U.S. Fears of a Lurch to the Left in South America Fail to Materialize

Days before the landslide election of a former leftist firebrand to the presidency of South America’s largest country, U.S. Rep. Henry J. Hyde warned the White House of a new “axis of evil” in the United States’ backyard.

Victory for Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would add another link to the chain of hostile leaders stretching from Cuba through Venezuela and down to Brazil, the Illinois Republican wrote in October 2002. Hyde urged the White House to educate Brazilians about the dangers of choosing a “pro-Castro radical” such as Lula, who had the potential of joining Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chavez, as a threat to the civilized world.

Just three months ago, the U.S. had strong words for yet another South American leader, this time a public rebuke of Argentina’s president for his ominous “leftward drift” in foreign policy.

To hear some members of the Bush administration, their allies in Congress and conservative pundits tell it, South America today is a caldron of simmering socialist sentiment liable to boil over into red-eyed radicalism. With left-leaning leaders at the helm, critics warned, heavyweights such as Brazil and Argentina might renege on loan payments, trample private enterprise, undermine liberal democracy and band together in an aggressive anti-U.S. alliance.

But the fears of a major lurch to the left in South America largely have not materialized -- and were probably exaggerated in the first place, many analysts say.

Most of the continent’s “suspect” leaders, even those with radical backgrounds, have proved themselves to be pragmatists willing to stick to orthodox economic principles and play by accepted international rules. Although some may advocate European-style social democracy instead of unfettered U.S. capitalism, their actions reflect none of the extremism predicted by doomsayers.

“I always thought it was a silly hand-wringing exercise,” said Margaret Keck, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. “It was wrong to begin with.... Now it’s clear that it’s not true.”

These days, there is little of the incendiary Marxist speechifying that electrified Latin America during the Cold War and sparked coups and bloody civil conflict. For the most part, the rhetoric has softened, stressing evolution instead of revolution in alleviating social inequality and sounding less strident in its criticism of capitalist countries and institutions.

In Brazil, for example, Lula rushed to soothe nervous international investors by hewing to the same anti-inflationary, fiscally conservative policies of his predecessor. Farther south, Argentine President Nestor Kirchner has, on the whole, tried to pump new life into Argentina’s moribund economy by following a prescription generally pleasing to Wall Street.

Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, although a declared socialist, presides over a coalition government with centrist and right-leaning partners and signed a free trade deal with the U.S. that took effect Jan. 1. And the leader of Ecuador, Lucio Gutierrez, who once spent time in jail for plotting a coup, raised gasoline prices to help balance the budget, negotiated loans from the International Monetary Fund and pledged to be Washington’s “best ally and best friend” in the fight against drugs and terrorism.

Overall, analysts say, South America’s new crop of leftist leaders has governed firmly from the center, despite some of their thumping rhetoric in the past.

“The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have both kind of caved in to [being] rational and pragmatic,” said Carol Wise, a Latin America specialist at USC.

Not that the new leaders have totally forsaken their former beliefs or become indistinguishable from their conservative predecessors. Argentina has had testy confrontations with the IMF under Kirchner, and Lula has led resistance to the hemispheric free trade agreement pushed by Washington. And South American governments strongly denounced the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

But politics in this region, as in other parts of the developing world, has become more about judging results rather than rhetoric, said Peter Hakim, director of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. The old labels -- relics of a bipolar, bygone era -- no longer apply.

“The notion of left and right has just changed so dramatically, so profoundly, that this is not a very useful categorization You basically see a move in Latin America toward the center,” Hakim said. “The much more important categories are competent governments and incompetent governments.”

Experts see a parallel with Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair gave the socialist Labor Party a face-lift to create “New Labor,” which embraced moderate principles once anathema to the party.

“This is kind of a new recipe,” Wise said. “Now you can talk about being a man of the people and talk about a pragmatic policy course in line with the demands of the international financial community, and you can make it work.”

On paper at least, the idea of a slide to the left in South America looked plausible. Since 1998, onetime radicals and other leftist politicians have taken charge in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Ecuador, while the volatile Chavez heads Venezuela. In Uruguay, elections later this year may usher yet another left-leaning government into power.

Even without Uruguay in the club, these countries account for 75% of the continent’s population and the lion’s share of its economic output.

Many of the new batch of leaders rose to power on the back of growing disenchantment with the so-called Washington consensus, the agenda of economic liberalization and privatization that the U.S. promoted as the pathway to growth but that has produced disappointing results and left glaring social inequities in place.

Yet once in government, the new leaders found themselves constrained by the system, their shaky economies faced with the certain flight of foreign capital and investor confidence if they suddenly were to reverse course. They continued to criticize, and tried to tinker with the model they inherited, but did not reject it outright.

Nowhere has that been more evident than in Brazil.

“Lula raised expectations of a turn to the left in his campaign,” said Guillermo Holzmann Perez, an analyst at the University of Chile. “But as soon as he took over, he adopted a realistic attitude -- that is, linking Brazil to the international financial system ... and trying to negotiate social reforms within a framework of political realism.”

Lula’s fidelity to many policies of his center-right predecessor, and his determination to push ahead with unpopular pension and tax reforms, has earned widespread praise from international economists but caused several more militant members of his Workers’ Party to quit in disgust and accuse him of betraying its left-wing principles.

Lula, a former union organizer and Brazil’s first working-class president, has tried to distance himself from the designation “left.”

“In all my life, I never liked being labeled as a leftist,” he complained to reporters last August.

The major exception to the more muted, more moderate tone has been Chavez in Venezuela. Pugnaciously populist and increasingly autocratic, Chavez has raised Washington’s hackles with his frequent anti-U.S. outbursts and open admiration of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

But Chavez is difficult to pigeonhole. He has gone after labor unions that oppose him, accusing him of sending the country’s economy into a tailspin. Despite his frequent criticism of Washington, Venezuela still exports oil to the U.S.; its state petroleum giant, PDVSA, owns the Oklahoma-based Citgo oil company. Although Chavez seized control of the state oil monopoly during a general strike early last year and is using the money to fund his “Bolivarian revolution” -- a plan to help the country’s poor that is named for South American liberator Simon Bolivar -- he has made no move to renationalize industries.

And at any rate, Chavez’s maverick ways have not endeared him to South America’s other leaders, although conservative critics such as Hyde thought that some would be his natural brothers in arms.

Even Lula, who made a point on his first day in office of having breakfast with Chavez (dinner was with Castro), has apparently grown exasperated with the antics of his northern neighbor. In February, the Brazilian government responded coolly to Chavez’s usual denunciations of the First World at a summit of developing nations.

“President Chavez’s speech was President Chavez’s,” Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said. “It wasn’t Brazil’s.”

Analysts caution against overstating links between Brazil and Venezuela, two countries with different priorities and pressures.

In the same way, they dismiss attempts to connect the dots between all South American nations with leaders who appear to be fellow travelers. To draw an alarming picture of a united left-wing front is simply not warranted, analysts say.

“There are common understandings and positions, but they are of a very broad nature. They cannot be described as an operational alliance at all,” said Luiz Felipe Lampreia, a former Brazilian foreign minister. “There is no design whatsoever of a common position.”

One strong nexus of agreement was opposition to the invasion of Iraq. But South American governments were hardly alone in speaking out against the war in particular or against the Bush administration’s foreign policy in general, a popular target of criticism here.

Overall, competing agendas in the region prevent the countries from acting too much in concert, even when their leaders speak sweetly of brotherhood and common purpose.