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Bolivian neopopulism spreading
By Carlos Alberto Montaner,
www.firmaspress.com. Posted on Tue, Feb.
21, 2006 in The
Miami Herald.
Former Spanish Prime Minister José
María Aznar has announced that he
will devote much of his time and energy
to fighting against Latin American neopopulism,
the elegant name given in the region to
the Banana Left.
What is neopopulism? It is an ideological
trend and a form of governance that amalgamates
all the errors and political vices blithely
and uselessly practiced by Latin Americans
throughout the 20th century: strong-man
rule, patronage, statism, collectivism and
anti-Americanism, to which is added -- in
some countries with a strong indigenous
presence -- the native component of resentment.
Naturally, not all the governments of that
type display the same neopopulist virulence.
The chronic cases are Cuba and Venezuela,
but joining that quarrelsome and bigmouthed
tandem is Bolivia, led by the hand by Evo
Morales.
What direction will Bolivia take? It's
not difficult to guess. All you have to
do is read Alvaro García Linera.
He is a former university professor and
one-time guerrilla who fought against democratic
governments (a practice that landed him
in jail) -- and now the vice president of
Bolivia. As such, he has the delicate task
of defining the broad outline of the new
government and administering the legendary
intellectual incapacity of Morales, an intuitive
but barely educated politician.
In his own words, published a few weeks
ago in Le Monde Diplomatique, the European
journal of neopopulism, the country is going
to develop "Andean-Amazonian capitalism.''
What does this new neopopulist contrivance
consist of? According to García Linera,
of "constructing a strong state that
will regulate the expansion of the industrial
economy, extract its surpluses and transfer
them to the communitarian sector, so as
to foster forms of self-organization and
mercantile development that are properly
Andean and Amazonian.''
So, Morales and García Linera will
not try to modernize Bolivia within the
tested-and-true model of development that
plucked out of backwardness and poverty
countries as different as South Korea, Chile,
Ireland and Singapore. Instead, they're
going to discover a new road to prosperity
that looks nothing like the schemes practiced
in the planet for the past several centuries.
Halt this madness
Will that new economic model lead to communism?
It might, but only if things go in the right
direction: "The potential that allows
for the possibility of a communitarian-socialist
regime must first reactivate and enrich
the small communitarian networks that still
survive. This would allow us, in 20 or 30
years, to start thinking about a socialist
Utopia.''
In other words, several decades from now,
when Morales and García Linera are
as old as Fidel Castro and are tired of
playing at Andean-Amazonian capitalism,
whatever survivors remain will begin to
experiment with the bloody Marxist-Leninist
monstrosity that took the lives of 100 million
earthlings in only 70 years of tryouts in
various latitudes and cultures and in all
possible circumstances.
Aznar does well to try to halt this madness
but the task is difficult. Millions of disoriented
Latin Americans usually judge populist governments
by their seductive revolutionary rhetoric,
not by the fatal results they achieve.
The diverse variants of Peronism have gradually
pulled Argentina into a pit, yet that small
detail has never been reflected in the election
results. Hugo Chávez is the worst
leader in Venezuela's history, yet one third
of the voters remain faithful to his constant
clowning. In Peru, neopopulist Ollanta Humala
has a sinister record as a violator of human
rights, yet he's climbing dangerously in
the polls.
That is the terrible thing about neopopulism.
Same as with cancer, the cells don't stop
growing until the patient dies. That's where
we are.
©2006 Firmas Pres
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