“This Anti-Imperialist Thing Isn’t Over.”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/thinksocialist?m=73 Mike Schafer puts paid to a Newsweek shill’s attempt to dismiss the rise of Latin American leftist governments:
bq. Of course, the concept that this trend towards socialist and radical economies is newfound is absurd. The Latin American socialist saga, and subsequent U.S. repression, began in 1951 with the election of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who’s successful redistribution of corporate land caused the United States to replace the Guatemalan government with a brutal military junta. In 1971, Chile’s Salvador Allende nationalized the mining industry and used the revenues to pay for education and food. Allende’s plan would have come to full fruition had the United States not backed Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of the Chilean government. Ronald Reagan continued the war against the economic rights of sovereign nations throughout the 1980’s by waging a terrorist campaign against the leftist Sandinista Government in Nicaragua. For the past ten years or so, the United States has managed to keep a lid on Latin America’s socialist heritage, but the elections of Chavez, Morales, and their kin indicate that we can’t keep the lid on people’s liberation any longer.
bq. Ruchir Sharma’s anti-nationalization hypothesis is clearly not derived from any political reality, but rather from a desire to keep poor Latin Americans in economic shackles so that American corporations can expand their markets and resources. This “Chavez Thing” isn’t over, it’s only beginning.
American corporate interests have for decades manipulates the American government into doing their dirty work for them in Latin America, suppressing leftist movements that might result in decreased profits but an increased standard of living for Latin Americans. Politics aside, the short-sightedness of this strategy would be breath-taking if it wasn’t so common - rather than allowing Latin American states to develop into markets for much higher priced goods and services, American (and European) corporations find it more expedient to try and maintain Latin America as a source of both cheap labor and cheap natural resources.
It seems evident from the rise of Chavez and Morales, along with the pending elections of Ortega in Nicaragua and Humala in Peru that the days of North American and European corporate imperialism in Latin America are numbered. It also seems that the leftists coming to power aren’t too damn happy about how their nations have been exploited over the past couple of centuries. Rather than engage in the generally deplorable and largely ineffective terrorism of the Arabs as a means of addressing this situation, the Latin Americans seem intent on using economics. I suspect North American defenders of the status quo have far more to fear from resurgent Latin American leftism than they do from any collection of Arab nutjobs.
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