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Foundations of the
Latin American Left
Claudio Lomnitz
Specters of the past haunt every iteration of Latin Ameri-
cas leftward move. There is a sense that the rise of the Left involves a rectication
of history: the return to an origin, a second chance at achieving some previously
derailed project. It is worth noting, however, that the specic histories being rec-
tied are, each of them, presented as national histories, and that the imaginary
points of foundation being reenacted vary from country to country. Thus, Evo
Moraless victory in Bolivia is supposed to rectify ve hundred years of colonial
imposition of whites over Indians; it is meant to reinstate indigenous rule. Hugo
Chvez, by contrast, found the source of national redemption not in the precolo-
nial past but rather in a return to the foundation of the nation-state, under Simn
Bolvar, almost two hundred years ago.
In Mexico, the rise of the new Left occurred rst in 1988 under the leader-
ship of Cuauhtmoc Crdenas, in a movement that harked back to the presidency
of Lzaro Crdenas (Cuauhtmocs father) and a period of agrarian reform and
the nationalization of oil. Six years later, the Zapatista movement cast itself as
a prolongation of the radical struggle of Emiliano Zapata in the armed phase
of the Mexican Revolution (1910 20). In the recent presidential election, leftist
candidate Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador cast himself as a new Benito Jurez, the
liberal president who struggled against Mexican conservatives and their French
allies in the 1860s. In Chile, Michelle Bachelet is returning to the course not
taken by redeeming the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende, killed in 1973
along with Bachelets own father.
In Argentina, the crisis of 2002 was so deep that it turned Peronism into the
only political force, the only powerful political idiom, in the country. As Bea-
triz Sarlo has argued, the secret of the posthumous life of Peronism lies in the
Public Culture 19:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2006-022
Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press
dox a at l arge
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obsession with lost opportunity that is the key motif in the cult of Evita.
1
In turn,
Lulas electoral triumph in Brazil was perceived as the symbolic conclusion of
that nations democratic transition, as the washing away of Brazils military rule
that had formally concluded in 1981. Finally, in Uruguay, Tabare Vzquezs tri-
umph is understood as a vindication of that countrys early social democratic
legacy of the 1920s.
Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile: ve hundred
years, two hundred years, ninety years, eighty years, sixty years, forty years,
thirty years. Also the precolonial era, the early republican moment, the Mexican
Revolution, Uruguayan social democracy, national popular regimes, democratic
socialism. These are some of the ghosts that haunt the new foundationalism.
The recovery of these moments past apparently concludes the work of mourn-
ing for the shattered illusions both of the Cold War Left and of the shareholders of
that eras national economic miracles, grafting the hopes of that period hopes
that had been degraded, humiliated, and violently obliterated by the dictatorships
of the 1970s and in the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s onto the emerg-
ing new regimes.
But the current rise of the Left occurs when there is no existing alternative eco-
nomic system to counter capitalism. In this context, the very meaning of left and
of right is difcult to pinpoint. For this reason, the lost moments that are being
symbolically recuperated all draw on specic national traditions and images of
autonomy and self-governance: the grandeur of the Incas, the cult of towering
gures like Bolvar or Jurez, the frustrated avant-garde experiments of modern
socialism in Uruguay and Chile, the robust national power of Brazils Estado
Novo or of Argentine Peronism, the grassroots vindications of the Mexican Revo-
lution. In short, the foundational discourse of the Latin American Left builds on
the remnants of an older nationalist discourse that is not the special possession
of the Left.
Reliance on this dominant nationalist idiom has in turn opened up a series of
contests about the meaning of the nation, who represents it, and who is a member.
The neoliberal era produced a deep fracture in every Latin American country, a
fracture between groups that were thrown at risk and the segments of the popula-
tion that thrived under conditions of free trade and the shrinking state. This frac-
ture was visible everywhere and it was identied in a plethora of expressions: the
two-tiered country, the deep nation versus the ctional nation, the oligarchy
1. Beatriz Sarlo, La pasin y la excepcin (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003).
Foundations of the
Latin American Left
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versus the pueblo, and so on. The rift is often represented as a contest about what
is really real and which side of the economy best represents it.
It was in fact the neoliberal faction that red the rst volley in this battle over
what is real and what is ctitious when it argued that the developmental state and
import substitution industrialization deed economic laws and aunted economic
reality. The Left, in turn, constructed an alternative version of the real, a reality
that is populated by the poor, by violence, or by marginalization that is attributed
to neoliberalism.
Ultimately, the Left was effectively able to identify this alternative version
with local mores and with the nation, and neoliberal economic laws with a for-
eign imposition (either from economists trained in Chicago or bankers employed
on Wall Street). For the Left, the real nation has been marginalized, and the
political project has been to bring this marginalized nation to center stage. As a
result, one of the dicey political challenges for the Left concerns the question of
how to move the real way from this marginal position once leftist parties are
elected into ofce.
Hugo Chvez has performed this theme repeatedly in his weekly show, Al
Presidente, where he constantly reenacts his popular origins while he asserts him-
self as an embodiment of popular sovereignty. The real as the marginal had ow-
ered in Caracas prior to Chvezs assent to power.
2
The food riots of 1989 the
so-called Caracazo, where hundreds of poor looters were shot and thousands were
photographed and televised is the high point of the upsurge of the marginal
real, of the sense that the prosperous Caracas is an island that is everywhere sur-
rounded, everywhere besieged, by a reality of poverty that is every day denied.
This summer of the marginal-real has in fact been referred to by Chvez himself
as the root of the Bolivarian ascent to power.
Similar expressions exist throughout Latin America. Not coincidentally, Latin
American cinema and literature have turned away from the magical realism of the
generations of the 1960s and 1970s to a new realism that insistently pursues what
Brazilian literary scholar Beatriz Jaguaribe calls the shock of the real the
raw portrayal of urban poverty, drug violence, and child prostitution.
3
Once in power, the Left has repeatedly emphasized its own contact with this
2. See Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil, Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The
Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela, Comparative Studies in Society and History 33
(1991): 288 337.
3. Beatriz Jaguaribe, The Shock of the Real: Realist Aesthetics in the Media and the Urban
Experience, Space and Culture 8 (2005): 66 83.
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national social reality. So, for example, Mexicos leftist presidential candidate,
Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, began his presidential campaign in January at a
village in Guerrero state that was selected because it is the poorest municipality in
the country. And Subcommander Marcos, who wrote the rule book on the conten-
tion over the real, routinely signed his press communiqus from a rural Chiapas
ejido community called La realidad. This is the real as the place from which
the Left emerges. It is often an anonymous place, or even a mythical place, the site
from where legitimate sovereignty must emerge.
In Venezuela, contestation over the real reached such a pitch that Chavistas
and the opposition do not even share the name of the country, or the name of key
events such as the Coup of 2002 versus the oppositions March of April 10.
In Argentina, the crisis of 2002 was so deep that there was soon no version of the
real other than the various versions of Peronism ( justicialismo) available in the
political spectrum.
This talk about the real is part of a political language that emerged from Latin
Americas classic populists Evita, or Getulio Vargas, or even dictatorial popu-
lists like Trujillo and has been denounced by many as populist and antidemo-
cratic. It is a language of bawdy transgression, of brown men upsetting protocol
and convention. It is a language that instills fear in certain sectors because it is an
idiom of identication between leader and marginal follower, an idiom of iden-
tication that is generally recognized as a call to class hatred. And class hatred
is a dimension and a readily available resource of contemporary democratic
politics in the region.
But there is, in addition to this, a second register in the Lefts discourse of
the real that is signicant, because it goes to the policies that are characteris-
tic of a number of leftist governments. This is the theater of public works. The
public work, and especially the monumental public work, is here a kind of con-
crete image, a positive whose negative is the corruption of neoliberal regimes, of
regimes that failed to build. Of course, it is the Mexicans and the Brazilians who
are the champions of this particular form of monumentality: the whole panoply
of 1950s developmentalism two-storied freeways, irrigation dams, new school
buildings is now deployed as an image of the real once the real is in power, as
an image of what can be done when a virtuous citizen occupies the presidential
seat.
For this reason, the neorepublican image of the presidential persona is cou-
pled with the neodevelopmentalism of his economic program and often of his
actual ministerial team. Thus the union of foundationalism, neorepublicanism,
Foundations of the
Latin American Left
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and neodevelopmentalism is both a formula for more state control over the econ-
omy for re-embedding the economy, as Karl Polanyi would have it
4
and
a somewhat worrisome sign of the poverty of the economic imagination of the
contemporary Left.
The new Left is not a revolutionary anticapitalist Left but rather a proregula-
tion Left. It will continue to turn to national-popular formulas and to the develop-
mental state if there is no concerted effort to promote alternative developmental
models.
4. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).