Debates about the Latin American left became academic in the 1970s with the triumph of the torturers, even more academic in the 1980s with the era of US-backed civil war in Central America and the retreat of army rule in South America and entirely unrealistic with the decline of the Communist Parties and the end of the USSR. Probably the only significant attempt at old-style armed guerrilla revolution was the ‘Shining Path’, brainchild of a fringe Maoist lecturer at the University of Ayacucho, who had not yet taken to arms when I visited that city in the late 1970s. It demonstrated what the Cuban dreamers of the 1960s had spectacularly failed to show, namely that serious armed politics were possible in the Peruvian countryside, but also – at least to some of us – that this was a cause that ought not to succeed. In fact, it was suppressed by the army in the usual brutal fashion, with the help of those parts of the peasantry whom the Senderistas had antagonized.
However, the most formidable and indestructible of the rural guerrillas, the Colombian FARC, flourished and grew, though in that blood-soaked country it had to deal not only with the official forces of the state but with the well-armed gunmen of the drugs industry and the landlords’ savage ‘paramilitaries’. President Belisario Betancur (1982–6), a socially minded and civilized Conservative intellectual not in the pockets of the USA – at least in conversation he gave me that impression – initiated the policy of negotiating peace with the guerrillas, which has continued at intervals ever since. His intentions were good, and he succeeded in pacifying at least one of the guerrilla movements, the so-called M19, favourite of the intellectuals. (There was a time when every party in Bogota śwas likely to contain one or two young professionals who had spent a season in the hills with them.) Indeed, the FARC itself was prepared to play the constitutional game by creating a ‘Patriotic Union’ intended to function as that electoral party of the left which had never quite managed to emerge in the space between the Liberals and the Conservatives. It had little success in the big cities, and after about 2,500 of its local mayors, councillors and activists, having laid aside their arms, had been murdered in the countryside, the FARC developed an understandable reluctance to exchange the gun for the ballot-box. I was host to one of the militants, en route to or from an international gathering, in the cafeteria of Birkbeck College, far from the wild frontier of banana plantations, battles between FARC and Maoist guerrillas and the local paramilitaries in Urabà, near the isthmus of Panama, where he practised his legal politics. When I next asked friends for news of him, he was already dead.
IV
What has happened to Latin America in the forty or so years since I first landed on its airfields? The expected and in so many countries necessary revolution has not happened, strangled by the indigenous military and the USA, but not least by domestic weakness, division and incapacity. It will not happen now. None of the political experiments I have watched from near or far since the Cuban Revolution has made much lasting difference.
Only two have looked as though they might, but both are too recent for judgement. The first, which must warm the cockles of all old red hearts, is the national rise, since its foundation in 1980, of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT) in Brazil, whose leader and presidential candidate ‘Lula’ (Luis Inácio da Silva) is probably the only industrial worker at the head of any Labour Party anywhere. It is a late example of a classic mass socialist Labour Party and movement, such as emerged in Europe before 1914. I carry its plaque on my key-ring to remind me of ancient and contemporary sympathies, and memories of my times with the PT and with Lula, often touching, sometimes moving, like the stories of the party’s grassroots activists from the São Paulo car factories and the remote inland townships. And as tribute to the democratic and educational zeal of the PT’s prize city, Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), honest, prosperous and anti-globalist, which moved its council to organize and its mayor to preside over an open-air question-and-answer session for the citizenry with a visiting British historian on the main square, amid the noise of the municipality’s efficient trams.
The other, more dramatic, landmark was the end in 2000 of Mexico’s seventy years of unshakeable one-party rule by the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party). Alas, one doubts whether this will produce a better political alternative, any more than the revolt of the Italian and Japanese voters in the early 1990s against the frozen Cold War regimes of their countries.
So the politics of Latin America remain recognizably what they have long been, as does its cultural life (except for the vast global explosion in higher education in which its republics have shared). On the world economic scene, even when not shaken by the great crises of the past twenty years, Latin America plays only a bit part. Politically, it has remained as far from God and as near to the USA as ever, and consequently less inclined than any other part of the globe to believe that the USA is liked because ‘it does a lot of good round the world’.9 For half a century journalists and academics have read secular transformations into temporary political trends, but the region remains what it has been for most of a century, full of constitutions and jurists but unstable in its political practice. Historically its national governments have found it hard to control what happens on their territory, and still do. Its rulers have tried to avoid the logic of electoral democracy among populations which cannot be guaranteed to vote the way their betters would want them to, by a variety of methods ranging from control by local grandees, patronage, general corruption and occasional demagogic ‘fathers of the people’ to military rule. All of these still remain available.
And yet, during these past forty years I have observed a society being utterly transformed. The population of Latin America has just about tripled, an essentially agrarian and still largely empty continent has lost most of its peasants, who have moved into giant cities and from Central America to the USA, on a scale comparable only with the Irish and Scandinavian migrations in the nineteenth century, or even, like the Ecuadoreans working on the Andalusian harvests, across the ocean. Emigrant remittances have replaced the great hopes of modernization. Cheap air travel and phone communication have abolished localization. Life-patterns I observed in the 1990s were unimagined in 1960: the New York taxi-driver from Guyaquil who lived half in the USA and half in Ecuador, where his wife ran a local print-shop; the loaded pick-up trucks of immigrant Mexicans (legal or clandestine) returning from California or Texas for the holiday to Jalisco or Oaxaca; Los Angeles turning into a town of Central American immigrant politicos and union leaders. True, most Latin Americans remain poor. In fact, in 2001 they were almost certainly relatively poorer than in the early 1960s, even if we set aside the ravages of the economic crises of the past twenty years, for not only has inequality within these countries soared, but the continent itself has lost ground internationally. Brazil may be the eighth economy of the world by the size of its GDP, Mexico the sixteenth, but per capita they rank respectively fifty-second and sixtieth. In the world’s league table of social injustice Brazil remains at the top. And yet, if one were to ask the Latin American poor to compare their life at the start of the new millennium with their parents’, let alone their grandparents’, outside a few black spots most would probably say: it is better. But in most countries they might also say: it is more unpredictable and more dangerous.