New pink wave in Latin America

Gustav Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, was elected the first left-wing President in Colombia’s history on June 19, 2022 in a run-off that gave him 50.5 percent of the votes as against his right-wing rival Rodolfo Hernandez’s 47.2 percent.

Long before another, better known guerrilla movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a peace agreement with the government in 2016, M-19 gave up armed struggle in 1990 and became a political party that helped rewrite the country’s Constitution.

Eventually, Gustav Petro became a forceful opposition leader known for denouncing human rights abuses and corruption. He rose to become the capital Bogota’s mayor and is currently a Senator.

Petro’s victory has evoked a wave of joy and celebration amongst fellow Latin American Leftist leaders. The continent is currently in the midst of a second swing to the Left, dubbed a ‘second pink wave’. The ‘pink’ in that description refers to a left-wing trend that has some significant Latin American countries in its fold.

Even though these left-wing governments are seen as more populist than ideological, social democratic rather than militantly revolutionary, they represent the second pink wave in the continent’s modern history.

The countries that have moved to the left in their last elections are Argentina, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia and Honduras. Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, Peru’s Pedro Castillo, Bolivia’s Luis Arce have all felicitated Gustav Petro on his victory.

Mexico’s President Manuel Lopez Obrador has expressed the hope that Petro’s victory will help heal the wounds in a country where political assassinations have been rife.A 10-year Colombian civil war followed the 1948 assassination of Leftist presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, which proved to be a precursor of the six-decade armed conflict between the state and the leftist guerrillas of FARC and M-19. But Colombia was not alone in suffering these wounds.

During the Cold War, the US supported and facilitated ‘Operation Condor’ to subdue left-wing rebellions by guerrilla groups almost throughout Latin America. This operation, carried out by US-trained and -supplied Latin American armies in a continent swamped by military coups during the 1950s to the 1970s (with Washington’s blessing) yielded some 60,000 deaths due to assassinations carried out by the military and security services, 30,000 of these in Argentina alone.

According to the Archives of Terror, 50,000 were killed, 30,000 disappeared, 400,000 were imprisoned. Cross-border operations (according to a 2002 source) resulted in 402 killed. Those in exile for fear of their lives were kidnapped, tortured and killed in US-allied countries or transferred to their home countries to be executed.

Hundreds or thousands (the figures are difficult to pin down) were abducted, tortured and murdered. They included dissidents, leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests, nuns, students, teachers, intellectuals and suspected guerrillas.

Their targets included guerrilla movements such as MIR, the Montoneros (ERP), Tupamaros, etc. But the bloody drive was expanded wholesale against all political opponents, their families and others by these military juntas. A short list of Leftist governments elected in Latin America and overthrown by US-sponsored or –supported military coups includes Guatemala 1954, Brazil 1964, Chile 1973 and Argentina 1976.

The pattern is clear. The poverty, deprivation and misery of the people of Latin America found expression in left-wing movements coming to power through the ballot box and being overthrown by military coups backed by Washington in the modern-day version of the Monroe Doctrine.

This pattern had exceptions in the shape of left-wing guerrilla movements that challenged the military dictatorships during the 1960s and 1970s. Most were inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959, but displayed a wide variety of strategies, including peasant-based guerrilla struggles and urban guerrilla struggles. Operation Condor was aimed at ensuring Washington’s imperialist hegemony in Latin America.

In the aftermath of the defeat of most if not all these guerrilla movements by the 1980s, the first pink tide emerged at the start of the 21st century. Countries that elected left-of-centre, left-leaning, radical social-democratic governments were dubbed ‘pink tide’ nations and the trend as ‘post-neoliberalism’ or ‘socialism of the 21st century’.

The leftist governments of Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela were characterised as ‘anti-American’ (i.e., the US), ‘populist’ for their rejection of the neoliberal Washington Consensus, and ‘authoritarian’ (particularly Nicaragua and Venezuela).

This first pink tide was followed by a conservative, right-wing wave in the early 2010s as a direct reaction to the pink tide. Some have argued that this first pink tide was in fact two tides, the first from the late 1990s to the early 2000s and the second from the late 2010s to the early 2020s. This latter trend of the resurgence of a pink wave included Mexico 2018, Argentina 2019, Bolivia 2020, Chile, Honduras and Peru 2021, and now Colombia 2022.

Given the history of US hegemony over Latin America, the current pink tide has its task cut out for it, precisely because its attempts to wield its hold on power in favour of the poor, dispossessed and indigenous peoples will inevitably trigger US conspiracies to defeat and overthrow these left-wing governments. The only problem today however is that military coups are no longer in ‘fashion’.

The abortive campaign to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela through parliament and via the ballot box failed, whereas the electoral defeat of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua was transformed into electoral victory at the next election.

The US also has lost its ability to build a successful reactionary coalition of its Latin American allies to isolate and bring down left-wing governments. Washington’s recent Summit of the Americas was boycotted by some Latin American countries such as Mexico because the US had not invited Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela.

Without overstating the case, it is to be hoped that Latin America has put the brutal past stoked by the US behind it and the Left has developed sufficient depth of support to be able successfully to ward off any attempts at regime change through foul means at the behest of the northern hegemon.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022