The history of the Americas is the history of the rape of its resources, the decimation and displacement of its indigenous people, and the deliberate underdevelopment of its economies. It is no wonder then that socialism even in the 21st Cen-tury still captures the popular imagination from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego. And why despite its best efforts to eradicate – sometimes lethally – left wing political movements, America may have to learn to accommodate political systems that differ from its own free market ideology.
First came the Spanish, spreading disease and death in the sixteenth century while hollowing out the Cerro Rico above Potosi, Bolivia with forced labour, and shipping its tons of silver back to Spain. Later it would be tin from Juan de Valle, copper from Chile, iron ore from Brazil, gold, diamonds, timber…even guano which in the mid-1850s saved Europe from mass starvation by fertilising its exhausted wheatfields. In fact by the turn of the century guano made up two thirds of all Peru’s exports and an indolent Lima elite, heavily indebted to the British, failed to diversify their economy. So with the invention of a process to manufacture synthetic fertiliser just before World War I, their dream of perpetual wealth from bird droppings came dropping down. A lesson for our time, our country.
In El Salvador during the 1800s the government, directed by the powerful coffee barons, abolished communal lands, thereby denying indigenous people the right to plant their own food. This forced them to work on the plantations. It was, as one writer noted, an example of how hunger is the bedrock of capitalism.
Not so widely known was the presence in Latin America of Great Britain – the original global capitalists. Although not colonial masters, they controlled the ports, built and managed the railways and financed the extractive industries. French foreign minister, René Chateaubriand, in the early 1800s lamented that, “In the hour of emancipation the Spanish colonies turned into some sort of British colonies.”
Not only content with extracting the resources on the cheap, they exported their own goods to the continent. Argentinians wore ponchos made in Yorkshire, textiles were traded for coffee, sugar, copper…helping to fuel their own industrial revolution and destroying indigenous manufacturers. This would set templates for economies that centuries later still struggle with the volatility and income inequality that afflict all commodity producers. The resource curse as something self-inflicted may be more a Western construct to keep developing countries as their consumers. Certainly this was the case in our own British Guiana – a monocultural economy where even the simplest nail came – and to this day still comes – by boat.
Finally the Americans adopted the continent under the Monroe Doctrine, in support of independence and non-interference from departing European colonisers, Ultimately and perhaps inevitably it would see the creation of Central American banana republics for the benefit of the United Fruit Company, and a network of military juntas that tortured and “disappeared” thousands all in the name of the Cold War. Chile’s Salvador Allende was forcibly ousted (and later took his own life) in 1973 in the aftermath of the nationalisation of American-owned copper mines. The 1964 overthrow of Brazilian President João Goulart and the installation of a 21-year military dictatorship was precipitated by plans to nationalise iron ore deposits controlled by US-owned companies. Human rights atrocities proli-ferated in Central America carried out by regimes supported by Washington including the 1981 El Mozote massacre of 800 El Salvadoran citizens.
Given this history it is therefore no surprise that left wing politics still has strong roots in the Americas. Perhaps left wing ideology fits comfortably with existing indigenous ways of life based as they are around consensus and sharing. Much also can be made of Cuba’s influence on the continent, not necessarily as an example of a particularly flourishing socialist state (thanks in large part to US sanctions), but as an inspirational generator of revolutionary ideas and icons of resistance – Castro himself and of course the ultimate poster boy Che Guevara, executed in Bolivia in 1967.
Other countries have generated their own icons such as Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest, who was the embodiment of the fusion of Catholic beliefs with communist principles known as liberation theology: “If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrillero,” Torres once said. And he lived his truth, taking off his cassock, joining the ELN and dying in an engagement with the Colombian military in 1966.
Uruguay’s Jose “Pepe” Mujica, former guerrilla was interned for 13 years for his part in what was a war against six military juntas under Operation Condor coordinated by five American administrations including that of Jimmy Carter. Mujica would go on to become his country’s president while setting an example of care for the poor and living a life of personal humility. And there was the magnetic Hugo Chavez, whose own country’s path of lifting people out of poverty was derailed by low oil prices, American destabilisation and his untimely death aged 57.
Most recently the continent has seen Peru go left with the election of Pedro Castillo an indigenous former schoolteacher whom the elite ridicule for his traditional hat even as they scurry to send their money off to Switzerland. So too Bolivia with the election in 2006 of coca farmer Evo Morales and then his successor Luis Arce despite the best attempts of the OAS to question free and fair elections.
Thirty plus years after the end of the Cold War the ideological struggle continues in the Americas and with high commodity prices favouring many of the continent’s countries, the China Effect and a United States convulsed with its own culture wars, the future is in the balance.
But what of little Guyana? Surrounded by sudden flattery and attention we are in danger of becoming a vassal state, on the cusp of wild wealth but not fully in charge of our external relations or how we wish to shape our society – of our destiny. Forced to ingest foreign capital, conveniently divided and headed for greater inequality as the “indigenous” business class gorges on the oil resources….a long tradition of anti-colonialism cast aside in the rush to materialism, believing in nothing.
