Latin America's left revisits prominence

Houston Chronicle ^ | Nov. 24, 2002, 12:23AM | DUDLEY ALTHAUS

[Cincinatus' Wife]

QUITO, Ecuador -- A former army colonel who once toppled a president stands poised to win the presidency of Ecuador today, continuing a left-leaning populist wave sweeping South America, where democratic government and free-market economics have failed millions of people.

With support from the country's powerful indigenous rights movement, poor urban neighborhoods and leftist political circles, Lucio Gutierrez, 45, led his opponent, Ecuador's richest man, by as much as 30 points in some polls. But the race appeared to be tightening in its final days, and some analysts cautioned that Gutierrez's apparent romp could stumble at the ballot box.

Win or lose today, Gutierrez's strong showing is interpreted by many here as an expression of voters' rejection of both traditional politics and the free-market model, called globalization, pushed by Washington and Wall Street.

"It's an economic model that has not given anyone very much," said Antonio Posso, vice president of Ecuador's badly fragmented Congress, which was elected in the Oct. 20 voting that put Gutierrez and banana baron Alvaro Noboa, 52, in today's runoff.

The latest hop to the left in the region began with the 1998 election of now-embattled Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose still unrealized revolution promised to favor the oil-rich nation's poor majority and sweep aside traditional power brokers.

In 2000, socialist Ricardo Lagos won the presidency of Chile and presides over a coalition government. In August, an Indian leader who opposes globalization nearly won the presidency of Bolivia and remains a powerful political force there.

Last month, socialist union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidency of Brazil by a huge margin, and leftist and anti-establishment parties dominated regional elections in Peru last Sunday.

Still, today's leftist tide seems a pale reflection of the past, when Cuba's Fidel Castro, Nicaragua's Sandinistas and other armed revolutionaries fought to transform the region's society and politics by force.

Though similar forces in their own societies have propelled each of the leaders to power, their platforms have not been coordinated on a regional level. Lula, Gutierrez and others have held the volatile Chavez at arm's length.

The new leaders, some analysts say, find their chances of implementing profound change hobbled by their countries' dependence on international financing and markets, by the need to negotiate with other factions within their democratic societies and by the wariness of the United States and others.

The U.S. government, which helped overthrow Chile's elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, in 1973 and funded civil wars against Central American leftist movements in the 1980s, has mellowed. This spring, after first appearing to sign off on the brief overthrow of Chavez in Venezuela, U.S. officials let it be publicly known that they held coups in high disregard.

Lula, who takes office in January, modified his class-struggle rhetoric to attract moderate voters and won the presidency on his fourth try. The International Monetary Fund, vilified by many leftists and populists in the region, last week praised Lula's proposed economic program.

Although Chavez has won two separate presidential elections and a handful of referendums, his revolutionary dreams have been all but dashed by a growing opposition movement. Chavez was briefly toppled in an April military coup and faced renewed street protests and persistent calls for his overthrow in recent days.

For his part, Gutierrez has worked hard since winning a place in today's runoff to distance himself from his leftist base and to reassure Washington, Wall Street and Ecuadorean voters that he plans nothing too radical as president.

It's a left that can't be too different from the conservatives," said Quito sociologist Simon Pachano, who studies political trends in the country. "In a democratic government they can't differ too much."

Since the mid-1980s, successive U.S. governments have pushed a program of democracy and capitalist economies in Latin America. Known as the Washington Consensus, the political and economic model was embraced almost everywhere in the 1990s as the salvation for a region battered by poverty, social inequality and autocratic governments.

But things haven't gone exactly as promised.

While Latin America became more welcoming to international investment and private enterprise, critics say most of the region's residents were left worse off than ever before. And while every Latin American country except Cuba now has a freely elected government, voters' belief in democracy as such has proved less than solid.

"With democracy, the poor sink further while the rich leap ahead," said Luis Jimenez, who scrapes a dwindling livelihood selling shrimp and fish from a makeshift stall in a poor Guayaquil neighborhood on Ecuador's Pacific Coast. "A lot of scoundrels take refuge in democracy. They support it when it suits them.

"That's why Ecuador needs a dictatorship to clean things up."

Propelled by demands in their own societies, the policies of the new left-leaning governments have little to do with one another. The shift to the left varies country by country, according to their recent histories.

In Ecuador's case, today's election unfolded against a backdrop of economic crisis and chaotic national politics. The economy collapsed in 1999, sparking severe austerity measures and the adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency. Political instability produced five presidents in as many years in the late 1990s.

"People are very frustrated," said Fernando Bustamante, a Quito political analyst. "The democratic institutions have a very low level of prestige. Traditional leaders have a very high level of disregard."

Each day during the campaign, the Gutierrez faithful thronged a nondescript, two-story building on a busy intersection near the old center of Quito. Many seemed fired with the hope that this time, somehow, things will be different.

It was a kaleidoscopic crowd: Indians from farm villages in the Andean highlands and the Amazon Basin rain forests; shopkeepers, laborers and teachers from impoverished neighborhoods; pie-eyed college students; manicured businessmen; frock-clad housewives; ward-heelers; hangers-on and would-be revolutionaries.

"We need a leader with guts, with conviction, who intends to end the corruption and help the poor," said Gisela Diaz, 21, a primly dressed student at Quito's Central University, who came with five friends to organize a political debate on campus.

"With their economic policies," Diaz said, "the politicians from before have left us in a deep hole which we still haven't climbed out of."

Gutierrez, a career army officer who served as military aide to several presidents, catapulted to national fame when he helped lead a revolt against Jamil Mahuad's government in January 2000. Mahuad, who had finished about half his presidential term, was blamed by many for rampant corruption, a banking scandal and the economic collapse of the moment.

What began as a popular protest led by Ecuador's radicalized indigenous movement became a coup when Gutierrez and other army officers threw their support to the Indians. Mahuad was forced to resign, and a three-member junta, including Gutierrez and an Indian leader, was formed.

Ecuador's senior military commanders stepped in, dissolving the junta and promoting Vice President Gustavo Noboa -- no relation to the current candidate -- to replace Mahuad. Still, the political fortunes of Gutierrez, and the indigenous movement allied with him, rocketed.

Forced out of the army because of his participation in the coup, Gutierrez and several fellow officers formed a political movement, the Patriotic Society, that included Indian and leftist groups and set out to win power in the ballot box.

In the Oct. 20 election, Gutierrez led a large field of presidential candidates, winning about 20 percent of the vote. Noboa, who nearly won the presidency in 1998, came in second with 17 percent.

Naboa's campaign ads have stressed similarities between Gutierrez and Venezuela's Chavez -- both are former army colonels who led coups before joining electoral politics. The tycoon also tried to brand his opponent a dangerous leftist who would lead Ecuador to the same class-based unrest now seizing Venezuela.

"All he knows is shooting, shooting, shooting," Noboa said at press conferences and rallies. "He knows as much about economics as I do about artillery."

Noboa's charges seemed to have had little effect on the voters. Gutierrez's coup was widely supported in Ecuador. And analysts say the military, which ended its most recent dictatorship in 1979, is seen by many Ecuadoreans as a more upright institution than the civilian government.

For decades, the military has conducted community development projects in rural communities and urban slums, winning officers like Gutierrez reputations as defenders of the poor. "People think that the military is going to defend the interests of the nation," said Bustamante, the political analyst.

Playing to those feelings, Gutierrez often campaigned in his army fatigues. Some campaign posters depicted him riding a white steed, looking every bit the rescuing knight or the liberating Latin American strongman of old.

Gutierrez's stump speeches this month focused on ending politics-as-usual rather than on any coherent economic or political program.

His pledges of corruption crackdowns and antipoverty programs elevated the slightly built, dark-skinned Gutierrez to the status of savior for many of his country's 12 million people.

"He worries about everyone. He knows how to help the poor," said Fernando Flores, a shopkeeper from a poor Quito neighborhood, sitting patiently at Gutierrez campaign headquarters, waiting to be allowed to volunteer for the candidate. "We hope for a better country.

"We have lived such a chaotic experience."

Since winning his place in today's runoff, Gutierrez has shifted many of his public stances away from those of his leftist supporters.

"If we are going to distribute wealth, we have to generate wealth," Gutierrez told a television interviewer. "I'm not going to attack wealth. I'm going to attack poverty."

Soon after the October election, Gutierrez flew to New York, Miami and Washington to meet U.S. policy-makers, International Monetary Fund officials and private investors. While urging a restructuring of Ecuador's foreign debt, which at $15 billion nearly equals the value of the country's annual economic output, he gave assurances that there would be no surprises.

"We have to have international credibility," Gutierrez said at the time. "The agreements that Ecuador has signed have to be respected."

But pleasing foreign creditors will almost certainly alienate Gutierrez's supporters at home, especially the indigenous movement.

"Gutierrez has a very small margin of movement," said Juana Ordonez, director of an economics consulting firm in Quito. "The probability that there will be an uprising against him in the first few months is very high."

The fragility of Gutierrez's ties to his Indian and leftist political base was apparent during his recent whistle-stop visit to Ibarra, a northern highlands city that is a stronghold of Pachakutik, an indigenous-dominated political party.

After keeping a mostly Indian crowd of 1,500 waiting for six hours, Gutierrez delivered a vague 15-minute speech railing against corruption and attacking Noboa as out of touch with the poor. He mentioned Pachakutik only in passing and offered nothing specific about indigenous rights.

"The differences between us are minimal; the issues run deeper," said Jose Manuel Quimbo, 38, a Pachacutik leader in Otavalo, a prosperous tourist mecca near Ibarra. But, Quimbo warned, "If Gutierrez fails us, the indigenous movement will reject him."

Whoever is Ecuador's next president will be saddled with a strained national budget with little to spare for social spending. And getting any proposals through Congress will require backscratching, well-entrenched political bosses whose ideology has often been limited to pork-barrel priorities.

As president, Gutierrez might find support from a fifth of the 100 congressional deputies, including the 11 from Pachakutik.

"It's going to be tremendously difficult," Bustamante said. "He's going to have to confront an incredibly sophisticated network of political power. The possibilities of stability and governability are very slim."

[Sparta]

The Houston Chronicle's wishful thinking at its worst. They want all of Latin America in Red so they can say Communism and Socialism is a success.