Problems in Latin America

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August 28, 2009 • Dan Perlman ('10)/ Eastside Global Commentary Editor
Filed under Global Commentary

Recently, there was an instance of social turmoil in Brazil that went a long way towards illustrating some fundamental and terrifically frustrating issues facing Latin America and our own country today.

This video here from The Guardian gives an encapsulated summary of the incident. In brief, a slum which houses a couple thousand impoverished Brazilians was bulldozed by the state, while riot police beat, gassed, and ran off its residents. The land that the slum was built on is “owned” by a corporation, which the state felt was more than enough precedent to forcibly evict hundreds of families into homelessness. I put that word in quotation marks because the land only existed as such in bureaucratic legal thought; the hard truth of the matter is that the land was home to these people—as horrible as that is.

The illustrative nature of the event lies in the ramifications. Keeping in mind the whole horrible history of Brazil—colonial wars, slavery, racism, corruption, on and on—as disgusting as it is true, slum annihilations are not exactly out of the ordinary, or really for the world entirely. In fact, not one hundred years ago they existed up in North America in much the same way. Remember the scene in The Grapes of Wrath when the cops burn the refugee camp? That wasn’t exactly fantasy; during the Depression, America’s Golden Age of Slums, our own police were pioneers of the practice of clearing out the poor, en masse, by force.

But today, America’s slums are much more intransigent places. It isn’t exactly easy for corporations to order police to bulldoze in inner cities as it is in a corrugated tin shantytown. Instead, the unwanted poor are now forced out of areas attractive to wealthier entities more slowly than previous days, and through economic means—gentrification, usually. In Latin America, however, the divides and powers of society are so much barer, and raw force is no mere acquaintance of the plutocratic elite. In Brazil, a country where the corruption in government, business, and policing is as much a fixture of the political landscape as the Amazon rainforest is of the geography, it is simple to evict the poor from their homes. When a party of rich and influential men wants the poor kicked out, the cops strap the boots on and it’s as straightforward as that. Will politicians clamor to stop the destruction? They might run their mouths off depending on how liberal their affiliation is, but meaningful litigation is a permanently spectral prospect.

So it was, essentially, throughout Latin America—except not so much anymore. There was a very recent time in history when that would have been true, when situations like Brazil’s (in which the wealthy live in gated communities guarded by mercenaries and the poor shelter in slums under the guns of the police) were all that was to be found. Still, such situations are commonplace. Yet things have been moving away from that grim paradigm, and in a much better direction. The disenfranchised poor, the slum dwellers and working class of Latin America , have against great odds constituted through blood, sweat, and community a power to call their own, with which to defend themselves from these kinds of historically prevailing forces of greed and ruthlessness. Yes, it is socialism. In fact, the best parts of it are communism. There are even heavy strains of anarchism involved, too. Does that scare you? If it does, you’ve been watching too much News Corporation programming because there are some beautiful opportunities—for us and for the whole world—being opened by the struggles taking place down south.

The leftist movements which have been surging to prominence throughout Latin America have been working wonders towards hauling Latin American society out of the centuries-old quagmire of violent injustice, towards a much more equitable and peaceful existence. Leftist parties, guided by leadership not only from prominent leaders like Rafael Correa, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales, but from the community councils, industrial councils, and other grassroots bodies comprised of the same once-disenfranchised people who now are working through direct democracy to establish control over their own lives, have formed an international community called “The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America”, or ALBA (meaning “dawn”). It is a project of cooperation between states that have undergone the political revolution that has brought socialist power—the united power of the working-class communities—into dominance over the formerly dominating force of foreign capital and the wealthy elite. In Venezuela, slum-dwellers have their own councils that cooperate with the socialist government in order to plan improvement projects, working away the slum by building healthy, economically sound communities from the inside-out. In Bolivia, the indigenous people no longer face the political and economic discrimination that plagued them under the old foreign-backed elite. In each of the ALBA countries, the old power structures are being transformed as society morphs into a new paradigm, one in which the state and its power is to check the wealthy and enable the poor to improve their conditions through cooperation rather than crush the poor to make room for the projects of the wealthy. Large projects of nationalization and redistribution of resources have been undertaken in the countries—for example, revenue from natural gas in Bolivia is no longer concentrated in corporate hands or in the grasp of a foreign bank, but is retained by the state and used at home to fund the community projects, mass infrastructure, healthcare, etc.

On a broader level, the international alliance has sought to create a Bank of the South, an alternative to the World Bank and IMF which would not take advantage of the poorer countries of the continent by keeping them in eternal massive debt to the richer countries of the northern hemisphere. Instead, it would be built on a foundational directive of working to facilitate the building of a regional economic partnership. This partnership would not focus on protecting the interests of mammoth foreign corporations and their bought-and-sold governments through unrestricted trade, but would allow the ALBA countries, and Latin America as a whole, to initiate fair-trade policies, which would allocate the most wealth to the working poor who need it, and who facilitated by their socialist democratic councils could put it to use in the way they see most fit.

As we see in Columbia today, the old paradigm which ALBA strives against is based on military might serving the purposes of the corporate elite. As we also see in Columbia today, it is the elite of the American federal government, and of American corporations, who go a long way towards bringing the hammer of armed violence down on the Latin American people. When it comes to the old free-trade agreements, administrations of both of our gargantuan parties, Democrat and Republican, have always been so eager to expand and defend them with violence. How can we, as responsible American citizens, come to terms with our country’s history of military oppression through “interventions,” coups, and corporate manipulation of our neighbors to the south? We can start by forcing a change in Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) policies today. In Columbia, the unions and leftist movements are suppressed with violence by a government backed by and armed by our very own government. Secret police, in the name of the “War on Drugs,” are reinforced by U.S. mercenaries and official military in exercising complete forceful control over the population of Columbia. When slum-dwellers try to organize, when factory workers try to organize, when corporate power is challenged, the legal machinery of the free-trade agreements kicks in, and we funnel money and weapons to a corrupt state which has been responsible for kidnapping and murdering unknown multitudes of leftist activists. Is it any surprise that there is a revolutionary uprising against the Columbian state going on right now? When the slums are patrolled by American-armed soldiers and any attempt to improve one’s own life in the ghettoes is met by violent suppression funded by the cash of the gated elite who run a country without the citizens’ consent—well, what would you want to do? But of course the FARC is smeared with the brush of “terrorism.”

In fact, there is a lot of smearing going on—most of it by the media megaliths in our country. Hugo Chavez is a military dictator running a police state, according to the talking heads; socialism is evil and there’s no more to it than that, according to professional political manipulators in both major Parties and in religious institutions and schools. People here tend to be naïve enough to think that our government doesn’t engage in active media manipulation around the globe. We fund our own Middle Eastern media network to counter Al-Jazeera, if you didn’t know. We invented Voice of America as our state-run media agency to broadcast conservative-capitalist propaganda into countries whose leading movements we wished to topple. And so, when Hugo Chavez shuts down the voice of counterrevolutionary manipulation in his country, which seeks to re-instate the old world of the violent rule of capital, he is of course (to Fox News, ABC, CNN, and B.S. Network) a dictator. Nevermind the fact that Rupert Murdoch himself categorized grassroots American journalists who take a critical view of American foreign policy as “terrorists,” which is coming from a man who believes in absolute draconian, authoritarian treatment for “terrorists.”

In Latin America they are wrangling with a beast that has terrorized their world for centuries. We must be supportive of them in their struggle. We must initiate our own struggles. The softer end of that same beast manifests in our homes as crass commercialism, the banality of pop culture, everything amoral and fundamentally rancid which infects our relations with each other and haunts us here in our minds. It is the same shopping-mall mindset which deceives, beguiles and deludes us into supporting and enabling through passivity a campaign of monstrosities which is nothing less than a crusade of murderous pillaging undertaken in our unwitting name. Wake up before we miss our chance. Manuel Zelaya joined ALBA; Pentagon-trained military goons forced him out and violently overtook the country, with Hillary Clinton’s maniacally-grinning blessing and Barack Obama’s facetious passive-aggression. Every free-trade government, that is, corporate-run elitist military state, which we sign defense agreements with, means another disaster for humanity. Most Americans have no clue about our government’s campaigns in Latin America. Most would say they don’t care. But I don’t buy that for a second. Nobody is too sedate to stop a murder. You are not too cold for action.