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Foundations of the Latin American Left

Claudio Lomnitz

Specters of the past haunt every iteration of Latin Ameri-ca’s leftward move. There is a sense that the rise of the Left involves a rectification of history: the return to an origin, a second chance at achieving some previously derailed project. It is worth noting, however, that the specific histories being rec-tified are, each of them, presented as national histories, and that the imaginary points of foundation being reenacted vary from country to country. Thus, Evo Morales’s victory in Bolivia is supposed to rectify five hundred years of colonial imposition of whites over Indians; it is meant to reinstate indigenous rule. Hugo Chávez, by contrast, found the source of national redemption not in the precolo-nial past but rather in a return to the foundation of the nation-state, under Simón Bolívar, almost two hundred years ago.

In Mexico, the rise of the new Left occurred first in 1988 under the leader-ship of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, in a movement that harked back to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (Cuauhtémoc’s father) and a period of agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil. Six years later, the Zapatista movement cast itself as a prolongation of the radical struggle of Emiliano Zapata in the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 20). In the recent presidential election, leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador cast himself as a new Benito Juárez, the liberal president who struggled against Mexican conservatives and their French allies in the 1860s. In Chile, Michelle Bachelet is returning to the course not taken by redeeming the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende, killed in 1973 along with Bachelet’s own father.

In Argentina, the crisis of 2002 was so deep that it turned Peronism into the only political force, the only powerful political idiom, in the country. As Bea-triz Sarlo has argued, the secret of the posthumous life of Peronism lies in the

Public Culture 19:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2006-022 Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press

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obsession with lost opportunity that is the key motif in the cult of Evita.1 In turn, Lula’s electoral triumph in Brazil was perceived as the symbolic conclusion of that nation’s democratic transition, as the washing away of Brazil’s military rule that had formally concluded in 1981. Finally, in Uruguay, Tabare Vázquez’s tri-umph is understood as a vindication of that country’s early social democratic legacy of the 1920s.

Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile: five hundred years, two hundred years, ninety years, eighty years, sixty years, forty years, thirty years. Also the precolonial era, the early republican moment, the Mexican Revolution, Uruguayan social democracy, national popular regimes, democratic socialism. These are some of the ghosts that haunt the new foundationalism.

The recovery of these moments past apparently concludes the work of mourn-ing for the shattered illusions both of the Cold War Left and of the shareholders of that era’s national “economic miracles,” grafting the hopes of that period — hopes that had been degraded, humiliated, and violently obliterated by the dictatorships of the 1970s and in the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s — onto the emerg-ing new regimes.

But the current rise of the Left occurs when there is no existing alternative eco-nomic system to counter capitalism. In this context, the very meaning of left and of right is difficult to pinpoint. For this reason, the “lost moments” that are being symbolically recuperated all draw on specific national traditions and images of autonomy and self-governance: the grandeur of the Incas, the cult of towering figures like Bolívar or Juárez, the frustrated avant-garde experiments of modern socialism in Uruguay and Chile, the robust national power of Brazil’s Estado Novo or of Argentine Peronism, the grassroots vindications of the Mexican Revo-lution. In short, the foundational discourse of the Latin American Left builds on the remnants of an older nationalist discourse that is not the special possession of the Left.

Reliance on this dominant nationalist idiom has in turn opened up a series of contests about the meaning of the nation, who represents it, and who is a member. The neoliberal era produced a deep fracture in every Latin American country, a fracture between groups that were thrown at risk and the segments of the popula-tion that thrived under conditions of free trade and the shrinking state. This frac-ture was visible everywhere and it was identified in a plethora of expressions: the two-tiered country, the “deep nation” versus the “fictional nation,” the oligarchy

1. Beatriz Sarlo, La pasión y la excepción (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003).

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versus the pueblo, and so on. The rift is often represented as a contest about what is really real and which side of the economy best represents it.

It was in fact the neoliberal faction that fired the first volley in this battle over what is real and what is fictitious when it argued that the developmental state and import substitution industrialization defied economic laws and flaunted economic reality. The Left, in turn, constructed an alternative version of the real, a reality that is populated by the poor, by violence, or by marginalization that is attributed to neoliberalism.

Ultimately, the Left was effectively able to identify this alternative version with local mores and with the nation, and neoliberal “economic laws” with a for-eign imposition (either from economists trained in Chicago or bankers employed on Wall Street). For the Left, the real nation has been marginalized, and the political project has been to bring this marginalized nation to center stage. As a result, one of the dicey political challenges for the Left concerns the question of how to move “the real” way from this marginal position once leftist parties are elected into office.

Hugo Chávez has performed this theme repeatedly in his weekly show, Aló Presidente, where he constantly reenacts his popular origins while he asserts him-self as an embodiment of popular sovereignty. The real as the marginal had flow-ered in Caracas prior to Chávez’s assent to power.2 The food riots of 1989 — the so-called Caracazo, where hundreds of poor looters were shot and thousands were photographed and televised — is the high point of the upsurge of the marginal real, of the sense that the prosperous Caracas is an island that is everywhere sur-rounded, everywhere besieged, by a reality of poverty that is every day denied. This summer of the marginal-real has in fact been referred to by Chávez himself as the root of the Bolivarian ascent to power.

Similar expressions exist throughout Latin America. Not coincidentally, Latin American cinema and literature have turned away from the magical realism of the generations of the 1960s and 1970s to a new realism that insistently pursues what Brazilian literary scholar Beatriz Jaguaribe calls “the shock of the real” — the raw portrayal of urban poverty, drug violence, and child prostitution.3

Once in power, the Left has repeatedly emphasized its own contact with this

2. See Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil, “Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (1991): 288 – 337.

3. Beatriz Jaguaribe, “The Shock of the Real: Realist Aesthetics in the Media and the Urban Experience,” Space and Culture 8 (2005): 66 – 83.

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national social reality. So, for example, Mexico’s leftist presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, began his presidential campaign in January at a village in Guerrero state that was selected because it is the poorest municipality in the country. And Subcommander Marcos, who wrote the rule book on the conten-tion over the real, routinely signed his press communiqués from a rural Chiapas ejido community called “La realidad.” This is “the real” as the place from which the Left emerges. It is often an anonymous place, or even a mythical place, the site from where legitimate sovereignty must emerge.

In Venezuela, contestation over the real reached such a pitch that Chavistas and the opposition do not even share the name of the country, or the name of key events such as the “Coup of 2002” versus the opposition’s “March of April 10.” In Argentina, the crisis of 2002 was so deep that there was soon no version of the real other than the various versions of Peronism ( justicialismo) available in the political spectrum.

This talk about the real is part of a political language that emerged from Latin America’s classic populists — Evita, or Getulio Vargas, or even dictatorial popu-lists like Trujillo — and has been denounced by many as populist and antidemo-cratic. It is a language of bawdy transgression, of brown men upsetting protocol and convention. It is a language that instills fear in certain sectors because it is an idiom of identification between leader and marginal follower, an idiom of iden-tification that is generally recognized as a call to class hatred. And class hatred is a dimension — and a readily available resource — of contemporary democratic politics in the region.

But there is, in addition to this, a second register in the Left’s discourse of the real that is significant, because it goes to the policies that are characteris-tic of a number of leftist governments. This is the theater of public works. The public work, and especially the monumental public work, is here a kind of con-crete image, a positive whose negative is the corruption of neoliberal regimes, of regimes that failed to build. Of course, it is the Mexicans and the Brazilians who are the champions of this particular form of monumentality: the whole panoply of 1950s developmentalism — two-storied freeways, irrigation dams, new school buildings — is now deployed as an image of the real once the real is in power, as an image of what can be done when a virtuous citizen occupies the presidential seat.

For this reason, the neorepublican image of the presidential persona is cou-pled with the neodevelopmentalism of his economic program and often of his actual ministerial team. Thus the union of foundationalism, neorepublicanism,

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and neodevelopmentalism is both a formula for more state control over the econ-omy — for “re-embedding the economy,” as Karl Polanyi would have it4 — and a somewhat worrisome sign of the poverty of the economic imagination of the contemporary Left.

The new Left is not a revolutionary anticapitalist Left but rather a proregula-tion Left. It will continue to turn to national-popular formulas and to the develop-mental state if there is no concerted effort to promote alternative developmental models.

4. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).