Bolivar’s Ghost

For a fictional place, the town of Macondo carries a powerful ring of familiarity. If there is a central character in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is this small, remote place, born in an unnamed part of South America. Márquez’s magical-realist novel tells the story of the couple who founded Macondo, during an unspecified period in the continent’s history, settling there to escape their past at a time when “the world was so recent that many things lacked names.”

In the beginning, Macondo was a magical place where no one was older than thirty, and where no one ever died. But trouble soon comes to the town. An orphaned girl arrives one day, carrying her parents’ bones in a bag and bringing with her a plague of insomnia. People begin to lose their memories. Panic-stricken, one family tries to label everything in sight. When the plague lifts, time begins to circle back on itself and one elder cries out, “I know all of this by heart! It is as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning.”

Warring political factions arrive and ransack Macondo, terrorizing its residents. Then the ruthless owners of a banana plantation come and the government, beholden to them, murders 3,000 workers and their families. Years later, the sole survivor of the massacre returns, only to find that the new residents have no knowledge of the hideous event. A torrential rain begins to fall on Macondo and doesn’t stop for nearly five years.

This sad tale must resonate with anyone who has lived through any of the last 100 years of Latin American history. For most of that time, military dictatorships, foreign interventions, and corrupt local governments have systematically upended small Edens and dashed larger hopes. But there is another way of interpreting Macondo,one in which the magical — levitating priests, clairvoyant gypsies, and yellow flowers drifting down from the skies — exists alongside the tragic and ultimately triumphs over it. And today a crack of light may indeed be penetrating the long darkness of Latin American history.

On March 1, 2005, Tabaré Vázquez Rosas stood in the back of a pickup truck and made his way through the packed streets of Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital city. The oncologist-turned-politician had just been sworn in as the country’s first leftist leader and now, decked out in a navy blue suit, his hair finely coiffed, it was time to address the masses. Vázquez extended his arms outward, gazed down Avenida de las Leyes, and admired the scene. Confetti floated from apartment balconies, fireworks pounded the air, and brigades of drummers carried themselves noisily through the streets.

Vázquez had not come alone to this celebratory occasion. Looking on like proud parents stood four men with a lot at stake in his inauguration: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s firebrand union-leader- turned-leftist-president; Ricardo Lagos, Chile’s first post-Pinochet social democratic leader; Hugo Chávez, the former soldier who won Venezuela’s presidency by ballot six years after failing to do so by bullet; and Néstor Kirchner, the man who rallied Argentina around a new and united populist vision. These men watched as yet another left-leaning politician was swept into office, their broad smiles suggesting a new day for a desperate continent. Having experienced it themselves, these more veteran and savvy politicians were not about to begrudge Vázquez his time in the sun, but beneath their smiles one sensed a certain apprehension. It is one thing to promise a new beginning to a people beaten and beleaguered by history, and quite another to follow through when amorphous hope mutates into loud, persistent, and non-negotiable demands.

“A lot of people died or went to jail to win what the Frente Amplio [Vázquez’s party] has today,” said Martin Bension, a local history teacher, recalling Uruguay’s brutal military past. “The Vázquez administration knows this and will have to keep it in mind.” The warning to be mindful is acute. Uruguay is wracked by poverty and social divisions, and if Vázquez doesn’t start delivering tangible improvements, conservative establishment parties are waiting in the wings with their own prescriptions.

The forces behind Vázquez’s ascent are also at work in Bolivia, where the charismatic Evo Morales — leader of the Movement Towards Socialism, or mas party, and the first full-blooded Aymara Indian to have a real shot at winning the presidency — has benefited from the wave of populism that has swept the continent over the past seven years. Following late-2005 elections in Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras, in 2006 no fewer than nine Latin American countries will go to the polls, with many of the contests featuring pitched battles between leftist political parties and conservatives backed by elites struggling to contain the populist wave. The region’s militaries are watching cautiously from the sidelines, as is the United States, which, since the incendiary events of September 11, 2001, has been so preoccupied with the “war on terror” that it has overlooked the revolution brewing in its own backyard. Until now.

Latin America could tilt either way. It is unlikely, given the region’s volatility and pressing needs, to choose a path in between. The chief prescription favoured by conservatives is the Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), the open-border free trade agreement with North America. But by the time President Bush, Prime Minister Martin, and President Vicente Fox of Mexico arrived in Mar del Plata, Argentina, last November to sing the virtues of such a hemispheric alliance, they had already been upstaged. Just prior to the summit meeting, Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales launched a counter-summit in the form of a massive anti-globalization rally with a straightforward message: a united Latin America will stand apart from North America, will achieve independence from World Bank and International Monetary Fund (imf) loans and prescriptions, from structural- adjustment programs that turn local indigenous economies into export-driven machines where the money flows offshore. Right or wrong, the United States was portrayed as the New Spain (i.e., as a neo-colonial would-be conqueror) and was told in simple terms: this is not your backyard. The Mar del Plata summit whimpered to a close, President Bush leaving before the compromised final communiqué was released.

Although a six-storey image of Che Guevara was chosen as the backdrop for the counter-summit, the ghost of Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) is also ever-present in revolutionary Latin America. Known as “the liberator” for launching revolts that brought independence to a string of countries (Bolivia, Panama,Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and his native Venezuela), Bolívar always dreamed of a united Latin America. But the end of Spanish rule in 1824 was followed by more than 150 years of wars and ruinous bitterness across the continent. The bloodiest and most tragic battle saw Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina crush a provocative Paraguay. The 1865 War of the Triple Alliance reduced Paraguay — which, at the time, was one of the most advanced and industrialized countries in the world and a direct threat to England’s economic supremacy in the region — to half its population and left its economy in tatters.