Latin American 'left' has been shifting to the right

Posted on Sun, Dec. 10, 2006

THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT
Latin American 'left' has been shifting to the right
BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
aoppenheimer@MiamiHerald.com

As 2006 comes to a close, the conventional wisdom among Latin America
watchers is that the region has shifted further to the left. But, as
often happens, the conventional wisdom may be deceiving.

Granted, there were nine presidential elections in the region this year
-- in Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador,
Nicaragua and Venezuela -- and the left won most of them.
Self-proclaimed leftist candidates won in Chile, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador,
Nicaragua and Venezuela, which has led Venezuela's populist president
Hugo Chávez to assert that a ''leftist wave'' is spreading through the
region.

But there are several reasons to take Chávez's assertions with a grain
of salt. Right-of-center candidates won key elections in Mexico and
Colombia, and centrist or center-leftist candidates who have little in
common with Chávez won in Chile, Peru, Costa Rica and Brazil.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva easily won reelection by
clinging to his predecessor's pro-market policies, which are helping
Brazil reduce poverty. In Peru, President Alan García, a former Third
World radical, won by presenting himself as a pro-market candidate, and
by accusing his leftist rival of being a Chávez puppet.

Even in Nicaragua, former Marxist President Daniel Ortega ran as a
fervent Roman Catholic, and even backed a Church-supported law banning
therapeutic abortions. Ortega is also vowing to maintain Nicaragua's
recently enacted free trade agreement with Washington.

POLL FINDINGS

A new Latin America-wide poll released Friday may help explain what's
going on in the region. The findings of the Latinobarómetro poll,
conducted among 20,000 people in 18 Latin American countries, include:

• Asked to rate their ideological leanings on a scale from 0 to 10, with
0 being the left and 10 being the right, most Latin Americans placed
themselves at an average of 5.4, or slightly to the right.

Interestingly, in leftist-ruled Venezuela, the average was 5.6,
suggesting that many non-leftist Venezuelans may have voted for Chávez.
In Mexico, the average was also 5.6, and in Argentina 5.3. The only four
countries in the region where most people placed themselves to the left
of the center were Chile (4.9), Bolivia (4.8), Uruguay (4.7) and Panama
(4.6).

''The average political stand in most Latin American countries is
right-of-center,'' Marta Lagos, head of Latinobarómetro, told me in a
telephone interview from Chile.

``In those countries where leftist candidates have won, they have won
with centrist votes.''

• Asked to rank Latin American leaders on a scale from zero to 10, the
most popular president was Brazil's Lula da Silva, with a 5.8 grade,
followed by Chile's Michelle Bachelet (5.5), and Colombia's Alvaro Uribe
(5.4).

• Chávez ranked among the least popular leaders regionwide, alongside
President Bush: both got a 4.6 grade. And Cuba's Fidel Castro was the
least popular of all leaders, with a 4.4 grade.

Many analysts say that what's happening in Venezuela, Bolivia and
Ecuador is not a triumph of the left but a triumph of petro-populism.

Populism is rising in countries that are benefiting from commodity-based
booms, such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia where people want an
immediate distribution of their countries' export bonanza, they say.

OUTDATED TERMS

My opinion: In a world where Communist China is leading the biggest
capitalist revolution in the history of mankind, and where a
conservative U.S. government is running the biggest deficit in the
country's history, the whole concept of ''left'' and ''right'' is long
outdated. (If anything, what we have now are globalized countries, and
isolationist-nationalist ones.)

But even if we wanted to go along with the left vs. right dichotomy, it
would be hard to support the notion of a single -- even loosely tied --
leftist trend in the region.

If anything, there are many countries where ''leftist'' leaders are
following Chile's successful free market economic opening, and a few
countries in which petro-populist leaders are giving money away without
worrying about building a solid base for long-term growth.

So, next time you hear that Latin America is shifting to the left, say
yes, but add that the left in most countries is shifting to the right.

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