NEWS & REPORTS

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The Political Dynamics of Social Change
in Latin America

by Henry Veltmeyer

Throughout the 1990s the dominant popular response to neoliberal globalization and associated regimes and policies was in the form of social movements that represented and advanced most effectively the struggle against what Ron Chilcote (1990) called a ‘plurality of resistances to inequality and oppression’. These movements placed growing pressure from below on the regime and the ‘political class’. However, by mid-decade, well into the left’s general retreat from class  politics, a number of these movements followed Brazil’s labor movement (The PT or Workers’ party) in establishing a party apparatus to allow them to contest both national and local elections – to pursue an electoral strategy. This political development did not require or mean an abandonment of the social movement strategy of social mobilizations…etc. but it did open up a broader opportunity to participate in the electoral process, allowing the populace to participate in party politics.
           

Local Politics and Community Development

The mobilization of the electorate via the institutional trappings of liberal democracy provided a new impetus to the political left – the segment that opted for party politics over social mobilization as a strategy for achieving state power: influencing government policy from within rather than outside the system. However, a large swath of the Left seem to have heeded Jorge Casteñeda’s call for the Left to switch its electoral ambitions to the municipality, local politics and community development. His argument, advanced in Utopia Unarmed, was that ‘municipal politics should be the centre-piece of the left’s democratic agenda…because it typifies the kind of change that is viable…a stepping stone for the future’ (1994: 244). Engagement in local politics, he argued –and much of the left seemed to have followed this line—would provide the basis for a consolidation of the left after the so-called ‘democratic transition’ from 1979 (Bolivia, Ecuador) to 1989 (Chile). In addition it would help re-articulate the civil society-local state nexus and restore legitimacy to the Left’s relationship with the popular sector (Lievesley, 2005, 8).

An example of the approach proposed by Casteñeda, and in fact widely pursued by the Left even before his book (the World Bank’s strategy in this regard was already quite advanced) had already is the PT’s experience with municipal government in Porto Alegre, the capital city of Brazil’s state of Rio Grande do Sul (1989-2004). The PT administration opened up municipal institutions with a stated commitment to accountability and transparency, as well as citizen participation in the budget planning process via the mechanism of public meetings (Orçamento Participativa).

The Porto Alegre experience with participatory budgeting was hailed by the World Bank and the International Development ‘community’ of multilateral institutions and liberal academics as a good example of collective decision-making for the common good, a model of grassroots participatory development and politics, and it continues to serve as a guide to similar practices and experiences elsewhere (Abers, 1997). Other examples of this ‘participatory’ approach towards local politics and community development, widely adopted by the Left in the 1990s in its retreat from class, can be found in Bolivia and Ecuador, both countries a virtual laboratory for diverse experiments to convert the municipality into a ‘productive agent (the ‘productive municipality’) and exertions by the Left to bring about social change via local politics (North and Cameron, 2003). On the left this shift from macro-politics and development (national elections versus social movements) to micro-politics and development (local politics, participatory development) was viewed as a salutary retreat from a form of analysis and politics whose time had come and gone. Within academe the dynamics of this process has been viewed in some circles as the harbinger of a ‘new tyranny’ (Cooke and Kothari, 2001).

The World Social Forum Process: Another World is Possible?

On January 3, 2007, Caracas, the capital city of an epicenter of social and political transformation in the region was converted into the mecca of the international left. Thousands of activists (100,000 according to the organizers) arrived in Caracas from some 170 countries to participate in the sixth edition of the World Social Forum (WSF), a process initiated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, six years earlier.  It was the first of a then thereafter annual event, extended to and replicated in other regional settings from India, Europe and most recently Nairobi, Kenya in the African subcontinent. In each place and in each annual event, the organizers would bring together hundreds of nongovernmental and civil organizations committed to the search for a more ethical form of globalization, a more human form of capitalism. The process brings together diverse representatives of a self-defined new left committed to the belief in the necessity and possibility of a ‘new world’, an alternative to globalization in its neoliberal form.

There are, of course, roughly defined limits to this new political process: participants are invited and expected to explore diverse proposals for bringing about ‘another world’ but to limit this search to reforms to the existing system, reforms that no matter how ‘radical’ are expected to leave the pillars of the system intact. This liberal reform orientation to the process is ensured by explicit exclusions – any political organizations that include armed struggle or violent confrontation and class struggle in its repertoire, that are oriented towards revolutionary change. Thus FARC-EP, for example is specifically excluded by the steering committee of the process that actually is representative of the world social democratic movement.

ATTAC, a Paris-based social democratic organization is the most visible representative of this approach towards social change, but the World Social Forum from its inception morphed into and became a significant expression of what emerged as the ‘anti-globalization movement. This movement had its origins in the encounter of diverse forces of resistance formed in middleclass organizations in the ‘global north’ and mounted against the symbols of neoliberal globalization such as the World Trade Organization and the G-7/8 annual summit. A defining moment in this movement, rooted in the organizations of the urban middle class – NGOs, unions, students, etc. – in both Europe and North America, included the successful mobilization against the MAI in Seattle. This mobilization was the first of a number of serialized events scheduled to unfold at important gatherings of the representatives of global capital – Genoa, Quebec, Melbourne, Dakar….

In Latin America the World Social Forum process, rather than the Counter-Summit, is the basic form taken by the ‘antiglobalization movement’ in the search for ‘another world’. Apart from the absence of an internal division between the advocates of moderate reform (ethical globalization) and more radical change (viz. the so-called ‘anarchists’) the antiglobalization process is designed to define and maintain the outer limits of permitted change; that is, controlled dissent from the prevailing model of global capitalist development. Not anti-globalization but a more ethical form. Not anti-capitalism but a more humane form of capitalism, a more sustainable human form of development. Not anti-imperialism because imperialism is not at issue.

The New Left and the Politics of No-Power

In the shape and form of class struggle the path towards social change in the 1960s and 1970s was generally paved with state power. That is, the forces of resistance, at the time based in the countryside, in the organizations and movements of the landless and near landless peasants, and in the urban-based organized labor movement; and for the most part led by petit-bourgeois middle class intellectuals, were concerned with the capture of state power. However, in the 1990s, in a very different context – neoliberal globalization – and in the wake of the Zapatista uprising in January 1994, there emerged on the left a postmodern twist to the struggle for social change: ‘social change without taking state power’ (Holloway, 2002).

In the discourse of Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatismo came to symbolically – or theoretically, in the writings of Holloway and others (for example, Burbach, 1994) – represent a ‘new way of doing politics’: to bring about social change without resort to class struggle or the quest for state power (Holloway, 2002). However, much of the Latin American left appeared all too ready to retreat from class politics and engage the new way of ‘doing politics’. Some of the Left joined the struggle for change at the level of local politics and community development – to bring about social change by building on the assets of the poor, their ‘social capital’ (Portes, 1998, 2000; Ocampo, 2004). Another part joined the ‘situationists’ and other militants of ‘radical praxis’ in an intellectual engagement with the forces of social and political disenchantment in the popular barrios of unemployed workers – in Gran Buenos Aires and elsewhere (Besayag and Sztulwark. 2000; Colectivo Situaciónes, 2001, 2002). This was in the early years of the new millennium. In the specific conjuncture of economic and political crisis, a generalized rejection of the ‘old way’ of doing politics (‘que se vayan todos’), the search for redemption and relevance left a large part of the left without a political project, without a social base for their politics. 

The Dynamics of Electoral Politics: What’s Left of the Left

With the advent of the new millennium, it was clear that the neoliberal model even in its revamped form, had failed to deliver on its promise of economic growth and general prosperity. Instead it had generated an all too obvious social and political divide, and political regime after regime was pushed towards its limits of endurance by the forces of popular mobilization. In this context, the political class in each country turned to the left, opening up new opportunities for groups that had hitherto concentrated their efforts on local politics and community development.  Governments of the day, many of them client regimes of the US with a neoliberal orientation, fell to the newly organized forces of regime change.

Political developments in the region regarding this regime change have led to a lot of writing, concern in the US, and widespread hopes and expectations on the Left about a tilt to the left in national politics and to what the press (Globe & Mail) has termed a ‘disheartening’ triumph of politics over ‘sound economics’. A lot of this concern of this revolves around the President of Venezulea, Hugo Chávez, who appears (to the press and US policymakers) to be taking the country down a decidedly anti-US, anti-imperialist and seemingly socialist path, taking a number of other governments in the region with him.

Chávez’s electoral victory in 1989? is seen by many as the moment when a red tide began to wash over the region’s political landscape. In the summer of 2002, the Movement to Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, led by militant coca growers’ leader Evo Morales, became the second largest party in the Congress while in December it achieved huge victories in municipal elections – in what was billed by the MAS itself as ‘la toma de los municipios’. The election to state power of Lula da Silva in Brazil (October 2002), Nestor Kirchner in Argentina (May 2003), Tabaré Vasquez in Uruguay (November 2004), Evo Morales (December 05) and most recently (December 2006) Rafael Correa in Ecuador followed. The tide was checked in Mexico in the summer of 2006 when Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the PRD, fell just short of victory, and in Peru, where the nationalist Humala lost out to Alan Garcia, the once disgraced social democrat but reborn neoliberal. But it appeared to swell again with Daniel Ortega’s victory in Nicaragua – although, given his opportunism and religious rebirth, Ortega could hardly be viewed as on the Left notwithstanding his friendship with (and support from) Chávez and Fidel Castro – and Rafael Correa.

Thus it appeared that Latin America had turned against the US-inspired – and dictated – neoliberal policies of structural adjustment and globalization by electing to state power a number of parties on the political left – although ‘moderate’ or ‘pragmatic’. Centre-left administrations, some of which explicitly cherish their links with Cuba and relish throwing it in the face of the US administration, which has shown itself to be extraordinarily ideological and non-pragmatic, now outnumber Right of Centre governments in the region. The days of the US-supported and instigated right-wing dictatorships and military rule are over, having long disappeared in the dustbins of history and replaced by a new breed of neoliberal regime. 

These regimes in appearance (that is, as constructed in the rhetoric of public discourse) have changed or are changing economic course, ostensibly moving away from the neoliberal policies pushed by the US. This was the case in Argentina, for example where the Kirchner administration was compelled by the most serious economic and political crisis in its history to confront the IMF and the World Bank, and the US, by halting payments on the country’s external debt, redirecting import revenues towards productive and social investments, including short-term work projects demanded by the mass of unemployed workers that at the time constituted over 25% of the laborforce and who had taken to the streets, picketing highways in protest. The result: some three years later is an annual growth rate of 8%, the highest in the region.
Another example of apparent regime change was in Brazil, where and when in October 2002 the electorate after his third attempt voted Ignacio [Lula] da Silva, leader of the PT, into power, re-electing him in 2006 to a second term in office. The first President on the ‘left’ voted into power since Allende in 1970, Lula is nevertheless (and for good reason, it turns out) very well received by Wall Street, if not Washington, which tends to view him as a thorn in the US side. Indeed Lula played a major role in defeating the White House plan for a hemispheric free trade zone. In this context, the intellectual left associated with the antiglobalization movement chose to see Lula as an opponent of neoliberal globalization. In fact, Lula, on behalf of Brazil’s agribusiness and other capitalist producers simply has been playing hardball in negotiations over access to the US market.

Elections of centre-left governments followed in Uruguay (2004), Chile (2005) and Ecuador (2006), where the electorate was polarized between a business magnate, Alvaro Noboa, the richest man in the country and a committed neoliberal ideologue; and Rafael Correa, head of a centre-left coalition that appears to be taking Ecuador down the same path as Evo Morales is taking Bolivia, particularly in regard to a constituent assembly that might well, or is expected to, change the economic and social system as well as the correlation of class forces in the country’s politics. In this regard, elements of the political left in Ecuador, especially those associated with the ‘Coordinadora de Movimientos Sociales’ (CMS), see a political opportunity to build a ‘radical bloc’ on the basis of combined action ‘from above’ (the government) and ‘from below’ (the indigenous and popular movement). Whether this will happen (see Saltos, 2007) remains to be seen. For one thing, it hinges on the capacity of the popular movement for active mobilization – to pressure the Correa government from below towards the left. On this the historic record is fairly clear. As observed by Pedro Stedile, leader of the MST, ‘without active mobilization the government gives nothing’.

With the election of Rafael Correa over Alvaro Noboa the popular and indigenous movement in Ecuador at least placed on the agenda of government action issues such as national sovereignty, nationalization of the country’s natural resources, agrarian reform, indigenous rights, subordination of payment on the external debt to social programs, renegotiation of oil contracts will the multinationals, the ending of the military bases in Manta, and Latin American (vs. continental) integration. Whether the government will act on these issues remains to be seen. At the moment, the government is embroiled over its plans for a Constituent Assembly, scheduled for April 15,with the political class seated in the Congress. Congressional Deputies.

The conflict over the Constituent Assembly in Ecuador is symptomatic and emblematic of the profound legitimation crisis in the Latin American system of domination (Saltos, 2006). Earlier and other forms of hegemony, such as ‘globalization’ and the trappings of representative ‘democracy’, have lost their hold over people, having been totally undermined by the all too tangible and visible signs of the negative effects of neoliberal policies. The reign of Washington appears to be in serious decline if not dead. Nor can Washington, in its efforts to preserve the status quo or the status quo ante, revert to the use of force – to bring back the Armed Forces to restore order. Its only recourse is to engage ‘civil society’ in the project of ‘good governance’ – to restore political order by means of a broad social consensus (Blair, 1997; OECD, 1997; UNDP, 1996; World Bank, 1994b).

What we see in Quito goes beyond a conflict between two branches of government. At issue is that the people who elected Correa have come to the point of refusing any longer to be subordinated to a state that is controlled by the ‘oligarchy’ and servile to Washington and the interests of global capital. On achieving representation in the Executive with the election of Correa, the popular movement is all too aware of the fact that the legislature is dominated by the ‘oligarchy’ (as the ruling class is understood in Ecuador). In this situation, Correa is hardly able to attempt to mediate conflicting interests between the right and left even if he were disposed to do as a member of the political class, albeit on the left. This situation is the product in part of earlier social mobilizations that resulted in among other things the defenestration of four Presidents.
These and other such political developments in Ecuador are illustrative of what appears to be a regional trend. Also, in neighboring Colombia in October 2003 the voters elected a former union leader Luis Garzón as mayor of Bogotá; the election marked a swing to the left in Colombia’s second most important elective office, a clear challenge to the pro-US, scandal-ridden right-wing government of Alvaro Uribe.

If we take all these developments together, especially in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, there does seem to be a leftward swing in the political wind, of increasing concern for the Bush White House, which had been so embroiled in Iraq that it failed to attend to political business in its Latin America backyard; and this business is, and has been since the advent of the Cuban revolution in 1959, to advance its own economic and political interests (and dictate government policy); embracing any cause that would help prevent a victory of the forces of the left, which, naturally enough, are  ranged against its policies that have undoubtedly greatly benefited the rich and powerful at the expense  to the poor, the obvious losers in the game designed and set up by the US and played by its allies and friends.

In fact, the radical left has rarely been a threat to the US, and when it has the US itself, as in the Middle East created the threat. In most cases, the ‘target’ of US destabilizing efforts in the region, and the coups that it instigated over the years, has been governments on the moderate or centre-left, as in Brazil in 1964 and in Chile in1973. Also, in both Central and South America in the 1950s and 1960s the US financed, trained and sponsored one military coup or intervention after another against democratically elected regimes in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. Neither an uplifting story nor a glorious history.

In any case, with George W. Bush’s visit in March 2007 to Latin America, with stopovers in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, it would seem that the White House finally determined that it had not only lost effective political control, but even influence in the region. It had come to recognize that many of its client states had been booted out of office, its policies opposed not only by ‘the people’ but also by a wide range of democratically elected governments.
So, to what degree are these impressions of a leftward change in the political tide valid, able to make sense of political developments in the region? First, we need to distinguish between political developments in civil society – the growth of social movements formed in resistance to US policies in the region …to US imperialism and neoliberal globalization, Indeed, this is the fundamental, most consequential form that the Left has taken over the last two decades: the MST, CONAIE, EZLN, etc. 

At this level Latin America has undoubtedly turned to the Left.  Here we can even identify elements of a radical left that would include FARC; sectors of some unions/peasant or indigenous movements, neighborhood associations and movements in Venezuela; the Workers confederation CONLUTE and sectors of MST (not the leadership) in Brazil; parts of the Cebtral de Obreros e Bolivia (COB), diverse peasant movements and neighborhood groups in El Alto; a part of CONAIE; the teacher’s popular movement in Oaxaca and indigenous peasants in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas. This is a very heterogeneous and internally divided bloc but it is fundamentally oriented against US imperialism and neoliberalism; against payment of the debt and it is generally supportive of what the establishment terms a ‘populist’ and radically nationalist program.
As for the electoral process, it has brought to power three types of regime, none in the least radical. First, we have what might be termed a ‘pragmatic Left’. The orientation and policies of these regimes need hardly concern the US – or of concern only to diehard neoconservatives and reactionaries wedded to the dream of US hegemony. Most of the so-called new Left in the region has a liberal, pragmatic or moderate, rather than radical, orientation in politics and policies.  This political bloc includes a multiplicity of electoral parties and peasant federations and unions in Central and South America; the PRD in Mexico; the FMLN in El Salvador; the electoral Left and Workers Confederation in Colombia; the Chilean Communist Party; most politicians associated with Humala’s Peruvian nationalist parliamentary party; sectors of the MST leadership in Brazil, MAS in Bolivia; the CTA in Argentina and a minority in the Frente Amplio and the Workers Confederation in Uruguay.

It would include the vast majority of Latin American intellectuals on the Left. Arguably it even includes Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. This bloc is ‘pragmatic’ because it does not reject or call for the overthrow of capitalism, the repudiation of the external public debt with international creditors, or a rupture in relations with the US despite its imperialist ambitions and persistent efforts to subvert or corrupt local politicians. 

In this connection, for example, in Venezuela the banks, both national and foreign, had a rate of profit over 30% between 2005 and 2007. Less than 1% of the enormously large property holdings have been expropriated for distribution to landless peasants. Relations of capital to labor continue to be tilted in favor of the former. Venezuela and Alvaro Uribe have signed high-level economic and security agreements. While promoting greater Latin American ‘integration’, Chávez is seeking to do so with Brazil and Argentina, where oil production and distribution is controlled by US and European Macs and investors. Although Chávez reproaches US efforts to subvert democracy in Venezuela, the country provides 12% of US oil imports; it owns 12,000 Citgo gasoline stations in the US and various refineries. The political system in Venezuela is very open to a press that is overtly subversive and hostile to the elected President and Congress. There are numerous NGOs, a dozen parties and a labor confederation in the country financed by the US with the intent and plans to subvert the democratic political process and overthrow a President who notwithstanding his radical rhetoric is eminently pragmatic in his politics.

Chávez’s discourse does not square with political realities to date. If it were not for the intransigent hostility and destabilization efforts of the White House, not to mention efforts to sponsor (finance and instigate) coups against him, Chávez would appear the moderate that he actually is. Nor is it likely that Chávez would turn up his radical rhetoric about Bush as a ‘devil’, the incarnation of evil, which he possibly is, a ‘political cadaver’, which he also might be, and the ‘embodiment of the imperialist model of colonial domination’ which he certainly is. Washington paints Chávez as a ‘dangerous radical’ because previous regimes in Venezuela in the 1990s were almost sickeningly servile to US interests, bending down to the US without question or charge. If the US, were to take Chavez’s foreign policy pronouncements with a ‘pinch of , taking note of the actually very limited state-led reforms implemented over the past seven years in power – and his excellent relations with pragmatic and dogmatic neoliberals such as Uribe and pragmatic neoliberals such as Lula, Kirchner and Tabaré Vázquez – we have a pragmatist who the US could easily accommodate and  live with.

The only area of possible concern to the US is a series of recently announced policies that might have more radical political repercussions. One of these policies relates to a proposed program of nationalizations, reverting the privatization policy of the neoliberal model. In this connection, Chávez in February and March 2007 reportedly spent $1.4 billion in  to nationalize the principal telephone/electrical companies, including, on Feb 18, purchase of 82% of the assets of Electricidad de Caracas (EDC) controlled by US AES Corporation]. However, in this connection there is no threat of expropriation, only the purchase of corporate shares on the market, to strengthen public ownership in the area.
Of greater concern, however, and ultimately greater political significance, is the more recent proposal to establish a Bank of the South, a new bank that would be capitalized from diverse sources, including the Venezuela government, and obliged to invest its capital productively in the interest of socializing regional development with profits a secondary consideration. Nevertheless, significantly there is no question raised about nationalizing the country’s banks and finance systems, a move that would signal a radical break with the neoliberal model or a more radical reform of the capitalist system. Likewise in Bolivia where the government has promulgated a law nationalizing ownership of oil and gas reserves and natural resources such as water. Significantly, this policy and associated legislation only applies in areas where popular mobilization demands nationalization and re-statification. And even in the area of hydrocarbon development, production and distribution operations remains under the control of the multinationals that have been explicitly asked to stay, and, notwithstanding negotiations over royalty and tax rates regimes, their highly profitable operations guaranteed.

A second and the most numerous, political bloc is made up of what could be termed pragmatic Neoliberals: Lula, Kirchner and Vázquez. And these politicians have many admirers and followers in the liberal or Left opposition in Ecuador, Nicaragua, Paraguay and elsewhere. The politics of these and other politicians is eminently pragmatic vis-à-vis relations with capital and international financial institutions, notwithstanding a concerted opposition to the US’s free trade strategy. At this level these leaders are simply standing up to the US in the competition for market share and in the interest of Latin American agribusiness and corporate capital related to improved access to the US market, which is protected, its producers subsidized. There is nothing radical about these policies.  It is simply a question of ‘looking after business’– attending to the national interest as the US itself always does (it is the game!) – and within the system.
            A third political bloc is made up of regimes, parties and associations of doctrinaire neoliberals who faithfully follow the Washington line and the dictates of Wall Street and Washington. This applies to Felipe Calderón in México, who is looking for ways to privatize the lucrative public enterprises in oil and electric power generation; Michelle Bachelet in Chile; and Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, who has received 5 billion dollars of military aid in this decade and who is by some accounts closely associated with some of the most notorious paramilitary death squads, that in an ongoing scandal has implicated not only a dozen of his closest associates and family members but Standard Fruit, distributor of Chiquita brand of bananas. Another erstwhile social democratic and now apparent doctrinaire neoliberal and faithful servant of US interests, is Peru’s Alan García, who is busily engaged in the process of privatizing what remains of the country’s mineral wealth.

According to Washington and the neoconservative ideologues that inhabit its corridors of power a ‘radical populism’ and growing anti-US sentiment is sweeping across the region, putting at risk US interests and sapping the political will of governments and policymakers in the region to continue with a policy regime that even Carlos Slim, the Mexican magnate currently third of  Forbes’ List, recognizes to be economically dysfunctional and unsustainable.
Washington insists that the subversive influence of Venezuela and Cuba, Chavez and Fidel, weakens its position and works against its interests in the region. But this is an extraordinarily doctrinaire position taken by the US government in its concern, and continuing efforts, to dictate policy and create client states in the region. In fact, under the influence of an ideology that defies belief and pragmatic politics, Washington officials willfully misrepresent political realities in the region. But then so does the Left, who also tend to grossly exaggerate the radicalism of Cuba and Venezuela; and persist in seeing pragmatic neoliberals like Lula, Kirchner and Vázquez as ‘progressive’, grouping them with pragmatic leftists, like Chávez, Castro and Morales. The Left should realize that notwithstanding the decline in US power, and the electoral defeats, or ousting through the popular movement (in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina), of many of its clients from 2000 to 2002, the US has in fact begun to recover its position of influence and power. It would be foolish or illusory of the Left to pin its hopes on the centre left regimes that have emerged in the region – hopes of these regimes, and the old political parties behind them, reverting to the neoliberal policies of their predecessors. This is not going to happen.

The relative decline in US power and influence in the region nevertheless is real. But the beneficiaries of the retreat of the doctrinaire neoliberals from power in Latin America, all clients of the US, have been the pragmatic or moderate leftists and neoliberals. What this means for the people remains to be seen. The predominant evidence of recent political developments suggests that governments on the center-left only ‘give’ or respond to popular demands for change if and when the popular sector is and remains actively mobilized – as in Bolivia.

Venezuela is somewhat of an exception to this in that the Bolivarian Revolution, as it is being implemented, ‘from above’ rather than pressured from below. In fact, it is the regime itself that is working hard to create a political base among the urban poor for its policies. Whether it is able to do this also remains to be seen. The lack of a popular base, pressuring for substantive change, is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Chávez despite his radical rhetoric, has made few real moves to the left – why he is a pragmatic not a radical leftist. At the same time, the need for a popular base and the government’s efforts to create one is undoubtedly a major factor in the flurry of recent announcements of policy moves towards the left – towards a socialist path. These policies include a plan to establish a Bank of the South, further nationalizations and significantly, a new socialized property regime in land, ‘Collective Property’ in productive land as part of a sweeping movement towards socialism.

NOTES

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