Living in Peru : your everyday companion

In light of the Chavez victory, one can only hope that Thomas Shannon, US Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, is sincere when he says that "regime change" is not part of his vocabulary. The US reaction to the victory of Chavez will be a test of whether the US can live peaceably and cooperatively with a region, long seen as its backyard, that has moved sharply out of its orb of influence. In awe at their own military might, a segment of the United States foreign policy establishment - and not just the neo-conservatives - often succumbs to the belief that the US has a power that no nation or empire has ever had, or ever will have: the power to solve the problem of political order for others.

It is the problem of political order that the Latin American left must face squarely. It cannot hope to address poverty, inequality, economic underperformance, or social exclusion without reforming the state. The Latin American state is, with rare exceptions, both cruel and inefficient: cruel both in its capacity for violence and its indifference to suffering and human need; inefficient both in its inability to provide public goods or enforce the rule of law, and in its incapacity to translate public preferences into collectively desired outcomes.

Latin America's most successful democracies - Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile - have all have made sustained investments in human development; they have created efficient public sector institutions based on the rule of law and the separation of powers; and they have sustained enduring political party and civil society organizations. These are orderly societies with functioning states, and they, more than the United States or Venezuela, represent the most reliable path to success.

The international community must back away from the imposition of rigid policy recipes and give the region latitude to experiment. When countries compete, they learn from each other. President Alan García has said that Peru must treat Chile as a model to emulate and exceed, not an enemy to fight and defeat.

When countries quarrel, they conjure up a dismal Hobbesian world of repetitive conflict. The polarisation in some of the recent elections in Latin America has been exacerbated by the dispute between the United States and Venezuela. The sovereign act of voting - in Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and elsewhere - has been interpreted as if elections were barometers of support for Chávez or Bush.

It was Latin America's misfortune in the 20th century to be caught in a pendulum-like oscillation between democracy and authoritarian rule. As Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet enter their twilight, it is worth reflecting on how the region can avoid a return to the stark and sterile confrontations of the last century.

• This is an abbreviated version of a talk prepared for a conference on the left in Latin America, delivered earlier this week at Cornell University.

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Cameron concludes: “It was Latin America's misfortune in the 20th century to be caught in a pendulum-like oscillation between democracy and authoritarian rule. As Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet enter their twilight, it is worth reflecting on how the region can avoid a return to the stark and sterile confrontations of the last century. If you can accept “Latin America� as an assemblage with a definable body of common beliefs, hopes, and dynamic, then you, like most of today’s pundits, are behind the reality of our times. More than 40 years ago Columbia University’s Frank Tannenbaum wrote a seminal work entitled “Ten Keys to Latin America� destroying the myth of a sociopolitical unit called Latin America. One need only to look at the geographic reality of Peru. Political and economic power lies within its Coastal desert, supported by the presence of manufacturing and river valley agriculture; the highlands where mining is the economic backbone, with a large Quechua-speaking population whose sociopolitical organization is largely inherited from Colonial and Inca times; and finally the jungle, Peru’s Cinderella-land, made up of some 57% of Peru’s surface, a museum of socioeconomic problems on view since the mid 19th Century. Similar cultural, historical, and economic diversity can be found from the Rio Grande to Ushuaia, including anomalous presences like Belize, French Guyana, Surinam and the Caribbean islands, Haiti and Cuba among them. “Similar diversity� is not sameness! It is equally unfortunate that useless terms like “left� and “right�, excellent for describing different feet and arms, are still used to lump dissimilar political philosophies together. What is even worse is that political philosophies, used to describe how people should be socially organized for communal living, are mixed up with, or are confused with, economic philosophies. There is also variety of these systems used to describe how people do or should exploit their surroundings. In Spanish one says “se me perdió el sombrero�, the reflexive form translatable as “My hat was lost to me�. Unlike English where I recognize responsibility for the loss of my hat, Spanish exonerates me. This semantic escape from responsibility appears in Cameron’s sympathetic statement that “it was Latin America’s misfortune in the 20th Century to be caught in a pendulum-like oscillation between democracy and authoritarian rule�. Was it the misfortune of the 13 colonies in the 18th Century to be caught up in a wave of anti-colonialism that ended in a Revolutionary War? Was it the misfortune of Simón Bolívar to have looked to Europe, rather than to the fledgling United States for social, economic, and political guidance? Non sense. Neither Katrina nor Vesuvius asked for permission nor apologized. In nature, pressures build up and are relieved without nonsense. Human nature, too, can be pressured up in very predictable ways and the reactions to those pressures can also generally be predicted. Metaphors like Pink tide are catchy but unsubstantial, giving no clues as to either cause or effect. Cameron’s recommendation that “…it is worth reflecting on how the region can avoid a return...� is obsolete and ineffectual. The intelligent recommendation would be to try to understand the realities lived by those swimming in the pink tide and the contours of the far shore they hope to reach unless they and their families drown in platitudes and waves of historical garbage and frustrated hopes. THE SWIMMERS ARE NOT LOOKING BACK! 1. U.S., or any other, policy makers who look backward, for reasons other than to find the mistakes not to be repeated, waste time. 2. U.S. foreign policy went wrong right around the time that Teddy Roosevelt started trust busting. Foreign policy focused on “protecting our (economic) interests� rather than protecting and reinforcing our original interests: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness�. 3. What has always been admired about the USA? It is the thrilling environment of hope, and joy, and productivity that freedom to pursue one’s dreams provokes. 4. The symbol of the United Sates is not an arm thrust up clutching a hammer, but the arm of liberty holding a torch to light the way to a more harmonious community, working peacefully for INDIVIDUAL AND MUTUAL benefits. 5. Four decades ago, Tannenbaum documented his conclusion that the principal error of U.S. foreign policy was lumping all of the Spanish-speaking countries together, and adding Brazil. 6. The problems of political order, plus serious problems of an economic and environmental nature, must be faced squarely by all, not just the so-called Latin American left, but by the United States, on a country by country basis. 7. The recent “leftist� Congress in Santiago decided in favor of violence as the route to creating understanding of their problems and to resolving them. The failure of arms to resolve social problems seems not to have reached the participants who could not come up with any “new solutions to the region’s political and social problems. They are, alas, no different than the hawks who are seeking to resolve society’s problems in Chechenya, Iraq, Darfur, and Palestine by force of arms. Recommendation: A. Be prepared for the worst since a turnaround in US foreign policy regarding Latin America is still being drawn on the walls of caves in Washington by artists far from the Library of Congress where solutions lie on dusty shelves. B. If you are an American, look to the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution for guidance in public affairs. C. Recommend, in writing, to your Congressmen to do the same and make sure they do. D. Tell your children what you are doing and beg them keep on monitoring their Congressmen when you have gone.