Source: The Nation
Add Peru to the list of Latin American countries that have turned left. On Sunday, Peruvians voted in a second-round run-off ballot and elected Ollanta Humala, a 48-year-old former army officer, president. This is Humala’s second try for the office. In 2006, he came close to winning, but Wikileaks cables reveal that Peru’s establishment politicians put aside their differences and beat a path to the US embassy, asking for help smearing Humala as a Peruvian Hugo Chávez.
Wikileaks also reveals that that same year the Mexican right and the US State Department worked together to defeat the populist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leading many in the United States to gloat that the “left turn” in Latin America had run its course.
Humala’s victory suggests otherwise. Here’s just some of what has happened since 2006: In Bolivia, Evo Morales presided over the ratification of a new social-democratic constitution and was re-elected as president in 2009 with 64 percent of the vote. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa also easily won reelection and ratified a new constitution that guarantees social rights and puts tight limits on privatization. Recently, Ecuadorians likewise voted on ten progressive ballot initiatives, passing them all. They included the strict regulation of two blood sports: banks are now banned from speculation and bulls can no longer be killed in bull fights.
And last year in Brazil, the trade unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left office the most popular politician on the planet, handing over the presidency of one of the world’s largest economies to Dilma Rousseff, a former urban guerrilla and economist who vows to continue to try to make Brazil a more humane and equal nation.
All of these national left political projects—from Venezuela to Uruguay—have their problems and shortcomings, and are open to criticism on any number of issues by progressive folk. But combined, the Latin American left can claim a remarkable achievement: It has snatched the concept of democracy away from neoliberals and the corporate privateers who came close to convincing the world that democracy equals deregulated capitalism and returned the term to its more humane, sustainable definition. In Latin America, democracy means social democracy. So considering the otherwise bleak global landscape, the return of the Latin American left, now well into its second decade, is cause for great cheer.