Last week, Colombia’s civil war – the sole remaining armed conflict in Latin America – formally came to an end. With any luck, the era of the mountain guerrilla, the irate demagogue in green fatigues, or the frightful general in dark glasses is over in the Americas.
SANTIAGO – Gabriel García Márquez’s great novel One Hundred Years of Solitude starts with a colonel who “started 32 civil wars and lost them all” facing the firing squad. The site of the event is the fictional town of Macondo, but few readers are fooled: the novel is about García Márquez’s native Colombia.
Last week, Colombia’s civil war – the sole remaining armed conflict in Latin America – formally came to an end. It lasted more than 50 years, cost a quarter-million lives, and displaced six million people. It seems hard to believe, but peace is finally here.
Pessimists will point out that much remains to be worked out, fighters have yet to hand in their weapons, and the final peace agreement has not been signed. Still, the handshake in Havana between President Juan Manuel Santos and guerrilla leader Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri (known by the nom de guerre Timochenko) marks the end of a tragic era and the beginning of a far more promising one.
Beginning in the 1960s, Latin America was infected by a bad case of what Lenin called “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder.” Donning fatigues and taking to the mountains was the cure for all social ills. Guerrilla movements were born and grew, often only to split up and engender new ones. In many places – especially Central America – violent insurgency became endemic.
Colombia’s bloodshed started even earlier, in the period simply known as “The Violence,” following the murder in 1948 of the liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The fighting between liberals and conservatives came to an end with the advent of the bloody dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1953. Democracy of sorts returned in 1958, but violence continued – until now.
Of course, the poster child for the period of revolutionary fervor in Latin America was the Cuban revolution of 1958. Che Guevara’s intense gaze and red-starred beret, captured in Alberto Korda’s iconic photograph, mobilized a generation.
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Nearly six decades later, the dream of the Cuban revolution lies in tatters. Its once-proud leader, Fidel Castro, has become a pathetic figure, clad in garish tracksuits, appearing from time to time to utter increasingly incoherent pronouncements. His brother and handpicked successor, Raúl, as grey and uninspiring as political leaders come, hosted this week’s peace ceremony in Havana.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the counterpart of childish revolution from the left was murderous repression from the right. Dictatorships proliferated, from Brazil and Argentina to Uruguay and Chile, all the way to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in Central America. They, too, made promises, theirs based on law and order and orthodox economic management.
Today in Latin America only a lunatic fringe believes such promises. When the going gets tough, no one turns to the military barracks anymore. As former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso pointed out recently, in the midst of his country’s political crisis everyone now knows the names of prosecuting judges, but no one knows the names of leading generals. That is progress, however hard earned.
Aside from Cuba, the saddest reminder of Latin America’s tragic mistakes of the past is Venezuela. The country, ruled since 1999 by populist Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolas Máduro, has gone from a political crisis to a full-fledged humanitarian disaster, with no food in stores or medicines in clinics. The Financial Times reports that, according to the Venezuelan National Assembly, “17 years of chavismo have seen more than $425 billion of public money stolen or wasted.”
No one knows how, but with the Colombian tragedy over, the Venezuelan tragedy seems destined to end sooner rather than later. Chavismo today inspires no one. The copycat regimes it spawned around Latin America are gone or severely weakened.
Just as Europe, post-Brexit, seems to be moving toward nationalism and populism, Latin America is heading in the opposite direction. With any luck, the era of the mountain guerrilla, the irate demagogue in green fatigues, or the frightful general in dark glasses is over in the Americas. What comes next is the era of the prudent politician in a boring blue suit who acknowledges that hard problems have no easy solutions, and who spurns towering promises in favor of Churchillian sweat and toil. We may finally be growing up politically.
Santos himself in Colombia, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in Peru are emblematic of this new period. They are all capable managers and highly trained technocrats. Steering the economy forward without populism – and the inflation and fiscal crisis that always go with it – is their principal challenge and possibly will be their most publicized achievement.
But they should not rely on technocratic prowess alone as the key to legitimacy and political success. Today’s Latin Americans have grown disenchanted with vain revolutionary promises, but they also look at their liberal democratic institutions – and the people who lead them – with a skeptical eye. This is understandable in a region where income inequality, unresponsive bureaucracy, and opaque businesses practices are still very much a feature of everyday life.
In Europe and Latin America, voters today need to feel that their leaders’ hearts are in the right place, and that they are acting on behalf of everyone, including the underprivileged, not merely serving a rich elite. The ultimate goals of sound policy are ethical, and they ought to be described in those terms.
When a leader mismanages a middle-income economy so terribly that people go hungry –as Chávez and Maduro have done in Venezuela – that is an immoral act. Hunger causes avoidable human suffering, a clear moral wrong. Seeking consensus, avoiding demagoguery, pursuing incremental and, therefore, sustainable solutions – none of that sounds terribly epic, but it is profoundly moral. If democratic leaders in Latin America can get that message across, then the era inaugurated by the Colombian peace agreement will be a long and happy one.
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SANTIAGO – Gabriel García Márquez’s great novel One Hundred Years of Solitude starts with a colonel who “started 32 civil wars and lost them all” facing the firing squad. The site of the event is the fictional town of Macondo, but few readers are fooled: the novel is about García Márquez’s native Colombia.
Last week, Colombia’s civil war – the sole remaining armed conflict in Latin America – formally came to an end. It lasted more than 50 years, cost a quarter-million lives, and displaced six million people. It seems hard to believe, but peace is finally here.
Pessimists will point out that much remains to be worked out, fighters have yet to hand in their weapons, and the final peace agreement has not been signed. Still, the handshake in Havana between President Juan Manuel Santos and guerrilla leader Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri (known by the nom de guerre Timochenko) marks the end of a tragic era and the beginning of a far more promising one.
Beginning in the 1960s, Latin America was infected by a bad case of what Lenin called “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder.” Donning fatigues and taking to the mountains was the cure for all social ills. Guerrilla movements were born and grew, often only to split up and engender new ones. In many places – especially Central America – violent insurgency became endemic.
Colombia’s bloodshed started even earlier, in the period simply known as “The Violence,” following the murder in 1948 of the liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The fighting between liberals and conservatives came to an end with the advent of the bloody dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1953. Democracy of sorts returned in 1958, but violence continued – until now.
Of course, the poster child for the period of revolutionary fervor in Latin America was the Cuban revolution of 1958. Che Guevara’s intense gaze and red-starred beret, captured in Alberto Korda’s iconic photograph, mobilized a generation.
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Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.
Subscribe Now
Nearly six decades later, the dream of the Cuban revolution lies in tatters. Its once-proud leader, Fidel Castro, has become a pathetic figure, clad in garish tracksuits, appearing from time to time to utter increasingly incoherent pronouncements. His brother and handpicked successor, Raúl, as grey and uninspiring as political leaders come, hosted this week’s peace ceremony in Havana.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the counterpart of childish revolution from the left was murderous repression from the right. Dictatorships proliferated, from Brazil and Argentina to Uruguay and Chile, all the way to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in Central America. They, too, made promises, theirs based on law and order and orthodox economic management.
Today in Latin America only a lunatic fringe believes such promises. When the going gets tough, no one turns to the military barracks anymore. As former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso pointed out recently, in the midst of his country’s political crisis everyone now knows the names of prosecuting judges, but no one knows the names of leading generals. That is progress, however hard earned.
Aside from Cuba, the saddest reminder of Latin America’s tragic mistakes of the past is Venezuela. The country, ruled since 1999 by populist Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolas Máduro, has gone from a political crisis to a full-fledged humanitarian disaster, with no food in stores or medicines in clinics. The Financial Times reports that, according to the Venezuelan National Assembly, “17 years of chavismo have seen more than $425 billion of public money stolen or wasted.”
No one knows how, but with the Colombian tragedy over, the Venezuelan tragedy seems destined to end sooner rather than later. Chavismo today inspires no one. The copycat regimes it spawned around Latin America are gone or severely weakened.
Just as Europe, post-Brexit, seems to be moving toward nationalism and populism, Latin America is heading in the opposite direction. With any luck, the era of the mountain guerrilla, the irate demagogue in green fatigues, or the frightful general in dark glasses is over in the Americas. What comes next is the era of the prudent politician in a boring blue suit who acknowledges that hard problems have no easy solutions, and who spurns towering promises in favor of Churchillian sweat and toil. We may finally be growing up politically.
Santos himself in Colombia, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in Peru are emblematic of this new period. They are all capable managers and highly trained technocrats. Steering the economy forward without populism – and the inflation and fiscal crisis that always go with it – is their principal challenge and possibly will be their most publicized achievement.
But they should not rely on technocratic prowess alone as the key to legitimacy and political success. Today’s Latin Americans have grown disenchanted with vain revolutionary promises, but they also look at their liberal democratic institutions – and the people who lead them – with a skeptical eye. This is understandable in a region where income inequality, unresponsive bureaucracy, and opaque businesses practices are still very much a feature of everyday life.
In Europe and Latin America, voters today need to feel that their leaders’ hearts are in the right place, and that they are acting on behalf of everyone, including the underprivileged, not merely serving a rich elite. The ultimate goals of sound policy are ethical, and they ought to be described in those terms.
When a leader mismanages a middle-income economy so terribly that people go hungry –as Chávez and Maduro have done in Venezuela – that is an immoral act. Hunger causes avoidable human suffering, a clear moral wrong. Seeking consensus, avoiding demagoguery, pursuing incremental and, therefore, sustainable solutions – none of that sounds terribly epic, but it is profoundly moral. If democratic leaders in Latin America can get that message across, then the era inaugurated by the Colombian peace agreement will be a long and happy one.