Lugo, Paraguay and Red/Blue Ratio of Latin America

来源:百度文库 编辑:神马文学网 时间:2024/03/28 20:02:42
byredsmear1
Mon Apr 21, 2008 at 08:37:21 PM PDT
I've had worse reasons to get joyously drunk than the potentiallyepoch-making electoral victory of Fernando Lugo in the Paraguay's presidential election.
For anybody with any rudimentary knowledge of the last 100 years of Latin American history, the norteamericano hand in economic manipulation, dirty wars, coups, undisguised fascism and a seemingly endless war upon the poor is not something for which the United States can soon atone, even were its leadership willing. Institutionally confabulated rationalizations of Cold War exigency aside — which some will surely still argue — American guns, chicanery and capital have served as an ominous, razor-wire-dressed bulwark against the merest, most modest steps towards inclusionary democracy and social and economic justice for half the hemisphere.
But capping as it has an onslaught of too long-delayed electoral redress for the machinations of gringos and their "Market"-sanctifying, pale-skinned oligarch proxies, Lugo and his coaliton's end of 60 years of reactionary one-party rule in Paraguay seems an exclamation point of sorts. What it punctuates is perhaps the best legacy the cretinous Bush administration can hope to leave us, the symbolic end to the Monroe Doctrine, and a nearly hemispheric rejection of the insidious and conspicuously a-consensual Washington Consensus (the "consensus" was arrived upon in Harvard and Yale clubs with precious few others included in the discussion)
At any rate, given the recent fascination with red and blue-hued geography in our current electoral enterprise, I wondered what this shift in Latin America might look like if similarly mapped out from the beginning of the Bush administration to yesterday. Not surprisingly, it gives me even more reason to get drunk, which I will soon.
I share this not out of any intellectual authority, I just played around with a couple maps and Photoshop and the pretty colors, and I understand there are some nuances to Lula and Kirchner versus, say, Chavez and Morales versus, say, Lugo and Colom. Obviously there are still huge problems, too many owing to corrupt institutions and indigenous economies wracked by blight long ago seeded by U.S. foreign and economic policies. But amid all these voices and these spirited victories, and in the face ofostensible Democrats like Mark Penn, Bill Clinton and Harold Ickes neolib clinging to the reactionary outlier (and coke industry legacy) Uribe, we do find some common denominators, namely trending toward social inclusion and economic populism, the kind that, if nurtured, improves economies, empowers people and makes better trading partners, no matter what the bullshit Chicago School orthodoxy says.
One other note: call any of these guys whatever names you want, one truth remains, that none of them are our enemy, or ever needed to be. Some of these might be miscolored in your opinion and, to re-emphasize, this is anything but scientific or ironclad, and if you've got suggestions, float em out there. Or just meet me at the bar.
2001

April 21, 2008:

Tags:Lugo,Paraguay,Washington Consensus,Latin America,Chavez (all tags) ::Previous Tag Versions