Feint Left

This is not just byzantine Third World politics. The Bolivarians have also exacerbated the region's class and race pathologies. Morales muscled through a radical new Constitution in 2007 and 2008 that ignored the voice of Bolivian opposition members, who at one point were physically barred from the constituent assembly by pro-government mobs. Not surprisingly, the Morales charter plays to the highland indigenous groups that back him while curbing the power and revenue of his rivals in the mostly white and wealthy lowlands. Correa did much the same in Ecuador, pitting the indigenous majority of Quito and the rural regions against the middle classes of Guayaquil.

Along strictly ideological lines, the Ortega government has raided Nicaragua's opposition newspapers and intimidated opponents. In elections last November, the Managua government disqualified two rival political parties and blocked the work of international voting monitors. And when journalists found that thousands of ballots had been destroyed, pro-government protestors trashed the independent radio stations. Meanwhile, no one has done more than Chávez, who, in the last few months alone, has chased a political rival into exile, stripped an opposition mayor in Caracas of his authority, and threatened to close down Globovisión, Venezuela's last independent broadcast network.

Just a few years ago, the word was that Latin America was poised to take a hard left, putting both open markets and political freedom at risk. In fact, that didn't happen. Many of the region's soi-disant leftists, like onetime Brazilian union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and socialist Michele Bachelet of Chile, turned out to be paladins of the free market, as well as champions of moderation and political plurality. And for all the wind blowing down from the Bolivarian revolution, three quarters of the region's 500 million people and two thirds of its $4 trillion GDP are still in the hands of stable constitutional democracies, such as Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia. And yet the new generation of populist leaders is an uncomfortable reminder of how democrats and demagogues can flourish on the same soil—that democracy is not always a liberal force.

In the negotiations now under way in Costa Rica, Zelaya and de facto president Roberto Micheletti may yet work out some agreement that restores Zelaya to power and allows Honduras to return to democratic normalcy. The outcome will have implications for the hemisphere. From Santiago to Mexico City, the region's most influential leaders roundly condemned the Honduran coup but said nothing about the assault on the law, the legislature, and the courts that preceded it. The tumult in Tegucigalpa is a cautionary tale: Latin America's real problem may not be the power of the man on the balcony, but the silence of its statesmen.

© 2009