Right wing gains ground in South America.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
In a span of just three months, conservative forces long bent on discrediting the region's leftist governments capitalized on victories in Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia to put the brakes on a continent-wide experiment in progressive politics that had taken hold, for the first time in two centuries of independence, in half of South America's 12 nations.
The first of the triumphs came in Argentina's presidential contest, in November (NotiSur, Dec. 4, 2015). A month later, Venezuela's conservative opposition turned the tables in legislative elections (NotiSur, Jan. 8, 2016). And in February, the right won a plebiscite in Bolivia that could have allowed left-wing leader Evo Morales to stay in power beyond 2019 (NotiSur, March 11, 2016). In Uruguay and Ecuador, in the meantime, destabilization efforts are making headway, while in Brazil, as former Uruguayan leader Jose Mujica (2010-2015) recently said, conservative forces that want to overthrow President Dilma Rousseff "are blinded by rage, [which means] people should be wary, because when the right goes into a frenzy, it becomes fascist."
The events come four years after conservatives used a parliamentary coup to topple another progressive leader, Fernando Lugo (2008-2012), the democratically elected president of Paraguay (NotiSur, July 13, 2012). "We're looking here at a coordinated effort," Mujica added. "It's no coincidence that they're hitting all of us at once, and in the same way." In all of the countries affected, rightist forces, alarmed by the introduction of social policies and of regional integration mechanisms that challenge the historic hegemony of the United States, falsely accuse the governments of imposing revolutions.
Conspiring forces
In recent years, high prices for the region's leading commodities exports provided the resources the progressive governments needed to implement policies that stress job creation and encourage greater consumption among traditionally marginalized sectors of the population. More recently, however, international commodity prices have plummeted. "The new international reality affected government policies and as a result, delivered a blow to the non-ideologized, non-politicized support base that benefited from those programs," political scientist Juan Manuel Karg wrote in the Argentine daily Pagina 12.
But the loss of export revenue is only part of the problem. The embattled leftist governments face an even greater challenge, according to Karg and...
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