While it was Lula who took direct aim at Brazil’s military rulers, it appears that Kirchner has bested him on this front as well. For twenty-eight years the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, many now elderly and frail, had gathered together every Thursday at 3:30 p.m. to walk slowly and in tight circles outside the legislature in Buenos Aires. They are the mothers of the countless thousands who vanished during Argentina’s “dirty war” from 1976 to 1983, when expressions of dissent against the military dictatorship often resulted in disappearances. The Mothers’ goal has been to end the amnesty accorded to those responsible. Detained himself during those brutal years, Kirchner purged the military generals and supreme court justices who had supported the amnesty. In so doing, he challenged the convenient predisposition among Argentina’s elites to let historical bygones be bygones. In June 2005, the reformed supreme court decreed an end to the am- nesty. The Mothers’ silent but incessant demand had been rewarded, Kirchner’s gamble had paid off, and the government and military edged closer to the needs of the street.
Outside Argentina’s borders, however, people and governments are less sanguine. While the Kirchner administration makes public declarations of support for Mercosur, a free trade agreement taking shape between eleven South American countries and an obvious countervail to the ftaa, in practice Argentina ardently defends its own interests, especially against Brazilian dominance. Argentina has joined other Latin American countries in criticizing the agricultural subsidies the United States grants to its farmers (as well as other forms of protectionism), but there, it seems, is where the unity ends. The Mercosur blueprint calls for free trade by 2006, but this plan is predicated on Argentina and Brazil moving toward roughly equal production. To cite one dispute among many, Kirchner has been harshly critical of Brazil’s more advanced automobile industry, which aggressively promotes new models each year and dumps cars into Argentina. Such practices have resulted in a dramatic trade imbalance in the automobile sector — over 50 percent of the cars purchased in Argentina are designed and manufactured in Brazil, while Argentina’s struggling industry commands a negligible share of the Brazilian market.
“We are going to bury [the ftaa] here,” Hugo Chávez announced to wild cheering at the 2005 counter-summit. “We are going to change the course of history. Only united can we defeat imperialism and bring our people a better life.” But Chávez’s “only united” clearly means buying, selling, and trading within Latin America, and Argentina’s current economic policies are tilting it toward offshore markets. Kirchner’s response is that it is not Argentina but Brazil that is active in the global game. Indeed, the criticism of Argentina’s “dear sister” is even more direct when matters turn to the international arena. “If there’s a job in the World Trade Organization, Brazil wants it. If there’s a place in the United Nations, Brazil wants it. They even want to name a Brazilian pope,” said Kirchner last year.
Protectionism plays well at home for Kirchner, but the sheen on Argentina’s star is likely to dull if the net effect of slapping tariffs on neighbouring countries is to suppress their economies. (Furthermore, the next time Kirchner goes knocking on the imf door, he will be doing so without the threat of foreclosure and can, as a result, expect tough bargaining.) While Brazil’s propertied elites and big-business sectors are thriving, its effort to create a middle class of entrepreneurs and small sellers is foundering, and a principal reason why is a dearth of nearby export markets like Argentina. In the diplomatic and trade war emerging between the two countries, Lula has some cards to play. His problem is time.
Lula has yet to announce whether he intends to run for re-election, but according to David Fleischer, a professor of political science at the University of Brasília, if he does run and loses, “the left ‘tilt’ in Brazil might not return for a while . . . Lula was the shining star of the left in Latin America . . . and there were a lot of people who had high hopes for what he’d be able to put together. And, of course, those hopes have been more or less dashed.” Fleischer’s assessment may belie a greater danger. The amount of emotional investment poured into Lula’s candidacy should not be underestimated, and, if his progressive reforms don’t bear fruit, there will be riots and, potentially, a military response.
Kirchner’s cozy relationship with Argentina’s new generals, and the transformation of the military into a benevolent force, is not without precedent in Latin America. Occasionally, South American armies have served leftist interests. On October 3, 1968, Peru was in a tough spot. Farmers were abandoning their lands for the cities, food production was plummeting, and radical guerrilla movements were springing up across the countryside. The nation’s top military officer, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, had seen enough. The Soviet-sympathizing Velasco staged a coup, easily overthrew the liberal government of President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, and began ruling by decree. Unlike other military leaders, however, Velasco sided not with the established elites but with the impoverished masses. Within months, he had seized control of the much-hated International Petroleum Company, nationalized a series of foreign businesses, and launched a sweeping land-reform program. He had also begun providing low-cost medicine to the country’s poor — hardly the stuff of the archetypal Latin American military strongman.
While Velasco’s tenure was relatively short-lived, and the results mixed, the same week that he seized power in Lima, Panama’s General Omar Torrijos launched his “revolution for the dispossessed, not for the propertied.” Torrijos threw out the right-wing civilian government, nationalized the main gas and electric company, passed a guaranteed minimum-wage law, brought in land reforms, and, critically, in 1977, wrested control of the Panama Canal from the United States.
Thirty years later Hugo Chávez, the former Venezuelan army colonel who was elected president in 1998 after trying and failing to take power through a military coup six years earlier, followed a similar script. “I had this conversation with Chávez twice,” says Humberto Brown, who represented Panama at the United Nations during the 1989 US invasion. “He positions himself as a Torrijista, seeing the military playing a different role than the traditional role of being the repressive tool of the elite. He also sees [the Torrijos tradition] as rescuing the national resources of the country and using them for the development of ordinary people. What he’s doing with oil is what Torrijos did with the Panama Canal.”
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