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Now
This is how the Washington Consensus
ends: With the president-elect of Mexico Felipe Calderón
sneaking off with outgoing Vicente Fox Thursday night to hold
a midnight, locked-door inauguration. Fait accompli, the next
day the videotaped ceremony was broadcast to the nation. "How
now, you secret, black, and midnight hags! What is't you do?"
"A deed without a Name," they answered.
Over the last two decades,
the Washington Consensus was more than just a set of economic
policies that opened up Latin America's economies to US corporations
and banks. It was a political directive as well, aimed at redefining
the meaning of Latin American democracy.
Once US-backed Cold War military
regimes and death squads had violently severed the ties between
socialist and nationalist political parties and their working-class
and peasant base and allowed a return to constitutional rule,
an army of corporate and government-funded U.S. social scientists
descended upon Latin America. They advised politicians to move
the fulcrum of politics away from mass rallies in the central
plaza to televised campaign ads and back-room elite negotiations.
They also sold a new brand of democracy, one defined exclusively
as the protection of political and economic freedom and the defense
of property rights, rather than the achievement of social justice.
Such advice was aimed at putting to rest Latin America's populist,
egalitarian tradition, which had deep roots in the region's political
culture, drawing from Catholic humanism, Rousseauean notions
of participatory democracy, and indigenous conceptions of justice
and solidarity. "Political democracy," Samuel Huntington
lectured Latin Americans in one transitology handbook, "is
clearly compatible with inequality in both wealth and income,
and in some measure, it may be dependent upon such inequality."
It depends on what you mean
by democracy. The success of such a campaign to turn Latin Americans
into passive consumers of electoral politics was dependent on
the success of the Washington Consensus's economic policies.
But the 1990s were a disaster for a majority of Latin Americans.
Inequality increased at a stunning pace and millions were thrown
into not just poverty but extreme destitution, leading activists
across the continent to rebuild alliances between grassroots
social movements and political parties and lay the groundwork
for today's left resurgence. Popular protests brought down
governments in Bolivia and Ecuador, and restored one in Venezuela.
Poor people increasingly became involved in politics (Evo Morales
is the first Bolivian president to win more than fifty percent
in a first-round vote since the country returned to democratic
rule in the 1980s, drawing the bulk of support from impoverished
rural communities). What is more, a majority of Latin Americans
continued to believe that democracy should entail some form of
equity and wealth redistribution.
The conflict between these
visions of democracy were brought into sharp relief in last summer's
presidential election, which pitted Calderón against Manuel
López Obrador, a center-leftist with a strong grassroots
base of support. López Obrador built his campaign around
old-style rallies and marches. In fact, it took a massive social
movement just to get him into the game, with hundreds of thousands
filling Mexico City's Zocolo to protest Vicente Fox's bogus attempt
to use a legal technicality to block his candidacy. He even
refused to visit the US to glad-hand bankers and think-tank pundits
who watched his early large lead with alarm. Calderón,
in contrast, might as well as have set up his headquarters in
Washington for all the personal contact he had with actual Mexicans.
With an enormous corporate-funded war chest, he relied heavily
on TV commercials to sell himself. In an effort to whittle away
at what seemed like an insurmountable López Obrador lead,
he turned to US political consultants, who micro-polled, product-tested,
perception-managed, and focused-grouped to roll out the most
relentlessly negative political campaign in Mexican history.
It worked, at least enough
to equalize the playing field just enough for Calderón
to squeak in with a victory that millions and millions of Mexicans
believe to be illegitimate. So what better way to inaugurate
the fruit of such a consumer-driven campaign than to abandon
the pomp-and-circumstance that usually mark of Mexico's transfers
of presidential power and hold a closed-door, midnight rite later
broadcast on the country's corporate-controlled airwaves?
But maybe Macbeth's conspiring
witches are not the best image to invoke to capture the significance
of Calderón's nighttime ritual. Facing hundreds of thousands
swearing allegiance to López Obrador, Oaxaca on the brink,
and politicians brawling on the floor of Congress, Calderón
just announced that he was naming Francisco Javier Ramírez
Acuña as his Interior Minister, in charge of domestic
security. While governor of the state of Jalisco, Ramírez
was accused by Amnesty International and others of serious human
rights violations, including ordering a brutal crackdown on anti-corporate
globalization protesters. A more appropriate way to mark Calderón's
inauguration is perhaps Henry V's Dauphin, as he prepares for
battle: "Tis midnight; I'll go arm myself."
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
