Tuesday, January 17, 2006

A Libertarian Defense of the Left Wing in Latin America

Yes you read that right. Pardon the pun. Not all Libertarians are merely dyed in the wool right wingers like Colby Cosh, who uses the term to somehow indicate that he is just a Republican wannabe in Canada. See my article Cosh Slanders Chavez Again

A fruitful debate from the Libertarian Left on Latin America has been posted at Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog.

Vulgar Libertarianism Watch, Part XV: Lula and Chavez and Morales, Oh My!

There's been a lot of right-wing pissing and moaning out there recently about Venezuela and Bolivia, a lot of it under "free market" colors. First off, Doug Allen at Catallarchy:

Add another anti-US leftist [Evo Morales] to the Latin American leader list.

Well, for anyone who's just emerged from a time warp and has a century worth of news to catch up on, I'd say the Latin American left has some pretty fucking good reasons to be anti-US.

In the comments to the same post, Jonathan Wilde identifies Hugo Chavez as

the latest in a long tradition of South American populist thugs like Allende and Lula.

Well, golly, we can't have any of those thugs in South America now, can we? Given the vast number of individuals who might have deserved that epithet in recent Latin American history, Wilde's singling out of Allende and Lula speaks volumes. First, consider the wide range of political forces in Latin America over the past half century or so; the single biggest, probably, is the U.S. government--the Marines, CIA, and School of the Americas, inter alia. Next, consider the governments installed by the U.S. over the same period by means of those same interventionist forces, starting with the intervention in Guatemala in 1954, continuing through the Brazilian coup in the 1960s, the overthrow of Allende, Operation Condor, and the tens upon tens of thousands of people murdered by U.S.-supported death squads in the 1980s. Finally, consider that the two most prominent political figures in Chile alone in the past 35 years have been Allende and Pinochet. The choice of Allende and Lula as exemplary "thugs," in such a context, indicates (to put it mildly) a rather idiosyncratic view of reality.



And it just gets better and better. And so do the lengthy contributions in the comments section.


So next time Colby Cosh calls himself a Libertarian you now know he is no such thing he is just another vulgar right wing reactionary.

Meanwhile the right wing will have another excuse to avoid reality, that the IMF and the neo-liberal agenda in Latin America is a failure. Consequently the basket case economies created by the IMF like Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, etc. has led to the revival of a viable left wing mass movement on the contient. A movement that is about worker and community control, rather than just statist-nationalization.

Now Chile has elected its first Woman President who is a socialist. A Victim of Pinochet Is Chile's New Leader

Yep the American Imperative, the Monroe Doctrine, in Latin America is tumbling down like a house of cards. Vive le Revolucion.


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