Um bom texto sobre Chávez publicado no imprescindível Times Literary Supplement antes de os expoentes membros do Foro de São Paulo empreenderem a ação orquestrada contra a Colômbia para esconder seus crimes.

February 29, 2008

The failure of Latin America

Hugo Chavez’s authoritarian populism is closer to fascism; hope for the continent lies elsewhere

David Gallagher

Michael Reid
FORGOTTEN CONTINENT
The battle for Latin America’s soul
384pp. Yale University Press. £19.99 (US $30).

Why has Latin America been so much of a failure when compared with the United States or Canada? In attempting to answer this question, Michael Reid’s Forgotten Continent looks at all the explanations available. One is so-called dependency theory, developed by economists in the 1940s, which blames “United States intervention and Latin America’s subordinate role in the world as an exporter of raw materials”. Then, as Reid explains, there is the idea that “Latin America has been doomed by its culture, and in particular an Iberian, Catholic tradition of social organisation and political thought which, it is argued, is both anti-capitalist and inimical to democracy”. Reid also invokes the region’s difficult geography, its “Baroque” legal system, its lack of solid institutions, and its deep inequality, which stems from the colonial period, if not before: the Inca Empire was rigidly hierarchical. Reid quotes Alexander von Humboldt, in an essay on Mexico of 1811: “The architecture of public and private buildings, the women’s elegant wardrobes, the high society atmosphere: all testify to an extreme social polish which is in extraordinary contrast to the nakedness, ignorance and coarseness of the population” – a stark description of inequality that persists up until now.

Which of all these explanations for the region’s backwardness does Reid regard as the most plausible? Always even-handed he says that it is a “mistake to seek a single, overarching explanation for Latin America’s failure”. The real explanation is to be found in a mixture of all the explanations, in what he sees as a never-ending “contest between modernisers and reactionaries, between democrats and authoritarians”.