Fascism in Latin America

06-08-2012

Amidst the crises that are engulfing Europe, Syria, and Afghanistan and our own problems at home, it is easy to overlook disturbing developments to our south. While some countries in South and Central America are thriving, others are experiencing authoritarian and fascist rule. Venezuela and Cuba are well-known examples of this trend, but Bolivia is often overlooked.

Many on the left had great hopes for Bolivia when Evo Morales was elected President in 2005. But the Morales administration has forged a “proceso de cambio” featuring a new constitution that opens the way for endless re-election, the restriction of press freedom, and a unlimited industrialization that includes building massive dams and development of oil, gas, and lithium. Morales has also ignored indigenous eco-reserves and violently repressed protests.

Las máscaras del fascismo: Castro, Chávez, Morales (in Spanish) is a new book by the Bolivian fiction writer Juan Claudio Lechín. Lechin, the son of a renowned union activist, "audaciously compares the laws and political strategies that Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Morales himself have employed to congeal power with those of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco."

While Lechin originally supported Morales, he went on a hunger strike in 2006 to protest Morale's consolidation of power. After the strikers were harassed and threatened, Lechin "realized that there could be a correlation between what was unfolding in Bolivian and European fascism, so I studied fascism for four and a half years."

Lechin's book is both an account of Bolivian authoritarianism and also a comparative history of fascism in 21st century Latin American and 20th century Europe. He develops a schema of fascism: 

 I see it as a product of the clash between the onrush of modernity and the familiarity of feudalism. I believe that, over the last four centuries, two political philosophies have been at battle. One is monarchy, whether it’s feudal, absolutist, or whatever; the other is liberalism that can be constitutional, presidential, etc. These two systems have been waging a constant war, on the one side for the centralization of power, and on the other, for redistribution of power. The rest, like communism or fascism, are in-between forms that some societies acquire in the transition between these two. The moment in which fascism appears is when the values and institutions of liberal society have not yet been fully installed and there exist masses boasting a traditional mindset. Fascism emerges from a social unconscious intent on re-establishing mentalities that people are familiar with—and this installation carries the novelty of being realized by a caudillo and leaders from the common people using a revolutionary discourse.

For those interested in Hannah Arendt's thinking about revolution, totalitarianism and fascism, there is much to be gained from Lechin's ruminations. He does not address the distinction of totalitarianism, and probably for the good reason that the Latin American variety of authoritarianism is far different from mid-20th century totalitarianism. This too is instructive.

One fault line that runs through Lechin's book is his ambivalence about liberalism as the primary opposition to one-person rule.

Liberalism is a complex system. It has its political side, with its emphasis on liberties and deconstruction of power. But then there is the economic side: capitalism with its two opposing faces, the small owner and the transnational. Liberalism has its failures, of course. I am not a liberal! But, from my position living inside dictatorships and military juntas in Latin America, I have witnessed that liberalism offers a better chance for people to succeed at protest than this shell of feudalism called fascism or communism. In it, nothing is possible. Too, liberalism is a young system; it’s still being created. One can intervene, propose, make it happen.

In the wake of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, such clear-sighted ambivalence about liberalism is welcome. It is often forgotten by critics of liberalism that the Arab Spring, for all of its newness and radicalism, is above all motivated by a desire for liberal freedom. While Arendt saw that revolutions are about freedom that means more than simply liberty, liberty is a necessary first foundation for freedom.

If you read Spanish, order the book; but even if you don't you can get much from reading Chellis Glendinning's fascinating interview with Lechin in Guernica.

-RB