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opinion
Also in this section: Sirias, A tribute to Virgil Suárez
Who’s left? by Eric Jackson There’s a meeting of leftist Latin American political parties coming up in San Salvador, and Panama’s PRD will be attending, sending a delegation headed by San Miguelito legislator Leandro Ávila. He’s a former leader of the obsequious FENASEP public employees’ union and the deputy who shepherded the privatization of Panama’s Social Security Fund through the legislature. So will there be anyone in the room audacious enough to impugn Ávila’s credentials? The PRD, you see, is part of the Socialist International, just like Tony Blair’s British Labor Party. Blair, a junior partner with George W. Bush in the Iraq disaster, is on the right wing of that collection of parties and Martín Torrijos is substantially to the right of Tony Blair. The Socialist International has in recent times stepped into a time warp, going back a century to the times when the social democratic parties split between their reformist and communist wings, the former in support of World War I and a division of colonial spoils among mostly European empires, the latter explicitly anti-imperialist. Communism then embarked on its own odyssey, coming under Russian control and embracing the norms of neo-Tsarist autocracy first by accepting the Communist International’s points of unity and later becoming totally subservient to Stalin’s dictatorship. First the Trotskyist schism, then independent-minded parties emerging from World War II under the leaderships of Josef Tito, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, and finally a string of Third World revolutions shattered the monolith that the Soviet party tried so hard to maintain, and eventually a stodgy and repressive Soviet empire collapsed of its own weight. A lot of the commies of the old Soviet bloc proved to be sycophants and chameleons who just said what they were expected to say in order to get ahead, then scurried off in other directions once there were no powers and privileges to be had from their erstwhile organizations. In a few places the genuine leftists, the burdens of opportunist “comrades” and a Russian totalitarian legacy lifted from their backs, reorganized, democratized and came back as major contenders for political power in their countries. Meanwhile in Latin America, due mainly to the economic failures of capitalism in our region, a new wave of leftist governments of various shades arose in many countries --- the “Pink Tide,” it’s often called. These administrations were not imposed by Soviet bayonets at the end of World War II, nor despite the ravings of the US-sponsored Cuban exile leadership, were they the result of some manipulation by Fidel Castro. The Pink Tide governments were the result of domestic forces reacting to both international pressures and the abuses of home-grown oligarchies, and it’s natural that they will have differences among them as big as the differences among the countries in which they came to power. If a principal point of Panamanian self-description is that we’re not Colombian, Uruguay’s history is that it’s emphatically neither Brazilian nor Argentine and thus nobody who knows anything about South American history ought to be surprised that Tabaré Vázquez’s government in Montevideo has had arguments with Lula da Silva’s Brazil and Néstor Kirchner’s Argentina. Maybe Chile and Bolivia might patch up their long-standing differences arising from the former's 19th century seizure of the latter's outlet to the Pacific Ocean, but this has not been an automatic process even though the voters of both countries have elected socialist parties to power. So does the PRD, which has become just another political expression of rabiblanco economic power in Panama, have any place at a gathering of leftist parties? To the extent that “leftist” means just another political gang looking for the enrichment of its leaders, political patronage to dole out to its followers and anything that extends its power and privileges, maybe it does. Betrayal, intolerance, authoritarianism and the idolization of the worst aspects of foreign cultures have over the past century from time to time been the hallmarks of certain parties in the social democratic fold and others in the communist ranks. On that score the PRD is by no means alone. But to the extent that “an injury to one is an injury to all” is the central idea of leftist ways of thinking, the PRD flunks the test. There is neither a sense of social solidarity nor any sort of egalitarian spirit to be found in Panama's ruling elite these days. Torrijos acts more like Berlusconi than Prodi. He was the first Latin American leader to embrace the election fraud against the Mexican left. He spent a ton of public money in a referendum campaign that, in addition to fraudulent promises, had as one of its central themes an attack on the “no” campaign because its members don’t support the oligarchy’s economic order. His administration's economic performance has been marked by declining real wages for working people and huge tax breaks for a tiny group of this country’s richest men. Torrijos is not a leftist. He defends the privileges of the rich, not the rights of the poor. He’s dismantling our social security system. He’s handing control of the Panamanian economy over to multinational corporations. It would be most appropriate if the PRD delegation gets snubbed in San Salvador. To the extent that President Torrijos and his party do not get the cold shoulder, we see precisely how meaningless the terms “left” and ”right” can be in today’s political life.
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