Brazilians Head to Polls with Fear of Bolsonaro Coup and Possibility of Lula Win Bolstering Left-Wing Latin American Politics

Rising out of the shadows of the Andean highlands, schoolteacher and trade unionist Pedro Castillo appears on the verge of winning the presidency and catapulting Perú toward a future free of neoliberal austerity and U.S. meddling after rallying the oppressed masses of the South American country to support his candidacy.

Castillo leaped into the spotlight of Peruvian national politics when the candidate topped all other competitors in the first round of elections held April 11. Castillo’s party, Free Perú (Perú Libre), also won 18.92 percent of congressional seats, more than other competing parties. Then Peruvians in the country and in the diaspora throughout the world cast their ballots June 6 to determine who would be the country’s leader for the next five years. The election became one of the most contentious in Peruvian history, featuring two candidates who personify polar opposite interests and visions for Perú’s future. Castillo is leading this week with a margin of less than 1 percent after 99.8 percent of votes have been counted.

A trade unionist and native of the Cajamarca region, Pedro Castillo held a lead over Keiko Fujimori, the right-wing daughter of a former despot and currently incarcerated ex-president, Alberto Fujimori. If Keiko Fujimori loses this race, it would be her third time missing the mark in a presidential election.

Fujimori, head of the right-wing Popular Force party, had seen success in Peru’s northern coastal provinces and from foreign votes. But Castillo received a majority of his votes from provinces in the Andean countryside, the Amazon and the southern coast, regions historically neglected and suffering from acute economic exploitation.

When official results first began rolling out to the public, Fujimori held a slight lead over Castillo. But near the end of counting, Castillo surpassed with enough votes to win him the presidency. Fujimori and her attorneys are now asking for a recount on 100,000 Castillo votes, claiming fraud and refusing to recognize Castillo’s victory.

 

Who is Pedro Castillo?

Nestled in the Andean mountains on the shores of Lake Titicaca lies the town of Puno, where Pedro Castillo was born in 1969. His parents were illiterate peasants, both of whom spent much of their lives working on plantations.

In his youth, Castillo joined the ronda campesinos, or ronderos, a local peasant-based police force launched in place of official Peruvian police, who often were absent and—when they were around—harmed peasant communities. While the ronderos generally exhibited left-wing tendencies, in the Chota district, ronderos found themselves combatting Shining Path insurgents, who were trying to seize control of towns. The Shining Path was a Maoist guerilla insurgency formed out of a split from the Peruvian Communist Party. The organization took up arms against the Peruvian state and against other communist and progressive groups. While the Shining Path committed atrocities, such as the massacre at Lucanamarca, the Peruvian military committed unprecedented human-rights violations in the name of counterinsurgency, leaving peasants in precarious conditions.

Castillo later went on to study at Cesar Vallejo University, named after the Peruvian communist poet. He received a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree in psychology, eventually becoming an elementary school teacher. In 2017, he garnered esteem in Peruvian politics by leading a teacher’s strike against the underfunding of public education as well as teacher’s salaries.

Despite actively defending the Chota district from the Shining Path’s incursions, major Peruvian media conglomerates El Comercio and La República led a media campaign against Castillo, red-baiting the candidate as a “Shining Path terrorist” because of his links with the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (Movadef).

Movadef had campaigned for the release of ex-Shining Path guerillas, an act that led former Interior Minister Carlos Basombrío to label the group an arm of the Shining Path. In the 2017 teacher’s protest Castillo headed, Movadef had been involved in the broad coalition. To the Peruvian media and political elite, that implied Castillo was a Shining Path terrorist.

Castillo’s party, Free Perú (Perú Libre), identifies as Marxist-Leninist-Mariáteguist, upholding socialism and the power of the working class. While Castillo himself does not openly label himself a communist, he has said he plans to create a new constitution with stronger market regulations, break up monopolies, initiate a second agrarian reform, and revise contracts with multinational companies for stronger labor rights and a greater share of profits for the Peruvian state.

Perú Libre’s plans for governance include the eradication of the neoliberal economic model, set forth by the current constitution that was written under Alberto Fujimori. They seek to replace it with what they call a “Popular Economy with Markets,” a model that would allow private sectors and capital to exist under stronger state regulation. Both Castillo and Perú Libre have reaffirmed they will nationalize those companies that have exploited “strategic resources, particularly in foreign hands [corporations]”.

 

Who is Keiko Fujimori?

At just 19 years old, Keiko Fujimori became the First Lady of Perú—the youngest in Peruvian history—as her father and ex-President Alberto Fujimori stripped his wife Susana Higuchi of her title and threw her into prison when she accused her husband of crimes against humanity.

Fujimori now sits in prison for crimes including organizing the death squad, Colina Group, overseeing disappearances, and a slew of human-rights violations. Then in 2009, he was convicted of an embezzlement charge and sentenced to an additional 7-1⁄2 years. 

Fujimori is currently facing another trial under charges of forced sterilizations that occurred through his Family Planning Program. This program reportedly sought to target Indigenous women in Perú’s countryside. Despite all this, his daughter, Keiko, has promised that, if elected, she will pardon her father.

Yet, Keiko Fujimori’s legacy isn’t stained only by the crimes of her father. In 2011, Fujimori admitted to having received donations from known narco traffickers. Fujimori also was implicated in the Panama Papers, which exposed illegal donations to her 2011 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Later, in 2018, she was arrested on charges of embezzlement that occurred during her unsuccessful 2011 bid for the presidency.

She left prison in April 2020 on a conditional release due to COVID-19. If Fujimori fails to win the presidency, she faces a 31-year sentence for money laundering.

All the while, notable Peruvian political elites, and even members of the Peruvian national soccer team, threw their support behind Fujimori under the cry to “save Perú from communism.” The Peruvian elite and upper classes have been taking to the streets and to social media, alleging electoral fraud. TV personality and model Alejandra Baigorria went so far as to call for military interference against a Free Perú victory.

 

 

Fujimoristas en reunión de blancos…

El comunismo no va a caer, blankito.

El comunismo TE VA a caer.

pic.twitter.com/6xvAaQuPwW

— El Plebeyo (@unplebeyomas) June 8, 2021

 

PERÚ LIBRE: ¡Hasta más allá de la Victoria! pic.twitter.com/opFioCe9gO

— Perú Libre (@PERU_LIBRE1) June 9, 2021

 

📌 [Comunicado]

Frente a la difusión en redes sociales con llamados a la intervención de las Fuerzas Armadas en asuntos netamente electorales o políticos. pic.twitter.com/xEvGmDc139

— Mindef Perú (@MindefPeru) June 9, 2021

 

The Peruvian Ministry of Defense released a statement Wednesday afternoon stating it will not intervene, citing the constitution and claiming it must maintain a neutral role so it can respect the sovereignty of the Peruvian people.

Since the start of the pandemic, Peru has seen mass unemployment, the highest COVID-19 death rates per capita in the world and a significant increase in national poverty. In the first week of November alone, the country had three presidents, and erupted in national strikes and protests that led to the police-sanctioned murders of Inti Sotelo and Bryan Pintado. Not only that, but in the past 30 years, the country has experienced political instability and brutal repression at the hands of the state.

 

The Future of U.S.-Perú Relations

Castillo’s victory also would upend U.S. interests in South America. For example, it could help kickstart the process of re-building a coalition of Latin American left-ruled states. Castillo has promised to withdraw Perú from the Lima Group, an organization of countries dedicated to subverting the democratically elected Bolivarian government of Venezuela. 

Besides that, the Perú Libre party calls for booting U.S. military bases and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), notorious for using humanitarian aid to undermine democratic processes in other countries, including during the Fujimori dictatorship. While Castillo has publicly opposed the Organization of American States (OAS), he has said he wants to fortify two regional groups: The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).

Over the next few years, Brazil, Chile and Colombia will hold presidential elections. With the turn of events in favor of the left in countries like Bolivia and Perú, the future looks hopeful for people’s movements in South America.

The victory of Castillo and Perú Libre, as well as the adoption of a new constitution, could open a path for the country reminiscent of the progressive military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado. But these elections also have highlighted the deep divide permeating through Perú, one that remains to be resolved whether a Fujimori administration or a Castillo administration comes to fruition.

Kayla Popuchet, a Peruvian national of Perúvian-Haitian descent, studies and writes about Latin America and eastern Europe. She was a 2019 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow.

Javiera Reyes, who is 31 years old, is the new mayor of the Santiago municipality of Lo Espejo in Chile. “I grew up in a home where [former President of Chile] Salvador Allende was always the good guy,” she told us, “and [military dictator] Augusto Pinochet was a tyrant. That marked my life.” Reyes’ comment reflects the old divides that have convulsed Chile’s politics since General Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état against former President Salvador Allende of the Popular Unity coalition on September 11, 1973.

Almost 50 years have gone by and yet Chile is still influenced by the legacy of that coup and of the Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. The May 2021 election that propelled Reyes to the mayor’s office in Lo Espejo also voted in a new Constitutional Convention to rewrite the Pinochet-era Constitution of 1980. Reyes’ victory and the gains made by the left alliance to shape the new Constitution suggest that it is Allende’s legacy that will shape the future and not that of Pinochet.

Reyes is a member of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh), which has rooted itself deeply in Chile’s society over the past 109 years. A PCCh leader—Daniel Jadue—will be the left’s candidate in the presidential election to be held in November 2021. Jadue, like Reyes, is a mayor of a municipality in Chile’s vast capital city of Santiago (a third of Chile’s 18 million people live in Santiago). In the May 2021 election, he was re-elected to the mayoralty of Recoleta, which he has governed since 2012.

“There is a historical continuity in [PCCh’s] policy,” Jadue told us, “with the same horizon—updated, of course. No one is thinking of taking up statist projects [again] or socialism as it has been tried, but there is undoubtedly a historical continuity, and we are in one way or another participants in the dream of the people who in the 1970s sought to build a fairer country and who today seek exactly the same thing.”

 

Vote Without Fear

Jadue leads in the November 2021 general election polls to replace Chile’s right-wing President Sebastián Piñera. Already, the press has started reporting about the various stances taken by Jadue during his life, particularly his association in the 1980s with Palestinian activism. The smearing of candidates of the left has become part of the electoral process in Latin America: the extreme-right press in Ecuador said that the left-leaning candidate for president, Andrés Arauz, had taken money from the Colombian left-wing guerrilla group ELN (National Liberation Army). The right-wing press also reported that Peru’s current presidential candidate Pedro Castillo, who is leading by a narrow margin, was similar to Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), which is a guerilla insurgency in Peru. Jadue dismisses these claims made against the leftist candidates. “I want my entire record to be visible because I have nothing to hide,” Jadue said when he spoke to us.

The communists participated in the elections held on May 15 and 16 under the slogan Vote Without Fear (Vota Sin Miedo). This slogan comes from a long history, which is part of the party’s legacy. The PCCh was banned, and its members were subjected to persecution over three periods: 1927-31, 1948-58 and 1973-90. Pinochet’s dictatorship killed thousands of communists, including many key leaders. A swath of Chile’s society was gripped by fear brought about by Allende’s socialism, which was essentially a result of the hatred cultivated during Pinochet’s dictatorship. During this time, it takes courage to stand with the communists.

Fear of communism has been diminishing, Reyes told us, because the PCCh elected officials have shown their constituents efficiency and compassion through their governance. Jadue’s Recoleta has become a showcase, with a municipal pharmacy, optical shop, bookstore and record store, open university, and real estate project operating free of any profit motive under Jadue’s vision as the mayor of the municipality.

Javiera Reyes says that her communism is rooted in her “conception of a municipal government that starts with the universalization of rights and the capacity to create conditions for a good life.” The project of municipal socialism starts with “health, education and common spaces,” says Reyes. It is a project that is “democratic and open to the community.”

Unlike Chile’s right-wing mayors, the communist mayors in Santiago such as Reyes, Jadue and Iraci Hassler (who was elected in May 2021 to the mayoralty of Santiago Centro) put the role of women at the core of their policies, including mechanisms to tackle violence against women. They want to create a society without fear in the broadest sense possible.

 

Penguin Revolution

In 2006, students across Chile protested the privatization of education. Their mass struggle was called the Penguin Revolution because of their black-and-white school uniforms. “The Penguin Revolution in 2006 was my first [introduction] to politics,” Reyes told us. Reyes and Hassler both participated in the massive protests in 2011 and 2013 over the inequalities that marked the secondary and university education in the country. Reyes joined the PCCh during that period. Other students who are currently Chilean politicians, such as Camila Vallejo and Karol Cariola as well as Hassler, were already communists.

Student demonstrations came alongside manifestations and strikes by workers from all sectors. Their protests rattled the elite consensus, which since the fall of Pinochet in 1990 had not attempted to write a new Constitution for the country or bothered to formulate a path out of neoliberal suffocation.

In October 2019, high school students protested the rise of fares for public transport. This wave of protests, which is ongoing, began to define Chile’s political life. With the slogan “it’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years,” the students have highlighted the need for a new Constitution.

 

A New Chile

Chile has the lowest electoral participation rate in Latin America. After 17 years of dictatorship, trust in the state structures had practically disappeared. Voting was compulsory until 2009, although registration to vote was not compulsory. Young people did not register with the electoral service (Servel). The demand for a new Constitution was a wake-up call for the youth. Data shows that more than half of Chile’s young people between 18 and 29 years of age voted in the election, with women constituting 52.9 percent of the voters.

Women and young people will shape the Constitutional Convention, just as women and young women in particular—such as Reyes and Hassler—have taken over the mayors’ offices. The 155-member Constitutional Convention is filled with young people like Reyes and Hassler, a sizable section of the left. The right wing was unable to win one-third of the convention, which would have given it veto power. This means that the new Constitution, which will be drafted in the next nine months, will have a progressive character.

On June 18, Jadue faces a primary against Gabriel Boric, another student leader and now a leader of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front). All indications suggest that Jadue will prevail over Boric and then meet the candidates of the right in November. He will be the third communist to run for the presidency, following Elías Lafertte Gaviño (1931 and 1932) and Gladys Marín (1999). If the polls are accurate, Jadue will be the first communist president of Chile.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by former Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma.

Taroa Zúñiga Silva is a writing fellow and the Spanish media coordinator for Globetrotter. She is the co-editor with Giordana García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI (2020) and is a member of the Secretaría de Mujeres Inmigrantes en Chile. She also is a member of the Mecha Cooperativa, a project of the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación.

The Latin American Left is regrouping. On July 19, 2021, Peru’s National Elections Jury announced the official results of the 2021 presidential elections, declaring Pedro Castillo as President of Peru. An important voting survey in Brazil has revealed that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would outperform neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro in all scenarios for the 2022 elections in the country. Colombia is in socio-economic turmoil, creating a potential opening for the election of Gustavo Petro – a left-wing politician. In Chile, the result of elections held on May 15-16, 2021, for the 155-member new constituent assembly has thrust progressive candidates to the forefront of national politics. All these dynamics will regionally strengthen the leftist governments already in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. An anti-neoliberal shift in Latin America’s political compass carries global significance. 

 

Imperialism

Large swathes of humanity who live in the peripheries of the world system have been witnessing a deadly process of absolute immiseration. Imperialism has restricted the economic growth of the periphery to mineral and agricultural sectors in order to assure raw materials for advanced capitalist nations. Hence, most Third World economies are heavily dependent on the export of primary commodities. In Latin America, such primary commodities account for the majority of exports for nearly all countries. While Latin American countries export primary goods to the Global North, they tend to re-import manufactured products from these same countries. The value added to these manufactured commodities – typically constructed from the primary inputs imported earlier – generates profit for northern countries while maintaining Latin American countries in a perpetual trade deficit.

While some countries in the periphery have facilitated a degree of industrialization through the surpluses accumulated from export-led growth, the disarticulated structures of these economies persists. The imperialist states’ monopolies – technological, financial, natural resources, communications, and military – has meant that there has been a lack of any significant indigenous technical development. Even to the extent that industrial growth has occurred, it has been based on the import of capital and technology, which has considerably reduced the dynamic effects on the economy that are usually associated with industrial growth. Moreover, a relocation of the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery means that the core relies less and less on the unprofitable exploitation of its own workers. Instead, the metropole increasingly divides the world into what has been labeled as Southern “production economies” and Northern “consumption economies.”

The main driver behind this process is undoubtedly the low wage level in the South. Entrenchment of extroverted economies like these has generated cut-throat competition amongst Southern firms for foreign capital. What we have now is a global race to the bottom, marked by a deathly spiral of exchange rate devaluations, hyper-low taxes and depressed wages. Multinational corporations based in the capitalist core have unendingly feasted on this wretchedness, fattening their profits from the extreme exploitation of the Third World’s large labor reserves. As such, the structure of today’s global economy has been profoundly shaped by the allocation of labor to industrial sectors according to differential rates of national exploitation. Thus, only the outward form of value transfers from the South to the North has changed, with the unequal exchange of products embodying different quantities of value steadily continuing. A large pool of precarized workers has been created, which consistently remains enmeshed in networks of informal economy, being forced by the productive configurations to enrich foreign capitalists and nourish the parasitic nature of the comprador bourgeoisie. 

 

International Finance Capital

The continuation of the international division of labor and the creation of dependent industrialization has been complemented by the hegemony of international finance capital.  Prabhat Patnaik writes: 

“In the current phase of imperialism, finance capital has become international, while the State remains a nation-State. The nation-State therefore willy-nilly must bow before the wishes of finance, for otherwise finance (both originating in that country and brought in from outside) will leave that particular country and move elsewhere, reducing it to illiquidity and disrupting its economy. The process of globalization of finance therefore has the effect of undermining the autonomy of the nation-State. The State cannot do what it wishes to do, or what its elected government has been elected to do, since it must do what finance wishes it to do.”

The interests of the financial oligarchy lie in strongly opposing state expenditure financed either by taxes on capitalists or by borrowing – the only ways of financing through which the state can effect a net expansion in aggregate demand. Financial interests are against deficit-financed spending for a number of reasons. First, deficit financing is seen to increase the liquidity overhang in the system, and therefore as being potentially inflationary. Inflation is anathema to finance since it erodes the value of financial assets. Second, financial markets fear that the introduction of debt-financed spending – which is driven by goals other than profit-making – will render interest rate differentials that determine financial profits more unpredictable. Third, if deficit spending leads to a substantial build-up of the state’s debt, it may intervene in financial markets to lower interest rates with implications for financial returns. 

Under these circumstances, even moderate welfarism has become a danger to the neoliberal order. Whereas the welfare state in the immediate post-War era served the ruling class by warding off the threat of communism, in the neoliberal era – where accumulation by dispossession has become the predominant mode of capitalist growth – even the most modest of demand management policies have had to face intense political opposition. Taking into account the internationally polarizing and nationally suffocating results of global capitalism, the slow resurgence of the Latin American Left will provide an avenue for the advancement of an alternative agenda. 

 

The Experience of the Pink Tide

Firstly, progressive governments in the continent have always tried to tackle relations of dependency, as is discernible from their experience in power during the Pink Tide. In opposition to metropolitan control over mineral resources and plantations, the Latin American Left consolidated the public sector which displaced the dominance of foreign capital. These arrangements ensured that the revenues coming from the primary commodity sector were no longer siphoned off by the rich but were diverted towards the poor. The assertion of control over financial resources and their redirection toward social developmentalism was coupled with the uneven promotion of sovereign forms of industrialization, trade and finance through various initiatives like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Union of South American Nations and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America. 

Before the public sector and regional groupings could be fully used for developing domestic heavy-industry base and technological capability, the commodity boom itself collapsed. This external event did not allow the Left’s redistributive strategy to transform into concerted attempts at changing the productive forces. However, the fact that a politico-ideological project of independence was advocated stands as a testimony to the fruitful possibilities contained in the Pink Tide. Industrialization, social welfare, and the nation came together in the notion of sovereignty; industrialization was not posed simply as a means by which Third World capitalists could accumulate capital more effectively, but as a means of improving the nation as a whole.

Moreover, a programme of selective delinking was supported which allowed Latin American governments to self-determine which sector of the economy could be safely opened up. They could differentially open up a sector where foreign capital was needed to supplement local capital in whole or in part. As part of this blueprint of economic self-determination, clear-headed campaigns were initiated to resist pressures to liberalize the financial sector. In fact, Latin America’s leftist governments tended to increase the level of capital controls instead of merely adapting to the constraints imposed by financial globalization. The reregulation of cross-border financial flows was part of a coordinated effort to obtain further macroeconomic policy autonomy and attend to the interests of impoverished constituencies. 

The existence of capital controls enabled the Latin American Left to temporarily soften the impact of the end of commodity boom. One of the visible ways that the collapse of primary commodity prices makes itself felt is through a shortage of foreign exchange to finance necessary imports. This gives rise to inflation, to currency depreciations which further aggravate inflation, and to shortages of essential goods. Further, the reduced incomes -a result of the slump in the primary commodity demand – cause recession, stagnation and unemployment. The conservation of foreign exchange for importing essential commodities, and the prevention of outflow of foreign exchange by wealth-holders hedging against exchange rate depreciation, become extremely important. Towards this end, the Latin American Left’s regulatory management of banks and foreign trade proved to be crucial in mitigating the effects of changing global conditions. 

Secondly, Latin American leftist governments extensively used planning and welfare policies, such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), financed through the receipts of economic growth and the taxation of rising commodity exports. Under a new socio-economic structure of accumulation, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates increased and social conditions improved, reversing the adverse consequences of neoliberalism and cementing popular support for the Pink Tide administrations. The GDP per capita of Latin America and the Caribbean rose by 31% between 2003 and 2013, poverty rates fell from 32 to 17%, and the country-average of the Gini index of household per capita income in Latin America fell by 0.06. All this stood in complete contrast to the past implementations of harsh austerity programs and fiscal niggardliness which were intended to restore government’s “credibility” and return to the elusive cycle of growth led solely by private investment. 

The implementation of welfare policies needs to be looked in the specific context of contemporary capitalism. In a global situation marked by the hegemony of international finance capital and calcified hierarchies, the unleashing of successful poverty alleviation schemes, increase in minimum wages, strengthening of labor regulations and the weakening of deficit targets were not acceptable to the elites who saw these policies as a precursor to more radical shifts. Thus, in an era of finance capital where even the most basic welfare spending runs contrary to the interests of an inflation-fearing financial oligarchy, the Latin American Left’s fiscal expansionism and consolidation of social policies constituted a sharp attack on neoliberal interests. 

Present-day fluctuations in the balance of forces in Latin America hint towards a revival of the Left. We need to comprehend these fluid tectonic plates of popular power from an actively political perspective. Building a socialist society in a Third World country, in which – despite its wealth of natural resources – there remains immense poverty and hideous inequality is a hard task. Moving against the powerful tide of reactionary forces and helping the oppressed classes to overcome social humiliation requires a long gestation period. In short, the entrance of the Global South subaltern on the stage of history is a richly textured pathway of socialized autonomy which never follows a linear or perfect course of economic reconstruction. Most of the times, the width of populist culture and depth of working class power intersect to generate a multi-sided trajectory of revolution. As Vladimir Lenin himself said, “Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.” Thus, in the current conjuncture, we need to show solidarity with Latin America’s renascent Pink Tide which promises to deal a blow to imperialist capitalism. 

This article first appeared in the Orinoco Tribune.