Progreso Weekly: "Latin America: Who Changes Whom?"

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"Latin America: Who changes whom?
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 11:57
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By Jorge Gómez Barata

In terms of the political evolution in the hemisphere and beyond, I don't remember any other time in history where the rift between the past and the future, in the scale of an entire region and epoch, has been so evident and profound as the developments in Latin America during the past week, in response to the coup d'état in Honduras.

With efficacy and speed, with minimal rhetorical gestures and without allowing time or opportunity for the coup-plotters to consolidate, the politically more advanced governments spoke out against the interruption of the institutional life of the most vulnerable of the Central American countries. Acting as a vanguard, they fostered support for the popular movement in one of the nations that most laboriously advances in the construction of a political system that is based on democracy.

That support came with a speed and coherence never before seen, from all points in the continent, covering a multicolored ideological spectrum that encompasses practically all the national, regional, hemispheric and even global organizations, and dozens of leaders from Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, whose coincident political action had been unthinkable until this point. The consistency in effort and the similarity in language are also amazing.

Suddenly, because of an action that was isolated and senseless to the point of being suicidal, the remnants of the Honduran oligarchy, survivors of the political process experienced by the region, act unwittingly as a catalyzer and agglutinate a huge diversity of political forces that rally around the struggle to reestablish the democratic institution.

The struggle for democracy was originally an effort by the liberal sectors of the European revolutionary bourgeoisie, which dragged proletarians, farmers, artisans, freethinkers and representatives of the liberal profession to the great class battles. In the historical crossroads of the late 18th and 19th centuries, these groups confronted the nobility, the military elites and the clergy, which were the buttresses of the feudal regime.

By a strange development of those political processes, the defeat of the feudalism that led to the implantation of a regime of greater individual and political freedoms, ideological tolerance, laity and popular participation by means of elections and the vote also fostered the coming of savage capitalism, the regime that has elicited the greatest repudiation in the entire political history of Europe. In the context of those struggles -- and to a degree, as part of them -- social democracy and Marxism emerged.

Although they never met the expectations of their citizens or fulfilled the aspirations of the popular classes, the European practices and institutions did not extend to the New World, where the colonial administrations established a peculiar standard.

Trapped by the enormous structural deformations introduced by the Spanish Conquest and colonization, heirs to the discriminatory and excluding attitude toward the native peoples, spoiled by the authoritarianism and caudillismo that emanated from the nature -- more military than political -- of the wars of independence and dependent on foreign capital, the native elites became oligarchies.

To maintain the scheme of domination based on exploitation, poverty and exclusion, the oligarchy -- aided by forces of the Empire that benefited from the environment of political primitivism and economic underdevelopment aimed at extermination -- repressed not only the patriotic sectors and elements, the avant-garde forces, and the Marxist left, but also the liberal elements of their own native bourgeoisies, which aspired to establish formal democracies.

Two hundred years later, with the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Cuban Revolution as premises, the precedent installed (albeit belatedly) by Salvador Allende and his Chilean Popular Unity, Latin America advances toward a new era in which the struggle for democracy and political freedoms assumes a new meaning. Not even the Empire has been able to remain indifferent to this movement and, at least this time, has joined it, rather than confront it.

It is good to have struggled and to have reached this point to corroborate the fact that, through highs and lows and by means of complex and sometimes unintelligible processes, the history of humanity is not made by whims or force, is not guided by the certainty of the leaders, who contribute talent and devotion, but by forces so powerful that sometimes are mistaken for divine will.

What is really happening is that the United States cannot change reality, but the reality sure can change the United States.

Jorge Gómez Barata, a Cuban journalist, lives in Havana."
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