Che Guevara Smacks Bush! [update: Bachelet wins.]

Unlike Che, who was a kind of revolutionary soldier of fortune, Morales does not have to adopt the revolutionary cause of Bolivia. He was born into it 46 years ago, in a tin-mining town in the district of Oruro, high in the Bolivian altiplano. Morales’s family history is similar to that of many mining families who lost their jobs in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when the mines closed, and migrated to the Bolivian lowlands to become farmers, above all of coca leaf. …As an adolescent and a young man, Morales was a coca farmer, but his political work on behalf of the cocaleros soon propelled him into the leadership of a coalition of radical social movements that constitute the base of the MAS party.

    How seriously to take Morales’s tough talk about drug “depenalization” and nationalization of natural resources – oil, gas and the mines – is the great question in Bolivian politics today. Many Bolivian observers say they believe that MAS is nowhere near as radical as its rhetoric makes it appear. They note that conservative opponents of Brazil’s current leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also predicted disaster were he to be elected, but that in office Lula has proved to be a moderate social democrat….-snip-

    Morales has become almost as much of a bugbear to the Bush administration and many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle as Chávez or Castro. And for his part, Morales seems to revel in the role. At the summit meeting of the Organization of American States held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, earlier this month, he appeared with Chávez at a huge anti-American and anti-globalization rally just before the meetings began. The two men spoke in front of a huge image of Che Guevara….

    For most Bolivians, globalization, or what they commonly refer to as neoliberalism, has failed so utterly to deliver the promised prosperity that some Bolivian commentators I met insisted that what is astonishing is not the radicalization of the population but rather the fact that this radicalization took as long as it did. Bolivia often seems now like a country on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Every day, peasants or housewives or the unemployed erect hundreds of makeshift roadblocks to protest shortages of fuel (a particularly galling affront in a country with vast hydrocarbon resources) or to demand increased subsidies for education or to air any of the dozens of issues that have aroused popular anger. The language of these protests is insistently, defiantly leftist, with ritual denunciations of multinational corporations, of the United States and of the old Bolivian elite, who are white, mostly descendants of Spanish and German settlers….

    Bolivia has considerable oil reserves and, far more crucially, has the second-largest proved reserves of natural gas in South America after Venezuela – some 54 trillion cubic feet. Talk to ordinary Bolivians, and it often seems as if their profound rage and despair over what is taking place in their country is at least partly due to the gap between Bolivia’s natural riches and the poverty of its people. “We shouldn’t be poor” is the way Morales put it to me…

Mr López Obrador rejects the comparisons with Hugo Chávez or Lula. “You can’t put it like that. Each country has its own history…I’m neither a populist nor a neo-liberal but a humanist,” he says vaguely. He slams the economic policy of the past two decades as a “failure” that has delivered “zero per capita growth”. (In fact, per capita income has grown since 1982, but at an unimpressive rate of around 0.5% a year.) But he told The Economist that he would maintain Mr Fox’s strict macro-economic policy (“you can’t have deficits”) while cutting wasteful spending on the bureaucracy and reassigning it to public works. He rules out throwing open Mexico’s state energy monopolies to private investment. But he says that he would lighten the tax burden on Pemex, the oil firm, to allow it to invest more, so that “in three years” the country would be self-sufficient in gas and petrol. He would respect NAFTA but seek to add “co-operation for development” to free trade in goods.

”I’m agnostic. . . . I believe in the state,” Bachelet told several groups of evangelical ministers last week. ”I believe the state has an important role in guaranteeing the diversity of men and women in Chile — their different spiritualities, philosophies, and ways of life.”

Bachelet, 54, a socialist running in national elections today, has a strong chance of becoming Chile’s first female head of state — and thus the first woman in South America to be elected to the top national office without replacing a deceased or disabled husband.

As a single mother, Bachelet is a symbol of change in a country so culturally conservative that it legalized divorce only last year. As both the child of a military family and a victim of prison and torture under the former military dictatorship, she is also a symbol of healing in a country long divided by ideology, class, and competing versions of a tumultuous recent history.

Running against two conservative male candidates, Bachelet has maintained a commanding lead in the polls, even while openly airing personal details that she thinks represent Chile’s shifting cultural landscape.

Short, compact and of Indian descent, the 43-year-old Humala envisions himself as the socialist Chavez’ ideological soulmate, attacking the Bush administration’s free-trade policies and opposing some coca eradication programs.

He also shares something of the Venezuelan’s background as an army lieutenant colonel who led a failed coup in 1992. A lieutenant colonel himself, Humala was arrested in 2000 after he led a small army uprising in 2000, in the waning days of President Alberto Fujimori’s rule. -snip-

Like the leftist Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia, one of two front-runners for the presidency there, Humala diametrically opposes U.S. policies in Latin America and wants to subsidize national industries and limit investments by foreign companies in key sectors.

And like Morales, Humala is the subject of widespread rumors that he receives financial assistance from the oil-rich Chávez. He denies receiving any aid, and no one has been able to prove him a liar.

Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s radical president, led his country into Mercosur yesterday, vowing to inject a strong dose of politics into the languishing South American customs union.

“We have to politicise Mercosur,” he said in Montevideo, Uruguay, at a meeting of the group’s leaders convened to mark Venezuela’s formal entry into the trade bloc. “We cannot allow this to be purely an economic project, one for the elites and for the transnational companies.”

Mr Chávez’s remarks are likely to cause angst among hardliners in Washington, who already eye Venezuela’s growing influence with concern. The country is one of the world’s largest oil producers and it has used windfall revenues from high oil prices to assert its weight in the region.

Venezuela’s entry marks the first expansion of Mercosur, which comprises Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, since it was established in 1991.

Mercosur leaders welcomed Venezuela’s incorporation. President Néstor Kirchner of Argentina said it was “a milestone”. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil said the expansion of Mercosur would “open a new chapter in our integration”.