Being in the Third World, Latin America is one geopolitical battleground, a place for superpowers to flex their influence since the Cold War. During that period, the Left sided with the Soviet Union, the Right sided with the United States, and whoever dominated caused atrocities against the nations' peoples. This is no longer followed; for instance, among right-wing regimes, Colombia's Ivan Duque received support from the West, while Paraguay's Mario Abdo Benítez, despite a West-aligned foreign policy, has friendly relations with Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and El Salvador's Najib (Nayib) Bukele shifted from criticising to praising PR China and refused to condemn Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine. And so did Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.
The region's politics is sharply divided into right and left, and there were many recent examples of peoples trying to figure out who the lesser evil would be every election. Rivals Lula da Silva (left) and Jair Bolsonaro (right) vied for Brazilian presidency late this year; Colombia had Gustavo Petro (left) and Rodolfo Hernández (right) earlier; last year were Gabriel Borić (left) and José Antonio Kast (right) in Chile; Peru experienced the same circumstance with Pedro Castillo (left) and Keiko Fujimori (right) earlier. This left centrists or in-betweens in dilemma. When it comes to foreign policy, progressives outside are uncertain whom to back or be fine with.
There is this phenomenon in Latin America in the 21st Century called the "Pink Tide", with like-minded left-wing politicians gaining their countries' governments; the reverse being the "conservative wave" or "Blue Tide" followed in early 2010s, then the Pink Tide returned starting in 2018. Mexico got a left-wing president for the first time in modern history that year-- controversial politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). His victory was part of the rise of populist strongmen around the world that time, which also affected India, Europe, the Philippines, the United States and later Brazil and El Salvador; AMLO has sympathy towards even autocrats like Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro (including him stirred Congress) and Bolivia's Evo Morales (he was welcomed in the country after the highly disputed election in 2019 (read more)), but he fell short on ruling with an iron fist that was the top demand in the wave of populist terrorism, and his support for despots proved inconsistent outside Latin America.
Argentina followed in 2019, with Alberto Fernández of the Peronist (syncretic populist) Justicialist Party elected as president. He, too, fell short of forming an authoritarian regime; instead, his administration went weaker and weaker, as shown in the results of the 2021 midterm polls. Like the AMLO regime, Fernández' foreign policy behaviour inside and outside Latin America would differ; one instance is the reaction to the Iranian mullahs' appointments of 1994 AMIA Bombing suspects to key posts (Ahmed Vahidi and Mohsen Rezaei, the latter having been invited to the re-"inauguration" of unpopular Nicaraguan despot Daniel Ortega in January this year).
The Tide continued through 2022: ex-guerilla fighter Gustavo Petro made a major shift of Colombia to the left. He posed himself as a liberal and democrat, but he softened the country's vigilant stance to neighbouring Venezuela, initiating talks with the Maduro regime and reopening the Cucutá border crossing.
Earlier, the Tide breached the Peruvian Right's wall, as teacher-activist Pedro Castillo narrowly won against daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori and veteran candidate, Keiko. The foreign policy of the Castillo regime was looser than those of AMLO's and Fernández', yet the likemindedness of many Pink Tide politicians was shown when he was impeached earlier this month after attempting a self-coup in retaliation to the Fujimorist Congress' attacks against him: Argentine, Bolivian (Evo's bet, economist Luis Arce, won the 2020 election), Colombian and Mexican authorities sided with him and called the administration of successor Dina Boluarte to protect his rights.
I have said "many" and refused to generalise them, as some diverted to this policy. Chilean student leader Gabriel Borić had been critical of Putin's invasion of Ukraine and supportive of the uprising in Iran, while Honduras' Xiomara Castro, wife of Pink Tide politician Manuel Zelaya, set the prospect to recognise PRC aside and gave RO China reassurance, keeping the country's ties with the latter.A dislikeable deed the latter had done was the proclamation of a "state of exception" like in neighbouring El Salvador under Bukele, a move that the likes of the regimes of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba would do.
I am now tuning in to Brazil, as a major regime change will occur as 2023 comes. Jair Bolsonaro, a fan of the USA-backed military dictatorship of 1964-1985, was a highly polemical figure due to his homophobic, misogynistic, pro-business, anti-environment, anti-black, anti-poor, anti-indigenous and anti-civil rights policies. The COVID-19 pandemic that killed thousands of Brazilians might have helped change popular opinion and make Lula win. The activist/veteran politician who was involved in a major corruption scandal that implicated top ally Dilma Rouseff (Ruseva) and who will return to presidency showed himself to be the reverse of Bolsonaro: pro-diversity, pro-workers, pro-environment, anti-abortion (conservative Bolsonaro appeared as in favour) and tried to convince faithful Christians, a powerful base for Bolsonaro, to support him. Uncertainty lingers however when it comes to foreign policy.
Bolsonaro acted like Trump-- he had deep admiration for Putin and animosity to his ally PRC, the latter only until when Trump was unseated in 2021 (read more) due to liberal Western isolation. In this manner, a Bolsonaro win in the past election would be beneficial to the Asian superpower; nonetheless, this doesn't mean it would be a loser with a Lula win, but it might also not expect the same kind of relations it had with his past administrations.
On the invasion of Ukraine, the Brazilian government condemned Putin's action, but Bolsonaro differed. He reiterated his neutrality to this conflict, a position Putin would still welcome, gaining the ire of Volodymyr Zelensky. On the other hand, Lula also displayed a degree of neutrality by blaming Zelensky in the development of the conflict, leaving Ukraine no second-round candidate worthy of its support.
Lula became a favourite of those he criticses (the West) during the recent highly-contested polls, but he is also a key figure-- one of the co-founders-- of the São Paulo Forum, Latin America's top alliance of left-wing politicians and parties. Recent statements of the Forum include voicing support for Castillo and Alberto Fernández' partner-in-power, Cristina Fernández-Kirchner (no relation to Alberto), two personalities the West is not sympathetic with, plus the congratulations to the Communist Party of China (CPC/CCP). All aforementioned Latin American left-wing leaders are also in the entity, even dictators like Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, Maduro and Ortega. Should he make major changes in foreign policy and accord these to Western policy, the returning president would develop friction with his Forum, something he would dearly dislike; Western countries, which are at a lethal power struggle with rivals like Putin and Xi Jinping, might not be able to gain full support from Lula, who might now play the geopolitical game on his own terms.
The latest sensation of the Pink Tide, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will have these choices in forming the country's new foreign policy: go Western and produce a rift with the Forum he founded, do a Borić or Xiomara and convince the body to follow (more difficult), keep Bolsonaro's orientation of courting with Putin and the CCP, or perform the latter but in his own terms or Forum's current terms. Undoing his predecessor's atrocities would have the Brazilian Congress as a stumbling block, but facing the international community and the world's challenges will be no easier. For someone who seeks for justice and sustainable peace globally, if I were Lula, defying the São Paulo Forum's current pro-autocrat orientation would be my easier choice; attempting to change it would be my harder but better preference.
Article posted on 31 December 2022, 19:16 (UTC +08:00).
No comments:
Post a Comment