Katu Arkonada on March 16, 2019
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this vacuum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
With this phrase, written in his Prison Notebooks, Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci defined moments of crises as those where the old is not dead and the new cannot be born; moments of monsters.
That is precisely the historic moment we are living, in which Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil are monstrous expressions of a historical moment of confusion that holds more questions than answers.
Neither Trump nor Bolsonaro were the candidates of the political and economic elites in their own countries. Wall Street and the industrial military system in the United States had Hillary Clinton, while the Brazilian bourgeoisie had Gerardo Alckmin, former governor in Sao Paulo. Yet, neither of them govern in the two largest countries of the continent (taking into account their size, population and GDP). Instead, morbid moments have appeared.
Though the progressive cycle that started in 1998 with commander Hugo Chavez’s victory is actually undergoing a retreat, which may have begun when Chavez died in 2013 and accelerated in Venezuela by violent protests in 2014 and 2017 and continues now with the real-time coup boosted by the United States in 2019 -translated in Juan Guaido’s self-proclamation on January 23, a “humanitarian siege” on February 23 and sabotage on the power grid in March. It is also true that right-wingers in the continent have not been able to consolidate any alternate project different to the postneoliberalism that has ruled in ten Latin American and Caribbean countries simultaneously.
In this time of monsters, not one right-wing government or leadership has consolidated itself as an alternative. Meanwhile, the neoliberal project continues spreading a path of chaos and social destruction.
There are plenty of examples. The closest but the less known is Haiti, first country in Latin America and the Caribbean to proclaim its own independence (1804). In Toussaint-Louverture’s country, despite having freed itself from the colonial yoke 215 years ago, the neocolonialism system fostered by the United States in connivance with the “international community” has made a country where the neoliberal shock is followed by the implementation of a criminal budget at the service of an absolutely corrupt new bourgeoisie. The result is more poverty and death for a population whom Latin America and the Caribbean owes so much.
Very close to Haiti is Honduras, where there was a military coup first and then an electoral fraud that consolidated a neoliberal system whose main goal is to keep maintaining the United States’ major military base (and landing strip) in Central America.
If we continue across South America and we look at the right-wing governments merged into the Lima Group that support the self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido (there are no coincidences), we find Colombia. There, defenders of human rights, indigenous communities or Afro-Colombian citizens are assassinated daily since the peace agreements were signed. There were 110 social leaders killed in 2018 alone (30 along 2019), while the popularity of Colombian President Ivan Duque dropped from 53% to 27%.
Meanwhile, in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, a year after the murdering of Afro Brazilian activist and feminist Marielle Franco, a city councilmember in Rio de Janeiro, suspicions have risen about links between Bolsonaro’s sons and the paramilitary command that killed her. In that Brazil, where they carried out a coup inside the coup so that Lula da Silva could not govern today, twice deputy and advocate for LGTBIQ rights, Jean Wyllys, was forced into exile in Europe due to political persecution that forced him to live under police escort.
Our travel throughout a Latin America of dark and light continues on to Mauricio Macri’s Argentina, with the highest poverty rates in a decade and at the same time it owes over $ 50 billion to the International Monetary Fund. That’s the same path being walked by Mr. Moreno in Ecuador, who’s getting a $10 billion debt with the IMF and the World Bank. We already know what the compensations for it in Latin America will look like: public spending cuts among the poorest.
Meanwhile, extreme rightists prepare to assault the European Parliament on March 26 and the United States -whose hegemony is shaking in a multi polar world- will undergo a year and a half of political, military and cultural offensive in an attempt to prevent a Democratic Party victory (which would be advantageous for the Mexican government) and achieve Trump’s reelection.
It is in this Gramscian moment, when the old is dying and the new cannot be born, it is in this moment of monsters, when we have to get right the answers to new and old questions. It is now when the left must show that it can gain politically and socially in front of a right without project or strong leaders but with a well-defined economic model: neoliberalism with the social destruction it has caused to the people of Our America.
http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2019/03/16/de-crisis-y-monstruos/#.XJGkVSJKiUk
Source: Cubadebate, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau