What is neopopulism?
It is an ideological trend and a form of governance that amalgamates
all the errors and political vices blithely and uselessly practiced
by Latin Americans throughout the 20th century: strong-man rule,
patronage, statism, collectivism and anti-Americanism, to which
is added -- in some countries with a strong indigenous presence
-- the native component of resentment.
Naturally,
not all the governments of that type display the same neopopulist
virulence. The chronic cases are Cuba and Venezuela, but joining
that quarrelsome and bigmouthed tandem is Bolivia, led by the
hand by Evo Morales.
What direction
will Bolivia take? It's not difficult to guess. All you have to
do is read Alvaro García Linera. He is a former university
professor and one-time guerrilla who fought against democratic
governments (a practice that landed him in jail) -- and now the
vice president of Bolivia. As such, he has the delicate task of
defining the broad outline of the new government and administering
the legendary intellectual incapacity of Morales, an intuitive
but barely educated politician.
In his own
words, published a few weeks ago in Le Monde Diplomatique,
the European journal of neopopulism, the country is going to develop
``Andean-Amazonian capitalism.''
What does
this new neopopulist contrivance consist of? According to García
Linera, of ``constructing a strong state that will regulate the
expansion of the industrial economy, extract its surpluses and
transfer them to the communitarian sector, so as to foster forms
of self-organization and mercantile development that are properly
Andean and Amazonian.''
So, Morales
and García Linera will not try to modernize Bolivia within
the tested-and-true model of development that plucked out of backwardness
and poverty countries as different as South Korea, Chile, Ireland
and Singapore. Instead, they're going to discover a new road to
prosperity that looks nothing like the schemes practiced in the
planet for the past several centuries.
Halt
this madness
Will that
new economic model lead to communism? It might, but only if things
go in the right direction: ``The potential that allows for the
possibility of a communitarian-socialist regime must first reactivate
and enrich the small communitarian networks that still survive.
This would allow us, in 20 or 30 years, to start thinking about
a socialist Utopia.''
In other
words, several decades from now, when Morales and García
Linera are as old as Fidel Castro and are tired of playing at
Andean-Amazonian capitalism, whatever survivors remain will begin
to experiment with the bloody Marxist-Leninist monstrosity that
took the lives of 100 million earthlings in only 70 years of tryouts
in various latitudes and cultures and in all possible circumstances.
Aznar does
well to try to halt this madness but the task is difficult. Millions
of disoriented Latin Americans usually judge populist governments
by their seductive revolutionary rhetoric, not by the fatal results
they achieve.
The diverse
variants of Peronism have gradually pulled Argentina into a pit,
yet that small detail has never been reflected in the election
results. Hugo Chávez is the worst leader in Venezuela's
history, yet one third of the voters remain faithful to his constant
clowning. In Peru, neopopulist Ollanta Humala has a sinister record
as a violator of human rights, yet he's climbing dangerously in
the polls.
That is the
terrible thing about neopopulism. Same as with cancer, the cells
don't stop growing until the patient dies. That's where we are.
