Fidel Castro, in an address to the Cuban Communist Party congress yesterday, spoke of his own mortality, mentioning that soon he will be 90, “but the ideas of Cuban communism will endure.” Earlier this week, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was the victim of right wing parliamentary coup efforts; the left candidate in Peru’s election was recently voted off the ballot in the lead up to a June election, paving the way for the right wing Fujimori’s possible victory; Argentina is in the hands of Macri; and in many ways, Venezuela’s Maduro and Bolivia’s Morales are on the political defensive. Change is in the air.
The historic shifts in Cuba point toward a sea change in US relations with the island. Macri is showing how disastrously and quickly the gains of the Kirchner years can be turned back in Argentina. Most of Rousseff’s key enemies are embroiled in monumental corruption scandals of their own. The situations in Venezuela and Bolivia are hard to sum up, but I think one thing deserves mentioning as corruption scandals beset many leftist governments in the region: the entire premise of 1990s neoliberalism was corruption and a war on the poor. This doesn’t excuse today’s culprits in power, but it does point to a significant difference between the two eras in the scale of corruption and policy impact
What is next for the region could vary widely, but recent news, which could well be interpreted as the twilight of this wave of the Latin American left, really underlines how phenomenal this last stretch of history was — from the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 to Evo Morales and the rise of a progressive regional bloc, and all the other people’s victories in between.
Ben Dangl is the editor of TowardFreedom.com.
Ben studied writing and literature at Bard College and Latin American history and literature at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina. He is the author of the book The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007), which has been published in Spanish by Plural Editores in Bolivia and in Tamil by The New Century Publishing House in Tamil Nadu, India. Dangl is also a contributor to Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Latin American Issues (McGraw-Hill, 2006). Dangl has worked as a journalist covering politics and social issues in Latin America for over six years, writing for publications such as The Guardian Unlimited, The Nation Magazine, The Progressive, Utne Reader, CounterPunch, Alternet, Common Dreams, Z Magazine, La Estrella de Panama and dozens of other media outlets. He has received two Project Censored Awards from Sonoma University for his investigative reports on US government and military intervention in Latin America. Dangl has been interviewed on a variety of news programs including the BBC and Democracy Now!.Dangl teaches Latin American history and politics and globalization at Burlington College in Vermont. He is the founder and editor of Upside Down World, a publication on politics and social movements in Latin America, and works as the editor of Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events.He has been a participant in various anti-war and anti-globalization movements in the US and elsewhere in the Americas. Dangl is also a member of the Burlington, VT Homebrewer's Co-op. writing at www.bendangl.net
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