opinion

The triumphs and tribulations
of the Bolivarian movement
by Eric Jackson

So what does it mean to be “Bolivarian?” In the United States, where most people notoriously know little about the rest of the world, the concept is fuzzy in a lot of minds. Here in Latin America, it's a term whose meaning is disputed, just as the less ecumenical denominations in the Western world are wont to argue about who's a “Christian” or as in how both the Cuban government and the Miami exile movement lay claim to the legacy of José Martí.

Simón Bolívar was “The Great Liberator” of South America, an early 19th century revolutionary born into the aristocratic class of what is now Venezuela and educated in the ideas that accompanied the French Revolution. After participating in several failed rebellions against Spanish rule, the Venezuelan backers of the Spanish crown thought they had done away with Bolívar and his movement for good, having beaten his army and chased it into a trackless wilderness. Or so they thought.

But Bolívar, a hard core of South American supporters and a misnamed “English Legion” --- yes, they spoke English, but with a brogue, exiled Irish revolutionaries that they were --- hacked their way through the jungle, scaled a snow-covered mountain range and showed up on the plateau behind Bogota. The Spaniards were taken by surprise and routed.

There ensued a string of victories, military and political, by which Bolívar and his followers ended Spanish rule across northern South America. In collaboration with two outstanding fellow freemasons, the Argentine José de San Martín and the Chilean Bernardo O'Higgins, and another revolutionary, Uruguay's José Artigas, Bolívar was one of the leaders who, all across South America, toppled the colonial regime headed by the government in Madrid and backed by the Holy See in Rome.

With the Spaniards on the run throughout the region, Panama achieved its independence from Spain without fighting a war on the isthmus and immediately threw in its lot with Bolívar's Gran Colombia. This political entity encompassed the former Spanish Vice Royalty of New Granada: modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama.

Bolívar's revolution not only ousted the Spaniards from power. It also mandated that nobody would be born into slavery where it held sway, and stripped the Catholic Church of its temporal powers and share of public tax revenues.

But The Great Liberator died young and disillusioned, his plans for Latin American unity shattered by grasping and squabbling regional warlords and politicians. “I have plowed the sea,” he lamented. His legend and his dreams, however, lived and grew.

For decades Bolívar has been honored by regional sporting events that are part of the Olympic movement, the Bolivarian Games in which athletes from Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia compete. There are also in Panama and other countries long-established Bolivarian societies, which attract those people from the business and political establishments who like to have their countries look to themselves and their Latin American neighbors rather than to Washington in their efforts to confront chronic problems.

Then, as the “Washington Consensus” economic and political models --- Latin American economies run by US-based corporations, Latin American governments ceding economic policy decisions to those who dominate the market --- took hold in country after country in Latin America, the left in most of northern South America began to embrace a version of Bolívar's dream and to promote it as an alternative. As the Washington Consensus policies turned out to be horrible disasters for most Latin Americans' standards of living, “Bolivarian” politics became a major current in the “Pink Tide” that washed across the region.

Viewed from the perspective of what Simón Bolívar wanted to do, the great victories of Bolivarian politics are not to be found in the pronouncements of the military man who was elected president of the Republic of Venezuela and changed the country's name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, but in the growth of Latin American institutions in which the United States has no say. The recent summit of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in response to violence in Bolivia is a salient example of this. The MERCOSUR common market of the countries of southern South America, the fledgling Banco del Sur, Venezuela's Petrocaribe energy alliance, the TeleSur TV network, CARICOM's moves to integrate the economies of Caribbean countries and the leftist ALBA economic alliance are some of the more noteworthy organizational expressions of Bolivarianism.

As caricatured from Washington, “Bolivarian” politics are a code word for Cuban communism. So the story goes, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez is a friend of the Castro brothers so even though he was elected he's a dictator, and because Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa are friends of Chávez they, too, are dictators notwithstanding the facts that they were elected and are their countries' most popular leaders in living memory.

What have Americans been hearing about all of this these past few weeks? 

Those who look will find the whole story laid out online, but those who get their news from mainstream television or major metropolitan newspapers may have heard that there was some violence in Bolivia, that Ecuador's voters approved a constitution that their president wanted, that Russian warships visited Caracas and that Hugo Chávez expelled a delegation from Human Rights Watch that had come to Caracas to unveil a report that criticized his government.

What those limited to the usual information sources will not have heard, because these things went virtually unreported in the mainstream US media, were the decisions of Honduras to join ALBA and Costa Rica to join Petrocaribe.

What? Honduras and Costa Rica going communist?

Well, no. They're just part of a Latin American trend for countries to at least occasionally look other than to the north to deal with their economic problems --- a “Bolivarian” trend, if you will. With a US economy in trouble, look for this tendency to grow.

Hugo Chávez may actually turn out to be the weak link in the Bolivarian movement. He recently embarrassed himself --- again --- when he threw a Human Rights Watch delegation out of Venezuela, when he could have done much better by inviting them to meet him and hear his side of the story. But if the sometimes blundering Chávez is to be replaced by Venezuela's voters with someone other than his anointed successor, it's most likely to be someone who arose out of the movement and paradigm that Chávez created, a Bolivarian with different stripes but a Bolivarian nevertheless. In the foreseeable future nobody is going to get elected to lead Venezuela running on a platform of doing what Washington says.

In Bolivia, Evo Morales has an overwhelming mandate from the voters to lead the country. He beat a recall move with more than two-thirds of the vote. He also has the backing of his most powerful South American neighbors against any enemy --- domestic or foreign --- who would break up Bolivia. It's likely that Bolivians will approve a new constitution that slaps down any notion of an “autonomy” that would leave the traditional white oligarchy in possession of vast tracts of arable land and in control of the nation's oil and gas wealth.

In Ecuador, Rafael Correa has a new constitutional mandate to end the paralysis and instability that has plagued the country and, with oil prices up, Correa has some wiggle room to make some progress against the chronic poverty that afflicts Ecuador's people. His biggest challenges now are to develop new relations between the government in Quito and both the country's huge rural indigenous population and its commercial center in Guayaquil that all parties will find acceptable over the long term.

In politics all things pass, and it's inevitable that Latin America's “Pink Tide” and the Bolivarian movements that have ridden it to power will ebb. However, the old elites, the Washington Consensus and the old rules of the game have been washed away forever across much of the region. Some of the new regional organizations may prosper while others may not, but the progress that has been made toward implementing Simón Bolívar's dream of Latin American unity will by and large endure.

Panama may be an anachronistic backwater in many respects, but even with its unimpressive field of presidential candidates this country is likely to take the path of least resistance and adapt to the changed situation. How the United States adjusts is a bigger question: we can be certain that a McCain administration would be more belligerent than effective in its dealings with Latin America, while US voters are left with many questions about an Obama administration's policies in this region.