On May 14, Jackson Diehl, the deputy foreign editor of the Washington Post, raised an intriguing question in an op-ed for that newspaper: Is Latin America about to "drift back toward its one-time status as semi-hostile territory for the United States"? Some of the evidence he cited was certainly enough to give pause. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, that country’s former Marxist president—voted out of office in 1990—seemed poised to finally regain power later this year. In Peru, Alan García, the leftist-populist windbag—the consummate Latin demagogue, almost a caricature of the type—who drove his country to the verge of collapse in the 1980s, has reemerged as a presidential possibility in a runoff scheduled for June 3. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the perennial standard-bearer of the Left, is leading in the polls for next year’s presidential race. "Even in El Salvador," Diehl writes, President Bush "may see the election of former FMLN guerrillas." As to Venezuela, the machinations of its president, Hugo Chávez, hardly require comment; he makes no secret of the fact that his principal foreign policy objective is to forge a new, worldwide, anti-U.S. alliance.

Diehl might have mentioned Argentina as well, which in the 1990s performed a remarkable U-turn in domestic and foreign policies, embraced free market economics with a vengeance, and transformed itself into one of the most reliable allies of the United States in both regional and international affairs. There, the government of President Fernando de la Rúa, beset by a three-year-old recession, presides over a weakening political coalition. As of today, the most popular figure in the Federal Capital (Buenos Aires city) is Congresswoman Elisa Carrió, founder of a new movement known as Argentines for a Republic of Equals (ARI). According to the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald (May 21), ARI is "gradually taking over the space formerly occupied by the Front for a Country in Solidarity," still formally part of the de la Rúa administration, but whose most outstanding personality, Vice President Carlos Alvarez, resigned months ago.

But is the picture really as problematic as this inventory would suggest? Probably not. The issue is not so much whether or not these politicians stand a chance of gaining power, but rather that—in the event that they do—they will not likely be able to seriously threaten the United States or its interests. The reason is simple—these are still poor, dependent, and in most cases backward countries whose margin for maneuver has been greatly diminished by geopolitical, technological, and economic changes over the past decade or so.

A Ground-Level Analysis

Let’s take each of these cases in turn. It is true that Daniel Ortega is leading in the polls in Nicaragua, but that is so only because the two other political forces in that country—both right of center—have been unable to agree upon a single candidate. Even if this situation persists up to election day and Ortega wins by being first past the post, he still must deal with the fact he is not the choice of a significant majority of his countrymen. Moreover, it is well worth keeping in mind that the Sandinista party itself has split several times since its devastating defeat at the ballot box eleven years ago; no less a figure than Ortega’s brother, the former commander of the Sandinista Army, opposes his candidacy; so, too, does Nicaragua’s best-known novelist, Sergio Ramírez, who served a term as Ortega’s vice president in the 1980s. Victory at the ballot box by default, rather than by an ideological majority, hardly creates the environment for a new "revolutionary" experiment in Nicaragua. And in any case, shattered by years of civil war and unpayable debts, the country is no position to go off half-cocked. It will need good relations with everybody—its neighbors and the United States—just to keep its collective head above water.

Then there is Alan García. To give the man his due, not since Richard Nixon has any politician in the Americas engineered so miraculous a return to public life. When García left office in 1990, his country was suffering from triple-digit inflation, urban and rural terrorism, and a total loss of international creditworthiness, not to mention national self-confidence. (One poll published in the last days of García’s term revealed that nearly half of all teenagers in Peru wished they had been born in another country.)

García’s recuperating political fortunes apparently have to do largely with the passage of time; younger voters in Peru have no memory of his presidency. (He spent the last decade in the relative obscurity of Colombian exile.) He also benefits from having the only well-organized political organization in the country, the APRA party, Latin America’s oldest populist force. Even with his many handicaps, he is locked neck-in-neck with a relative political newcomer, Alejandro Toledo, who almost defeated former President Alberto Fujimori in the days just before the latter’s departure for Japanese exile. In truth, Toledo would not be much of an improvement over García; it is a case of death by shooting or death by hanging. Perhaps as a consequence, as this Outlook goes to press the percentage of Peruvians who plan to vote for neither on June 3—to cast blank ballots—hovers fairly close to the highest scores of either candidate. If that holds up, presumably it would invalidate the exercise. Whatever one may think of this situation, it hardly suggests that Peruvians as a whole nourish the kinds of illusions that have fueled their boom-and-spend populist-leftist administrations of the recent past.

As for El Salvador, one might well argue that the emergence of the FMLN as a serious political force—as opposed to a guerrilla army—represents one of the great successes of U.S. policy, and even (dare one say it?) of the policies of the Reagan administration. The FMLN has long since discarded Marxism-Leninism as an ideology and no longer maintains a special relationship with Cuba. Instead, in both the Congress and the capital city of San Salvador (where it controls the local government) it has concentrated on the day-to-day problems of administration. Indeed, in many ways it is difficult today to distinguish the FMLN from other centrist parties in the region; its leftism is more a matter of historic memory than a blueprint for the future.

Finally, there is Lula da Silva. A former labor leader turned politician who genuinely embraces Marxist sociology and economics, Lula is, pejoratively speaking, the ultimate fantasy of your garden-variety sociology graduate student. (He even looks and talks like a real worker!) If he runs for Brazil’s presidency next year, it will be his fourth attempt. He may, of course, succeed this time; the fourth try was the charm for Chile’s late president Salvador Allende (1970–1973), whom Lula resembles in a number of important ways. On the other hand, Lula always runs ahead in the polls at this stage of the game, which is to say, while the forces of the center and right have not yet decided upon a common candidate. It is possible, of course, that the center and right will not be able to unify behind a single personality or, even if they do, that he will not be as attractive a choice as President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was in the past two elections. It is also possible that some other populist standard-bearer, say Minas Gerais governor (and former president) Itamar Franco, may emerge. At this point there appear to be so many candidates in the wings that Brazil is likely to go to a second round of voting; under such circumstances, it is highly unlikely that a candidate associated with extremist ideas will emerge victorious.

A Different World Now

It may well be true, as some people have suggested, that Latin American politics runs in cycles. In that case, perhaps after a decade of free market economics the other side has earned the right to its turn at the wheel. But the circumstances under which it would assume control are greatly different from those of the past.

The most important change is the most obvious—the end of the cold war. It is difficult to overestimate just how central that event was for U.S. policy in the region between 1945 and 1989. What else, after all, could cause the United States to evince so acute an interest in small, relatively resource-poor countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Chile? True, some Latin American leaders like Venezuela’s Chávez are trying to resurrect the old patterns of East-West conflict by journeying to Moscow and announcing a new "strategic alliance." But this is a case of mounting a horse that is dying, if not indeed already decomposing. As Jeffrey Tayler recently wrote, "Within a few decades Russia will concern the rest of the world no more than any Third World country with abundant resources, an impoverished people, and a corrupt government. In short, as a Great Power, Russia is finished." Indeed, he characterizes Chávez’s new partner as "Zaire with permafrost."[1]

Second, the external sources of support for Latin American revolutionary regimes have likewise dried up. Western European governments financed a good part of the Sandinista experiment in Nicaragua as a way of demonstrating their independence from the United States in the Third World, or even as a cost-free feint in the direction of "nonalignment" in the cold war. Paradoxically, today Ortega is less attractive to such governments precisely because he is less revolutionary; indeed, the principal business class in Nicaragua today is made up of former Sandinista officials who enriched themselves at the end of Ortega’s last term by "privatizing" resources and pocketing the keys and the bank access numbers. And the mere fact that the United States would be largely indifferent to a neo-Sandinista Nicaragua deprives the latter of the necessary cachet to milk resources from its old social-democratic touches in Northern and Central Europe. Potential leaders like García are even less convincing "revolutionaries," and therefore less attractive recipients of support. As for Castro’s Cuba, having lost its own subsidies from the Soviet Empire, it has scant little to share with others.

Third, it will be difficult—if not impossible—for governments pursuing unorthodox economic policies to find conventional sources of external financing. It is well worth bearing in mind that the last round of populist experiments in Latin America coincided with the emergence of petrodollar surpluses in the United States and Western Europe and with an indecent rush on the part of private Western banks to lend huge sums to countries that on no account could be regarded as creditworthy. Indeed, what was referred to in the 1980s as the Latin American "debt crisis" was nothing more than a drying up of such sources of credit. That made it impossible for Latin American governments to borrow fresh money to finance basically unproductive state enterprises and agencies.

Fourth, Latin American governments that attempt extreme solutions, or even simply behave irresponsibly, will provoke a dramatic outmigration of some of their most productive citizens and their assets. Indeed, this is already happening, as any visitor to south Florida can attest. (One of the most striking phenomena in Miami these days is the growing number of signs in Portuguese alongside those in Spanish.) The flight of capital from Venezuela has reached such dramatic proportions that President Chávez recently threatened to put a clamp on such transfers. The prospect of a Hobson’s choice in the Peruvian elections has already sent dollars scampering to offshore banks. If Lula is elected in Brazil, the southern part of the country, which most nearly resembles Western Europe, will be virtually emptied of its most valuable human and financial resources.

The Best Approach for the United States

The most likely outcome is bound to be a mixed bag of governments, some of which will be more committed to U.S. hemispheric objectives than others. Diehl obliquely criticizes the Bush administration for viewing the entire region through the prism of Fox’s Mexico. That is an acute observation—as far as it goes. On the other hand, Mexico is not the only country with which the United States is likely to have a productive relationship these next four years. Chile—under a socialist president, no less—is seeking to conclude a free trade agreement with the United States. Costa Rica and El Salvador are likewise interested in the Free Trade Area of the Americas project and, what is more to the point, are preparing their economies for that eventuality. Even an enlarged NAFTA, limited to five or six countries—say, Canada, the United States, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Chile—would constitute an enormous pole of attraction for the rest of the continent and act as an important incentive to remain within the basic parameters of the so-called Washington Consensus.

It may even indeed be that presidents such as Chávez (or García, or, in the most extreme case, Lula) will end up serving U.S. purposes by demonstrating beyond all doubt that populist demagoguery cannot deliver the goods. The Bush administration would be well advised to keep its cool, remain on course, and allow developments to move in the only direction in which—in the middle or longer term—they can.

Notes

1. "Russia Is Finished," Atlantic Monthly, May 2001.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.