Antonio Navalón
There is a tendency to value failure that I have often wondered whether it is not the reaction to the sublimation of the triumph and victory that the American world has put in front of us. Pedro Castillo is no longer President of Peru. He is replaced by his Vice-President, who is from the same party and seems to have a more predictable and normal character. The right has not thrown out Pedro Castillo; he has thrown himself out with a series of erratic behaviors that, at the end of the day, have not interrupted the very dangerous tendency of the Peruvian people to be led under a truly curious political system that leads them to failure time and again.
Of the ten Peruvian Presidents since the military regime of 1980, only two have emerged unscathed. Castillo is the third Peruvian President – after Pablo Kuczynski and Martín Vizcarra – to be removed from office by the Peruvian Congress. But the worst thing about all this is that in the deep soul of Peru, in the subconscious and in the benches of Congress, the ghost of former President Alberto Fujimori, who was the last President to carry out a coup d’état with a successful outcome for the people of Peru, continues to haunt the country.
Since the birth of Peronism in the mid-1940s, populism has always been a latent danger in Spanish-speaking countries. In both the North and South, there came a time when America was populist. When Trump came to power, all he did was to turn populism – in denial at the core of the construction of the great northern republic – as the system of government that has recurrently been setting the trends among those close and not so close to the Americans. It is clear that with the removal of Pedro Castillo – after his attempted coup d’état and after provoking a series of reactions such as the reaction of the President of Mexico to defend and reinstate, beyond all reason, all the positions of those close to him or whom he respects from an ideological point of view – Latin America once again has an interesting situation and panorama.
What is happening in Peru with Castillo and the decisions of some presidents, such as the Mexican president, are relevant for several reasons. But the most important is that – whichever way you look at it – Spanish-speaking America, with a few exceptions such as Brazil and other countries, is a populist America. The worst dreams of America’s most prominent conservatives and dangerous nationalist leaders have come true. Today the United States is surrounded by several countries, starting with Mexico, that are hostile – ideologically speaking – and potentially enemies in matters of its internal security but, above all, of its political tradition and its way of seeing the world. Fidel Castro and all the revolutionary leaders who saw and imagined an America out of US control will surely be calm and happy in their graves today. Today, almost all Latin American countries have ideologies and political doctrines contrary to those of our neighbor to the North.
In any case, the liberator’s dream or Castro’s dream was always the nightmare of Monroe and his “Big Stick” theory. “America for the Americans’, they used to say. Then came events such as the Cuban revolution, Soviet interference in Central and Latin America, and with it, the Missile Crisis; and with these and other events came the ideological and political reconfiguration of the region. With 21 days to go before Lula da Silva becomes President of Brazil again, the ideological definition, but above all, the unfinished business of social distribution in Latin America, are issues that are once again latent and awaiting resolution.
Karl Marx has been buried for centuries, although for some governments, his person and thought are as if he had never existed. It is not that they are leftist or red governments; it is that they are populist governments that now, for the first time, are feeling the contaminating effect that populism once ruled and continues to have a significant presence in the United States. There is a recent poll that shows that, of the 435 members of Congress who were elected to make up the new Republican majority, 200 of them believe that Joe Biden and this era are the product of a robbery.
Beyond the dialectical barbarities of Trump and his lawyer Giuliani, it does not matter that there is no data to support what happened, that in the end, not even his own followed him, look at the role of the Secretary of State of Georgia, of Arizona or how he found no echo in the governors of those states, until then wholly pro-Trump. Since Donald Trump could not lose and was a populist factor, in the face of defeat, there was always room for a set-up, a conspiracy, and a situation that would allow him to undermine and sully the electoral process.
Today, at a time when the United States is undergoing the most significant internal crisis since the time of Abraham Lincoln, one can discover that they – who, until before the attack on the Twin Towers, were convinced that God was protecting them and that is why he had placed two oceans between them and the rest of the world – now have to begin to measure and see a new panorama. One in which there is not only the latent fact of sharing more than three thousand kilometers of border with a country that the Americans call a narco-state, which is a danger to their internal security. Worse still, they form part of the cannon fodder for the great war that, for the first time in over 150 years, they are confronting the ideology and political doctrine they sought to establish in the region and the world.
Today, no one holds undisputed territory, especially not the United States. If one looks from the Rio Grande to the Andes or the Amazon, Latin America and the Caribbean, first, has become the region that holds 20% of the world’s total proven crude oil reserves. A resource that is increasingly proven to be necessary to keep the world economy moving. Second, this region remains one of the few lungs that can save us from the disaster and challenges posed by climate change. Third, ideologies in the area today are presenting a new face. Although communism and Marxism – except Cuba and manu militari – never managed to sustain themselves, today, the anti-capitalism represented by figures such as Andrés Manuel López Obrador or Lula da Silva raises many questions about what the world will be like in the future and above all, how the new Latin America that is emerging under a populist tendency will develop.
The current reality is that the whole of the Americas is infected by populism and, worse, ideologically demotivated. There is only the continuation of a model that has made a mistake and the betrayal in the area of not having understood that the most intelligent thing it could have done was not to send in the marines to stage a coup but to run and create the social revolution that would prevent the outbreak of multiple revolutions. The United States should have performed the miracle of the countries around it. That would have given it more stability, but, above all, it would have given much more seriousness to the region and the situation. It was not done. And now, little by little, there is a risk that it will be done, but with other players who did not exist until now and are key. I am clearly referring to the Chinese and the Russians.
Against this backdrop, the management and use of energy, water, and strategic material capacities for this era is key to how we can end up or how relations in the Americas can be from here on. For a long time, it has been feared and suffered that there would be a shift to the left, that Castro’s communist thinking and the various communist attempts – often ending in pantomime or tragedy – would not be what ideologically dominates the region, neither in the North nor in the South.
Those of us who know Lula personally know that he is a politician unlike any other and that a large part of his political discomfort lies in the fact that he was the first Brazilian ruler to change the position and social status of nearly thirty million of his compatriots. Brazilians who, at the beginning of his first term in office, lived in extreme poverty. By the end of his administration, those compatriots, or a substantial part of them, had had the opportunity to move up to the lower middle class of their country. Lula never understood what was the mechanism that made – far from having a greater identification and commitment to him and his party – the social reaction of the rescued Brazilians and others was one of anger. And the anger, in my opinion, is directly related to the consequence of the unleashed social and communications revolution.
Knowing what social program Lula da Silva will implement in his second term is a big challenge. What is a fact is that, for the first time, Lula will be President of Brazil with half of the country at odds with him, which will force him to be very socially cautious when it comes to taking the country out of the debate that arises between him and his policies and those of Jair Bolsonaro.
People don’t want to be poor, but they don’t want to be in the lower levels of the middle class either. People always look for more when they have a change in their way of life and quality of life. In short, this flat vision of the world that gives birth to communications means that people have lost the time to be grateful for what it means to improve, and they choose to establish violence and anger as the preferred instruments to demand more change, even though many times they do not even know what they want.
All of the above leads us to a situation in which, today, there is a real possibility that if Lula’s leadership in Brazil – which has the second largest reserves and is the leading oil producer in the region -; if Mexico and López Obrador’s 4T; if Argentina emerges from the abyss; and if Russia and China become more involved in the area, the United States has very little chance of recovering its leadership peacefully.
This is the opportunity to do – by hook or by crook, though it looks like it will be by crook – social sharing. Today more than ever, Washington has to define what kind of policy or strategy it will pursue in Latin America and whether that strategy understands that the era of its marines, ships and its then undisputed success as a world leader is no longer enough.
We are living in a new world. We have Ukraine and then Vladimir Putin to thank for showing us – by dint of missiles – what today’s world is like. It is a tragedy; fossil resources are destroying our planet. In the next twenty or thirty years, because of China and India, but also because of all the others, and because of the failures in the distribution of the social pie, we will have to get used to the fact that this nuclear weapon, which is possession of the fundamental raw materials for our development, is what will consolidate or destroy the new economic and political blocs.
In this sense, if we exclude Mexico from the North American bloc – as President López Obrador has tried so hard to do – we must be aware that there are almost 660 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean who are outside the American fold. If, on the other hand, we include Mexico within the North American bloc, we must know that, with its policies, its convictions, its principles, and the policies of President López Obrador, our country is the biggest Trojan Horse that the US hegemony has at the moment.
Ideologies are dead today. One of the biggest problems today is that a like is equivalent to a vote. Since the emergence of social networks, global political behavior has been much more emotional than reflective. And therefore, there is always the possibility that this emotionality will give it the same validity as a trending topic.
The problem is no longer who is in charge; the problem is for whom they are in charge. And what we currently have is a crisis of orientation and political domination that inevitably leads us to consider the tremendous pending social change that explains the failure of capitalism in the America that is not, so to speak, the America of development.
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