The media lobby against Latin America
Latin America has stood (or at least some Latin American governments have) against the current that has been dominant on the international stage for decades.
After suffering harshly the effects of that current, some governments have rebelled against it and begun to put into practice policies that contradict the neoliberal wave head on.
The results couldn’t have been better. While inequality, poverty, misery and social exclusion increase worldwide, a country like Brazil, once the most unequal country in the continent, has made spectacular advances in this field, to the point that it projected Lula as a world leader in the war against hunger.
Evo Morales’ Bolivia, once one of the continent’s poorest countries along with Haiti and Honduras, has become a model of economic growth and promotion of social justice.
The administrations of the Kirchners have managed to rescue Argentina from the worst crisis in its history, produced by neoliberalism, permitting the country to grow once again and distribute its wealth.
Ecuador has become one of the fastest-growing Latin American countries, with some of the finest social indices.
Those examples should be enough — though we could cite others — for us to realize that they are governments that incommode those who continue to believe in the priority of tax adjustments, in the policies of austerity, in the centrality of the market.
Those governments in particular need to be disqualified in order to affirm the single thought, the Washington Consensus, that says there is no alternative to neoliberalism.
In the vanguard of the lobby against the governments that continuously overcome neoliberalism and its dogmas are some publications with international projection: Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and El País, among others. They systematically promote campaigns to try to disqualify the advances made by those governments, advances that clash against their positions and those of the neoliberal governments.
Those publications even have Latin American columnists who lend themselves for those campaigns, while others remain silent in the face of the systematic attacks against the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and Ecuador. If those governments consolidate, they would become veritable denials of the postulates of the policies of austerity that are being imposed in Europe, rejections to the precepts of the IMF and the World Bank.
It would be necessary, then, to destroy their images, to say that their social advances either were deceitful or had disappeared under the current crises. To say that the problems faced by some of those governments would represent their exhaustion. To say that the corruption, authoritarianism and populism sentenced those governments to failure.
Those publications in particular engage stubbornly in campaigns against those governments, against their leaders, because they can’t stand the fact that those governments have imposed the longest period of political stability with great social support in a region where previous governments — military dictatorships and neoliberal governments — failed roundly.
Meanwhile, the European governments that maintain the neoliberal policies, despite their tragic social effects, are not condemned by those organs that, on the contrary, keep them as reference, even though they’re unable to overcome the deep and prolonged crisis of recession that began in 2008 without an end in sight.
The lobbies of the international communications media are incapable of understanding why the governments that they so fiercely disqualify are capable of reelecting their leaders or electing their followers, while the Latin American governments that they attempted to promote as alternatives — like the Pacific Alliance, especially Mexico and Peru — have governments without popular support whose discredited leaders succeed one another.
But they go on with their atrocious journalism, which cannot understand why those countries are exceptions to the worldwide standard, exemplified by the decline of the governments that maintain neoliberal models.
(Translated from Cubadebate by Progreso Weekly)
