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 Editorials | At Issue | March 2005 
Who You Callin' a Populist?
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - El Universal
Unlike in the United States, the word "liberal" doesn't work as a political putdown in Latin America. What's more, communist is outdated and leftist is fading. So the threatened ins had to scour the political lexicon for a trendier term of contempt to pin on the emerging outs. They came up with an oldie-but-goodie populist.
If it seems you've been hearing that word a lot lately, it's because you have. President Fox called called for a halt to populist proposals. Telmex head Carlos Slim warned of undesirable "populist alternatives."
Business Week worried aloud about the facile promises of undemocratic populists in Mexico.
The exiled Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner has taken the theme to apocalyptic extremes, with all of Latin America the new Armageddon: A populist wave, with clear antidemocratic signs, sweeps the continent from one end to the other, he wrote on March 9. So who are these undesirable, facile, antidemocratic populists? Well, the stereotype is Bolivian Congressman Evo Morales, a {gasp!) coca grower and a leader of that landlocked nation's opposition. The designated populist bčte noir is Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. Morales organizes street demonstrations; Chávez was the target of them. Either way, both are used to connect populism with turmoil.
The idea is to tarnish the rest of the Latin American populist roster with that same brush of turmoil. The populist starting line-up includes (among others) Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, Uruguay's Tabaré Vázquez, Argentina's Ernesto Kirchner and Chile's Ricardo Lagos, not to mention their supporters.
The blanket condemnation doesn't hold up. The only thing these populists have in common is their varying degrees of independence from the rigid, neoliberal, privatize-everything orthodoxy that has dominated the Western hemisphere for more than two decades. And, oh yes, one other thing: All except Morales are the democratically elected presidents of their countries. Antidemocracy hardly applies to them. Turmoil, too, is mostly missing.
Lula has overseen Brazil's healthiest growth in decades. Kirchner just engineered a global debt swap designed to lift Argentina out of the default crisis he inherited. Vázquez has been in office just a few weeks. Chile is a model of stability. The world of finance hasn't stopped spinning.
But the P-word still echoes, especially in Mexico, where a potential new member of the Populist President's Club waits in the on-deck circle. The New York Times matter-of-factly identifies Andrés Manuel López Obrador in its news leads as the populist mayor of the capital.
This obliging use of the negative label advances his opponents' favorite formula for slowing his presidential run: López Obrador = populist = Chávez = instability.
Why "populist" as the epithet of choice? It has little to do with historic movements by that name. It has everything to do with a political style the word connotes. Populists, it is implied, pander to the public. They want to be popular, not responsible. They feed the masses ice cream instead of vegetables.
President Fox himself, perhaps inadvertantly, clarified the motive for resorting to the populist tag. What's dangerous about populist proposals, he said, is that they "divert us from the true route to development" - that is, from free-market absolutism. Note the overtones of revealed truth in the president's words. There is but One True Economic Church. Populists are infidels.
Actually, the leaders smeared with the populist label have no intention of dismantling the free-market system. Most, however, want more direct action to assist the poor. Most favor slowing down pell-mell privatization. And most recognize the state's responsibility to steer the market in a socially beneficial direction. Their agenda is not radical. But hey, since it strays from neoliberal doctrine, it must be populism.
Branding alternative proposals as populism also diverts attention from the neoliberal model's utter failure to put a dent in Mexico's twin mega-problems of poverty and environmental degradation. The rich are richer and the poor are poorer . and there's much more of the latter.
Almost one in seven Mexicans lives in extreme poverty and most of the rest are suffocatingly poor as well. The environment, meanwhile, keeps hurtling toward un-livability. This is not progress. If the neolibs were soccer coaches, they'd have been sacked years ago. Is trying something different really just a populist illusion?
Soviet Bloc victims waited for most of the 20th Century for an imposed economic ideology to deliver on its promise. Rigid free-marketers want Mexicans to give them more time too. The problem, they insist, isn't neoliberalism but an insufficient application of it.Maybe they're right. Maybe Mexico's future will best be served by more of the same in bigger doses. But let them convince the electorate of that by deeds and arguments. Not by calling people names. |
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