What the recent elections in Latin America teach us

HAVANA — In barely two years, eleven presidential elections have taken place in Latin America. Almost all of them were characterized by a high degree of polarization and political confrontation that tested the conduct of some leftist governments and the continuity of the processes of integration ongoing in the region.

Still to be seen are the results in Brazil of the next presidential round, on Oct. 26, and in Uruguay, where heated and transcendental confrontations are expected. The case of Brazil is very special, because of the country’s weight in the region’s geopolitics.

So far, in all the contests involving this type of dispute, the leftist governments have been re-elected. But even in the places where the contests did not have such an ideological bent, such as Chile and Colombia, we witnessed the triumph of candidates who distanced themselves from the far right. Therefore, there were no significant changes in the status quo.

It is true that there have been some coups d’état (failed or successful); that police and paramilitary violence still rules in some places (let’s think Mexico); and that there’s no assurance that repression, as a system, won’t return if the right continues to lose spaces of power.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that at this time the electoral processes have become the stage, par excellence, of the political struggles in Latin America.

That has transformed the nature and extent of those processes, inasmuch as it’s no longer a question of choosing between dictatorships and tutelary democracies, as was habitual in Latin America. Instead, in most cases, countries debate different models of political organization and national strategy vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization.

Such a reality poses an enormous challenge to the progressive popular processes. In the first place, because they must deal with the lack of culture and accumulated alienation of large segments of the population that have an important specific weight in their natural base of support. The simple objective of encouraging those people to vote and teaching them how to do it then becomes the primary task.

In addition, they must challenge power machines trained in electoral manipulation, machines that have great economic resources, the support of the forces in power, the almost exclusive control of the main means of communication, and the backing of the United States, which intervenes variously in the events.

These groups have very sophisticated techniques of social control that directly affect the electoral campaigns. It is no accident that, when leftist candidates compete — say, in El Salvador, Venezuela or Brazil — the polls are always wrong.

Either they pump up contenders who, after losing, say that there was fraud, opening the door to destabilization, or they predict such wide margins of victory for the leftist candidates that a lesser outcome robs the impact of their victory or serves to question the legitimacy of their victory — which in turn serves to promote destabilizing actions.

To act within the electoral context forces the social movements to become political parties, constantly engaged in costly campaigns that function according to the rules established by their opponents.

The cost of such an adaptation is no trifle. It is the genesis of bureaucracies that sometimes distance themselves from the popular bases, as well as the establishment of compromising political alliances that limit the extent of the proposals and distort the transforming discourse that nourishes the people’s participation.

All of this can lead to the alienation of sectors that demobilize, disappointed, or assume stances of confrontation that, justified or not, eventually are useful to the right.

The issue becomes more complicated in the exercise of government management. Not only because of the problems of state inefficiency inherited from the previous governments or the inefficiency resulting from the inexperience and errors of the new leaders, but also because rising to power by democratic means does not imply having sufficient power to fully satisfy the demands of the people they represent.

Corruption always shows up, associated with these processes. True, it is a phenomenon that’s endemic in political structures everywhere, but, no matter what the propaganda claims, progressive governments are not the worst example.

For the left, corruption is always more corrosive than for its opponents, inasmuch as it weakens internal unity and moral credibility among the masses, a credibility that is the left’s main political strength.

All this places us in a very complex and volatile scenario, characterized by imperfect electoral processes, to the degree that they reflect social inequalities and unresolved structural problems.

From my point of view, what’s most complicated is not only to overcome these obstacles and activate the best possible policies, but also to allow those policies to help transform the predominant culture through popular participation.

One of Hugo Chávez’s great merits was to keep socialism from being seen as an unattainable objective — even a bad word — and turning it into a hope capable of mobilizing the great Latin American masses.

However, this socialist objective is doctrinally diffuse and lacking in an ideological cohesion that counteracts neoliberal values that are rooted deeply in popular culture, exacerbating consumerist pretensions that are part of the problem, not its solution, to the degree that they are not economically and ecologically sustainable.

This explains the perverse logic that when, as a result of progressive policies, poverty declines and the so-called middle class grows, the social projects are not as attractive for the mobilization of a part of the most benefited popular sectors, and the right achieves a higher level of convocation by encouraging individual aspirations.

The conclusion could then be that Latin America’s political future is decided in the advancement of popular culture, both to win elections and to identify its true interests and back the governments whose policies respond to the really fundamental needs of the population as a whole. A road where, long term, the left is bound to succeed, so long as it is protected from possible conjunctural political defeats and the stumbles that the dominant culture always imposes.

Likely aware of this, as soon as the results of the Bolivian election were made public (an election that nobody could manipulate), Evo Morales warned that Bolivia’s relations with the United States would be welcome under conditions of respect and equality. If that were not the case, the relations could be dispensed with, because they were not indispensable for the interest of the nation, rather the opposite.

That’s an advise that comes from an ancestral culture, where socialism — conceived as “the good life” of the collective and its respect for nature — is not strange at all.