November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Latin America Looks Left

(Page 3 of 3)

July / August 2003
Leif Utne Utne magazine 
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El Salvador: Some 200,000 health care workers marched through the streets of San Salvador last October dressed in white to protest the sale of public hospitals, according to NACLA Report on the Americas (Jan./Feb. 2003). The demonstration was the country?s largest since the bloody civil war of the 1980s.

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Whether this new wave of populist organizing will translate into real shifts in political power in the region remains to be seen. Some Latin America observers fear the current situation is merely a prelude to a repeat of the 1960s and 1970s, when a leftist tide was brutally quashed by a series of military dictators from Central America to Chile, generally with U.S. support.

?No one knows for sure what the United States will do,? says Mary Turck, editor of Connection to the Americas, noting ?the way the United States is militarizing the Andean nations [Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia] in the name of the war on drugs.?

The grassroots movements growing across Latin America today are driven not so much by ideology as by opposition to the harsh loan conditions imposed by the IMF and other international lenders and by people?s desire for social justice and democratic control over their own lives.

Mark Weisbrot warns: ?Those who insist that the people should suffer more before they can experience the economic changes they demand would do well to consider the warning of John F. Kennedy: ?Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.??

Connection to the Americas, the membership newsletter for the Minneapolis-based Resource Center of the Americas, provides comprehensive news, analysis, communiqu?s, and action tips on issues affecting Central and South America. Subscriptions: $40/yr. (membership) from Resource Center of the Americas, 3019 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55406; www.americas.org.

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