The ideas that sent Latin America down the path of poverty and political instability
MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Election posters touting Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in 2006. The dictatorial Chávez won re-election with 63% of the vote.
There are almost 600 million people living south of Mexico's Rio Bravo, and a majority of them are either lower-middle-class or poor. This shouldn't be so. Latin America is rich in natural resources, geographic assets and human capital. Yet its economy runs dramatically behind that of English-speaking North America. Why?
Many historians and economists blame the region's underdevelopment on its colonial past—on the vestiges of the Spanish crown's practice of exploiting resources for the home country, its effort to centralize the governance of a vast and diverse culture, and its campaign to export a supposedly anti-commercial Catholicism. Others point to the wars and political instability of the post-independence period, roughly from 1820 to 1870.
Yet these theories ignore the fact that in the 19th century many Latin American countries broke with their pasts and experimented with classical liberalism, which produced significant economic benefits. Unfortunately that effort was abandoned in the 20th century. And not surprisingly, as Sebastian Edwards, a former World Bank economist, showed in his 2010 book on Latin populism, "Left Behind," the income gap between Latin America and the world's advanced countries widened dramatically in the latter half of that century.
Enrique Krauze's "Redeemers" is an ambitious attempt to trace the interaction of ideas and power in Hispanic America in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps unintentionally he also depicts how a potentially vibrant region became mired in poverty and plagued by political instability. Mr. Krauze profiles 12 individuals who are, he says, "representative of the major themes of Latin American politics" over the period. What emerges is a map of the intellectual path that led to the nationalism and socialism that did so much to set the region back.
Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America
By Enrique Krauze
Harper, 538 pages, $29.99
Mr. Krauze's "redeemers"—he uses the word intentionally for its religious overtones—include famous figures like Evita Perón, Che Guevara, Hugo Chávez and the novelists Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Others are less familiar, like the Uruguayan intellectual José Enrique Rodó, an early proponent of Latin American nationalism and anti-Americanism, and the Mexican cultural crusader José Vasconcelos. Mr. Krauze also offers portraits of José Carlos Mariátegui, the father of indigenous Marxism in Peru, and the intellectual father of Cuban independence, José Marti. Rounding out his dozen redeemers are Octavio Paz, Mexico's great man of letters; Bishop Samuel Ruíz, the Roman Catholic cleric who promoted liberation theology in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1970s and 1980s; and Subcomandante Marcos (a nom de guerre), the man who put the bishop's ideas into action by leading the 1994 uprising there.
The story of Argentina is emblematic of the continent's lost century. The political instability sparked by the hardship of the Great Depression gave way to a toxic mix of state repression and legalized plunder. "Perónism was really the first great populist movement in Latin America," Mr. Krauze says, and it cost Argentina dearly. Juan and Eva Perón "found a country that was economically among the fifteen richest in the world (with a huge budget surplus after World War II) and left a nation divided and very far from the levels of production and efficiency that Argentina had shown through the 1940s."
A poster of Eva Peron describes her as "Loyal Interpreter of the 'Descamisados."
As Mr. Krauze reminds us, Eva Perón (née Duarte) was once a poor, skinny, dark-haired girl from the provinces hoping to make it big in the theater. By her own admission she never had much talent, but she had a voice for radio melodrama, and it made her famous enough to meet and marry the Argentine military dictator Juan Perón in 1945. Perón himself had traveled through Europe in the 1930s as an observer for the Argentine army. He "venerated" Mussolini and studied "Mein Kampf." From Goebbels he learned, Mr. Krauze says, "the importance of oratory and especially the medium of radio in the political manipulation of the masses"—making him all the more susceptible to Eva's charms.
Deeply bitter about her childhood poverty, she was the perfect spokeswoman for Perón's combination of populism and authoritarianism. And her message had an eager audience: Buenos Aires in the 1940s and early 1950s was home to a new population of uneducated industrial workers who became the political base for Perónism. The result was a cult of personality and a repressive government that offered vast social entitlements without generating the wealth to pay for them.
Perón allowed elections, but he ruthlessly persecuted his opponents, a large category that included classical liberals. And "Evita," as Eva came to be known, though supposedly a champion of the downtrodden, devoted part of the state's resources to her own clothes and jewelry. When she died in 1952 at the age of 33, she owned, among other things, 1,200 gold and silver brooches, 1,653 diamonds, and 120 wristwatches. Meanwhile, Perón's statist policies were a disaster. By the time he was deposed by the military in 1954, Argentina had ceased to be a serious economic competitor. It has yet to recover.
This arc—from nascent classical liberalism to a populism that takes the country backward—is the wider story of 20th-century Latin America. Why did it happen so easily and so frequently? The poverty is easily explained. The failure to respect property rights, the erecting of stifling trade barriers and the wayward monetary decisions that destroyed currencies could have produced nothing else. But such policies, as Mr. Krauze shows, are carried along by political currents, and these have been set in motion by resentment, envy and feelings of cultural inferiority. The problem may have started when economic liberals fell prey to the temptations of state intervention. But whatever the first cause, the creativity, openness and generosity inspired by 19th-century classical liberalism were lost. Thus the question becomes: Why did the socialist populism of Juan and Evita win out over classical liberalism?
For Mr. Krauze the genesis of this victory can be found in the life of José Martí (1853-95). He was neither a socialist nor a populist. He led the crusade for a sovereign Cuban republic—free of both Spanish colonial masters and American influence. He was, according to Mr. Krauze, "a republican, committed to democracy, to civilian, (not military) rule, and a sworn enemy of tyranny."
Martí lived in political exile in New York for 13 years and admired, Mr. Krauze says, the "heterogeneous, hard-working, conservative people" of the United States. Yet he also disliked the country's "excessive individualism" and feared that American leaders had designs on Cuba. Over time his fears deepened. In "Our America" (1892), he argued for the cultural specialness of "the Latin American enigma," and claimed that the region's future lay not in copying developed countries but in discovering an inclusive model that would "move forward for the benefit of everyone." He was, in short, an early "Latin Americanist."
With the humiliation of Spain in the war of 1898, the United States became the region's main power, and Martí's Latin Americanism began to evolve into nationalism and anti-Americanism. The rejection of all things Anglo-Saxon would lead to the embrace of communism as the only true response to the rise of fascism. Yet, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out in "The Road to Serfdom" (1944), fascism and communism were really just two sides of the same coin, simple "rival Socialist factions." Socialism and freedom can never be combined. Still, with nationalism as the highest priority of some of the most influential Latin American intellectuals of this crucial period, individual liberty took a back seat to collectivism.
Mr. Krauze sees the error of this turn in Latin intellectual life, but he still shows a tendency to give the heroes of the left the benefit of the doubt because they were idealists. The Peruvian political philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, for instance, promoted an "idealized vision of 'Inca communism,' a return to communal roots." Mr. Krauze sees nothing odd in his wanting "to justify the ideas of Lenin but at the same time reserve for himself the liberty to think freely and independently." He even sees parallels between Che Guevara and Jesus Christ, finding in both a "journey toward Redemption" and a "sacramental devotion." Such parallels are plausible only if you ignore Che's own murderous violence and the murderousness of the ideology he espoused.
If Mr. Krauze is blind to the more grievous faults of his radical subjects, he is wonderfully alive to the virtues of the more moderate members of his portrait gallery, especially those of Octavio Paz (1914-98), the key figure in "Redeemers." Mr. Krauze knew Paz for almost a quarter-century; the Mexican poet and essayist was his mentor and friend. He forms the "central spine" of "Redeemers," because he "intellectually confronted, for and against, most of the major revolutions of the twentieth century."
Like most Latin American intellectuals, Paz started as a man of the left. His rejection of European fascism led him to communism. Yet during a trip to Spain amid its civil war, when the Soviets were brutally imposing ideological conformity on the republican forces, he recognized "the atmosphere of spying and persecution that surrounded him." Over time, Mr. Krauze says, "his silence before this half-glimpsed but rejected reality would torment him."
Paz's idealism led him down many a dead-end. In 1943, he fled Mexico for Berkeley, Calif. As Paz himself explained: "In an excess of money, cabarets, industry and business deals, Mexico had lost its revolutionary nerve, poetic inspiration and critical passion." And though he would later call the state "the most solid instrument of oppression that men have known since the end of the Neolithic age," never to the end of his days did he grasp that his beloved socialism was crucially dependent on the state's monopoly on the use of force.
Paz, though, also displayed foresight. He did not like the Cuban Revolution or what its promised "wars" offered to Africa, Asia and the rest of Latin America. In 1961, he wrote that "the results can only be dictatorships of the right if popular movements are destroyed or, if they triumph, totalitarian dictatorships like that of Castro." By the end of the 1960s he had become convinced of communism's moral decadence. Paz became a "heretic" in Marxist circles, which meant his exclusion from Latin American intellectual circles as well. When, in the 1980s, he defended Central American peasants against the aggression of Soviet-backed Sandinistas, Mexican communists burned him effigy. In a letter he lamented "the passion that rules the class of intellectuals in our era, especially in our [Latin American] countries. . . . In my case that passion has attained a seldom seen virulence through the union of resentment with ideological fanaticism."
Despite Paz's courage and his ability to see past political façades, he never quite managed to embrace classical liberalism. Mr. Krauze thinks that he hung onto "a nostalgia for the 'living, social and spiritual order' of Catholic and monarchial New Spain." Paz and other intellectuals in the region, Mr. Krauze believes, "thought of themselves not as mere reformers but more truly as redeemers," determined to deliver social justice. In this respect, they had not broken free of a colonial mentality that saw society as hierarchal, governed from the top down by an elite.
For all the virtuosity with which Mr. Krauze conveys the ideas that have dominated a troubled century in Latin America, he can't quite bring himself to let go of the socialist ideal that has guided so many Latin American intellectuals. He mistakes what he sees as a recent swing toward democracy and "social justice" in the region for progress, "in line with Octavio Paz's final position: 'a reconciliation of the two great political traditions of liberalism and socialism.' " This is pure fancy. Private property and the rule of law are the most fundamental tenets of a free and prosperous society, and socialism cannot abide them. As long as Latin American leaders trample on individual rights in the name of equality, political stability and economic vitality will remain out of reach.
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