The Sao Paulo Forum: is there a new Latin American left?

Monthly Review, Dec, 1992 by William I. Robinson

In Brazil, the PT has avoided interfering in the autonomy of the social movements, including the trade-union movement from which the party sprang. "The trade-union leaders who belong to the PT subordinate their own party position to that defined by the trade union," explained Joaquin Soriano, a member of the PT National Directorate. Similarly in Mexico, the PRD "is developing relations with the social organizations, but the latter maintain complete autonomy from us," explains PRD leader Adolfo Gilly. "We are taking care not to repeat the corporatist tradition of the PRI [the governing party].[8] In Nicaragua the FSLN has been critical of the way the party subordinated the mass organizations that grew up in the wake of the 1979 revolutionary triumph. This had the effect of stifling grassroots initiative and creativity. Participation in the mass organizations declined and the social base eroded.

The Salvadoran FMLN, itself an amalgamation of five organizations, envisions itself as a centripetal force for uniting diverse national sectors around a popular alternative. In the words of FMLN Central Command member Eduardo Sancho, "A remarkable and unprecedented process of social and political organization has taken place in El Salvador. In the face of this process, the FMLN has come to accept a broad leadership shared among the multiple social and political movements, in a new and evolving pluralist situation .... [This implies] a collective, or shared vanguard--in other words, a political rather than an organic articulation of numerous groups.[9]

The Historic Context of the Latin American Left

The new left is emerging at a time of crisis in Latin America and at a great historic crossroad. The profound changes that are taking place make this decade strategiC. The 1990s will decide what combination of international forces will guide humanity into the next century.

The breakup of the self-proclaimed socialist bloc shifts the axis of world tensions from East-West to North-South, and has accelerated immiseration in the South. The share of global GNP going to the underdeveloped world, which has some 75 percent of the world's population, dropped from 23 percent in 1980 to 19 percent in 1990. The UN Development Program estimates that an additional 100 million people in the South will become impoverished every year of the 1990s.[10]

In Latin America, the number of people living in extreme poverty went from 112 million in 1980 to 184 million in 1990, nearly half of the continent's population. Latin America decreased its participation in the international market from 7 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in 1990, and the area's foreign debt exceeds $430 billion, a source of permanent economic hemorrhage.[11] What is happening constitutes an historic decapitalization of Latin America that rivals the colonial plunder of the sixteenth century.

Meanwhile, the United States has emerged from the Cold War with its control over the Americas intact, at least for the time being, with the invasion of Panama, electoral intervention in Nicaragua, destabilization in Cuba, and the military and political penetration of South America through "drug wars" and other forms of intervention.