Reform and Revolution in Latin America

Scan page 8

the governmental functions by voluntary (Above) Fidel Castro and Salvador organizations. You know, probably every Allende in Chile in 1971. radical in Mexico considers himself a Za- (Ctr.) Andrés Manuel López Obrador patista, or a member of the Zapatista net- is running for president of Mexico as work. But in reality, it just a nebula; there’s a “leftist” pro-capitalist candidate in nothing there, no real organization. It has elections scheduled for July 1. slowly faded away—which illustrates some (Far left) Gerry Foley, speaking in 8 Socialist Action june 2012 Gerry Foley, the former international editor of Socialist Action newspaper, died on April 21, in Chiapas, Mexico. Over the span of nearly two decades, Gerry often commented in this newspaper on the political situation in Latin America. This included reports on his visit to Chiapas at the time of the Zapatista rebellion. More recently, he visited Argentina and Brazil to interview and confer with revolutionary socialists in those countries.

The article below has been transcribed from Gerry Foley’s last public speech and is slightly edited for publication. It is the first portion of a forum sponsored by the Philadelphia branch of Socialist Action in May 2011. Unfortunately, we don’t have space to print the entire presentation, in which Foley dealt extensively with Venezuela and Argentina. A video of the speech can be viewed at www.youtube.com.

T he processes in Latin America have a special importance for us because they came just at the time to prove that the fall of Stalinism did not mean the end of socialist revolution. Basically, you could date the fall of Stalinism to 1989, when the [Soviet] bureaucracy decided to head toward the restoration of capitalism. They were frightened by the [Russian] miners’ strike and they saw a workers revolution on the horizon. They decided that the best way to defuse it was to move toward capitalism, because that would atomize and demoralize the working class—and [their plan] essentially worked.

With the fall of the old Soviet bloc, which was for many years seen as the alternative [to capitalism], you began to get capitalist apologists saying that “this is the end of history,” by which they meant the end of class struggle—things will never change. When I was living in France, there were books published with titles like “Adieu, les lendemains de change,” “Farewell to the bright futures….”

But in the 1990s, you began to see an upsurge of very violent struggles in Latin America. By the turn of the century, there were three presidents of Ecuador who had been forced to flee from mass mobilizations, two presidents in Bolivia, and one president in Argentina—he had to flee from the Argentine equivalent of the White House in a helicopter to escape a crowd of 100,000 people who were besieging the palace. And then you had the election of Chavez in Venezuela in 1998. Chavez had been the leader of a military coup in the early 1990s; he had spent [two] years in prison for his role in the uprising. But that was symptomatic; the uprising was triggered by what was called the Caracazo, the Caracas uprising [of 1989].

At the end of the 1980s, the IMF had demanded that oil subsidies be cut; that was part of the whole neoliberal offensive. All these countries have debt they can never pay; Fidel Castro wrote an interesting book on that, saying that the debt is unpayable, since it’s several times the GNP of most of these countries. Petro-dollars were recycled, and banks encouraged Latin American countries to incur debt, and they all got into debt way over their heads. And so, in order for the debt to be recycled, they had to appeal to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. What [the World Bank and IMF] demand is that government deficit can only be 4 percent, and there can’t be any subsidies.

What typically had happened was that as a solution to the pressure of mass revolt in Latin America, the governments would subsidize basic food as well as fuel prices. In the case of Caracas, they took the subsidy off fuel oil, which meant that the bus fares went through the roof. Caracas is a sprawling area, and people needed the buses to go to work, and they couldn’t afford the fares. There was an uprising, which was put down at the cost of 2000 dead. That created a crisis in the army, because [instead of] defending the country, they were shooting down their own citizens. … A section of the army, the young officers, went into revolt and staged a coup to overthrow the government—which failed. Hugo Chavez, who was one of the leaders of the coup, went to prison. But when he emerged from prison, he was a popular hero, and was elected by a big majority in 1998 on the grounds that he would make real changes—that he would be the president of the people, instead of the president of the political parties.

In a number of Latin American countries, there was a situation in which you had two political parties—a conservative and a liberal party—and they would rotate the executive between them.

In Colombia it was actually written down; for so many years the conservatives would be in power, and for so many years the liberals would be in power—while the changes meant absolutely nothing. It was really one party with two heads that ruled all the time.

There is another timeline: From the end of the 1960s to about 1985, most of the Latin American countries were ruled by dictatorships. This was a response by the oligarchies to the uprisings and social movements very largely inspired by the Cuban Revolution; there were guerrilla movements in most Latin American countries.

The U.S. government encouraged the oligarchies to return to parliamentary rule; you can’t defend military dictatorships forever. They’re ugly, and nobody likes them—you know, the generals with dark glasses, who kill and torture people—it looks much better if you have an elected president! And so, by 1985, most of the military dictatorships had converted themselves into parliamentary “democracies.”

And in the beginning, there was a lot of hope in these parliamentary regimes. It was back to “democracy!” The age of dictatorship, torture, and mass slaughter was over! The Argentine dictatorship had killed 40,000 people. … And in Brazil, a very large number of people were killed by the right wing, and a lot were tortured. The popular writer, Paulo Coelho, was tortured in prison, for example; that’s one of the things that led him to become a mystic. But by 1990, the parliamentary “democracies” had become essentially discredited, and you began to see new popular rebellions. The first was probably in Mexico, in 1992—the Zapatista uprising of native people in one of the most Native American provinces of the entire country. The Zapatistas were able to hold territory and to force the Mexican government to compromise and keep troops out of the territory they controlled. So they were able to have their own territory, which they formally have to this day, though it is eroding more and more because of the pressure of the military on them and the ability of the government to buy off people by subsidies, etc. Also, the Zapatistas abandoned their perspective of taking power. They now said, “we just want to enlarge the civil society,” by which they meant to take over some of of the problems of the current wave of populist movements in Latin America.

Traditional radicalism in Latin America is what we would call populism.

What populism represents is an attempt to balance between the native working class and imperialism. In order to maintain this balance, it means there must be some inroads into imperialist power, some attacks on imperialism, but they are always limited. It doesn’t involve a real break with imperialism, much less a decisive route to socialism.

Populism was the main response to the Great Depression in Latin America during the 1930s and ’40s. It was represented by the Perón regime in Argentina, the Vargas regime in Brazil and the Lázaro Cárdenas regime in Mexico. It was Mexico where populism went the furthest because that led to the nationalization of the oil industry when the country was the world’s second largest oil-producer. It came very close to foreign [armed] intervention in Mexico. Britain broke relations with Mexico, and there were a lot of very ugly noises in the United States. The U.S., of course, had been intervening in Mexico all through that period, ever since the 1910 revolution. That was probably the height of the populist upsurge in Latin America, but already by 1940 it was beginning to ebb; a right-winger was elected as the presidential candidate of the Party of the Revolution (PRI), the party that was established by Cárdenas regime, and continued to move steadily to the right since that time. And starting with the 1970s, the regime actually abandoned populism, and the Mexican ruling party split over that.

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who was the son of Lázaro, broke away and formed his own party, and he ran for president in 1988 and apparently won. But the election was stolen. The computers were showing that Cárdenas was ahead in the voting up until the wee hours of the morning, when suddenly the computers went down. When the computers went up again, he was behind. The election was very obviously stolen. There was a period of protest against it, but Cárdenas not being a revolutionist, these mass mobilizations didn’t lead to anything .

This happened again in the last elections in Mexico [in 2006], which were apparently stolen again, though the vote was smaller. In that case, López Obrador, who was the bourgeois “left” candidate, organized mass mobilizations of up to more than half a milToronto in May 2010. lion in Mexico City, and he even set up sort of a government in exile, but it slowly faded away because there was nothing he could do. Governmental power was in the hands of the official victor, and since López Obrador was not a revolutionist, he wasn’t going to organize a counter-power.

If you set up a “counter-government,” to be real it has to be like dual power. The soviets in Russia in 1917 were a real power. The rail workers would not move the trains unless they got an order from the soviets [revolutionary workers councils]; they were not impressed by an order from the provisional government. … The army obeyed the soviets, the workers obeyed the soviets, but the government could count only on the loyalty of the police and the upper ranks of the army. Eventually, it came to a clash that was resolved in favor of the soviets. The slogan of the Bolsheviks was “All power to the soviets!” That’s a real alternative government; Lopez Obrador wasn’t prepared for that.

More recently, there was a mass uprising in Oaxaca [Mexico] by unionists. It was in response to a right-wing state governor’s attempt to crush the teachers’ union. As a result, the unions came together with indigenous organizations of that area, and they formed a “counter-government.” But it remained under the political influence of the PRD, the bourgeois left party led by López Obrador. Although there were demonstrations of supporters in Mexico City, López Obrador didn’t try to organize the masses in support of this government in Oaxaca. So it just faded away. The city was surrounded, and eventually, the “counter-government” collapsed. Leaders were arrested. Some of them are still in jail.

In Latin America, if you talk about a revolution, you have to be serious about it. In a sense, what condemned [Salvador] Allende in Chile was that he won the elections in the spring of 1973. The bourgeoisie was figuring that the [Allende] government was going to erode—it wasn’t making real changes in people’s lives, it wasn’t keeping its promises, so support for it would erode. And the right would come back to power in its usual way. But what happened instead was that hopes were still there, and the coalition won the elections of May 1973. And after that, the right-wing-oriented military, in September 1973, carried out a coup and established a military dictatorship. In Chile, 40,000 people were killed by the repression. And so, I remember people in Mexico saying, “Why should we vote for López Obrador? Because he is not really ready to fight. If he wins, it just means there is going to be repression, and we’re going to suffer.” So in Latin America, it doesn’t make sense to vote for anyone who says they’re a leftist, unless they’re ready for revolution. n