Post Cold War Latin America
Overview
Chile and Argentina
Following the Cold War, Latin America had a variety of new opportunities to grow economically. Many states began to explore globalization and economic growth.
Learning Objectives
- How did the end of the Cold War affect Latin America?
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Concertación: a coalition of center-left political parties in Chile, founded in 1988 (Presidential candidates under its banner won every election from when military rule ended in 1990 until the conservative candidate Sebastián Piñera won the Chilean presidential election in 2010. In 2013 it was replaced by the New Majority coalition.)
“disappearances”: in international human rights law, this occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or political organization or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person’s fate and whereabouts, with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law
Peronist: a person who follows the Argentinian political movement based on the ideology and legacy of former President Juan Domingo Perón and his second wife, Eva Perón (The Justicialist Party derives its name from the concept of social justice. Since its inception in 1946, candidates from his party have won 9 of the 12 presidential elections from which they have not been banned. As of 2016, Perón was the only Argentine to have been elected president three times.
Trial of the Juntas: The judicial trial of the members of the de facto military government that ruled Argentina during the dictatorship of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (el proceso), which lasted from 1976 to 1983.)
Democracy in Chile and Argentina
Chile and Argentina both transitioned from military dictatorships to democratic regimes in the 1980s, leading to relative political stability in both countries in the 21st century.
Chile’s Transition to Democracy
The Chilean transition to democracy began when a constitution establishing a transition itinerary was approved in a vote. From March 11, 1981 to March 1990, several organic constitutional laws were approved leading to the final restoration of democracy. After the 1988 plebiscite, the 1980 Constitution, still in force today, was amended to ease provisions for future amendments to the constitution, create more seats in the senate, diminish the role of the National Security Council, and equalize the number of civilian and military members (four members each).
Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin served from 1990 to 1994 and was succeeded by another Christian Democrat, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (son of Frei-Montalva), leading the same coalition for a 6-year term. Ricardo Lagos Escobar of the Socialist Party and the Party for Democracy led the Concentración (a coalition of center-left political parties in Chile, founded in 1988) to a narrower victory in the 2000 presidential elections. His term ended on March 11, 2006, when Michelle Bachelet of the Socialist Party took office. Center-right investor and businessman Sebastián Piñera, of the National Renewal, assumed the presidency on March 11, 2010, after Bachelet’s term expired.
Part of the transition from the military dictatorship to democracy entailed investigating the human right’s abuses under the previous regimes. In February 1991 Aylwin created the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, which released in February 1991 the Rettig Report on human rights violations committed during the military rule. This report counted 2,279 cases of “disappearance” that could be proved and registered. Of course, the very nature of “disappearances” made such investigations very difficult. The same issue arose several years later with the Valech Report released in 2004, which counted almost 30,000 victims of torture, among testimonies from 35,000 persons.
Contemporary Era in Argentina
Argentina also experienced a transition from a military dictatorship to a democracy in the 1980s. Raúl Alfonsín won the 1983 elections, after campaigning for the prosecution of those responsible for human rights violations during the military dictatorship. The Trial of the Juntas and other martial courts sentenced all the coup’s leaders but, under military pressure, Alfonsín also enacted the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, which halted prosecutions further down the chain of command. The worsening economic crisis and hyperinflation reduced his popular support, and the Peronist Carlos Menem won the 1989 election. Soon after, riots forced Alfonsín to an early resignation.
Menem embraced neo-liberal policies: a fixed exchange rate, business deregulation, privatizations, and dismantling of protectionist barriers normalized the economy for a while. He pardoned the officers who had been sentenced during Alfonsín’s government. The 1994 Constitutional Amendment allowed Menem to be elected for a second term. However, the economy began to decline in 1995, with increasing unemployment and recession; this led to Fernando de la Rúa and the UCR—Radical Civic Union, a centrist social-liberal political party—returning to the presidency in the 1999 elections.
De la Rúa kept Menem’s economic plan despite the worsening crisis, which led to growing social discontent. A massive capital flight led to a freezing of bank accounts, generating further turmoil. The December 2001 riots forced him to resign.
Mexico
Learning Objectives
- Evaluate the role of NAFTA on Mexico.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Peronist: a person who follows the Argentinian political movement based on the ideology and legacy of former President Juan Domingo Perón and his second wife, Eva Perón (The Justicialist Party derives its name from the concept of social justice. Since its inception in 1946, candidates from his party have won 9 of the 12 presidential elections from which they have not been banned. As of 2016, Perón was the only Argentine to have been elected president three times.
Mexico’s Transition to True Democracy
In the November 2015 elections, after a tie in the first round of presidential elections on October 25, Mauricio Macri won the first ballotage in Argentina’s history, beating Front for Victory candidate Daniel Scioli and becoming president-elect. Macri is the first democratically elected non-radical or Peronist president since 1916, although he had the support of the first mentioned. He took office on December 10, 2015. In April 2016, the Macri Government introduced austerity measures intended to tackle inflation and public deficits.
The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the political party that controlled national and state politics in Mexico since 1929, was finally voted out of power in 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox Quesada, the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN).
Background: Decline of the PRI
A phenomenon of the 1980s in Mexico was the growth of organized political opposition to de facto one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Spanish: Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI), which held power uninterruptedly in the country for 71 years from 1929 to 2000. The National Action Party (PAN), founded in 1939 and until the 1980s a marginal political party and not a serious contender for power, began to gain voters, particularly in Mexico’s north. They made gains in local elections initially, but in 1986 the PAN candidate for the governorship of Chihuahua had a good chance of winning.
The 1988 Mexican general election was pivotal in Mexican history. The PRI’s candidate was Carlos Salinas de Gortari, an economist who was educated at Harvard and who had never held an elected office. Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, the son of former President Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with the PRI and ran as a candidate of the Democratic Current, later forming into the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD). The PAN candidate Manuel Clouthier ran a clean campaign in long-standing pattern of the party.
The election was marked by irregularities on a massive scale. The Ministry of the Interior administered the electoral process, which meant in practice that the PRI controlled it. During the vote count, the government computers were said to have crashed, something the government called “a breakdown of the system.” When the computers were said to be running again after a considerable delay, the election results they recorded were an extremely narrow victory for Salinas (50.7%), Cárdenas (31.1%), and Clouthier (16.8%). Cárdenas was widely seen to have won the election, but Salinas was declared the winner. One observer said, “For the ordinary citizen, it was not the computer network but the Mexican political system that had crashed.”
There might have been violence in the wake of such fraudulent results, but Cárdenas did not call for it, “sparing the country a possible civil war.” Years later, former Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid (1982 – 88) was quoted in the New York Times stating that the results were indeed fraudulent.
Salinas embarked on a program of neoliberal reforms that fixed the exchange rate, controlled inflation, and culminated with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into effect on January 1, 1994. The same day, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) started a two-week-long armed rebellion against the federal government, and this has continued as a non-violent opposition movement against neoliberalism and globalization.
In 1994, Salinas was succeeded by Ernesto Zedillo, followed by the Mexican peso crisis and a $50 billion bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Major macroeconomic reforms were initiated by President Zedillo, and the economy rapidly recovered and growth peaked at almost 7% by the end of 1999.
President Vicente Fox Quesada, 2000 – 2006
Emphasizing the need to upgrade infrastructure, modernize the tax system and labor laws, integrate with the U.S. economy, and allow private investment in the energy sector, Vicente Fox Quesada—the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN) —was elected the 69th president of Mexico on July 2, 2000, ending PRI’s 71-year-long control of the office. Though Fox’s victory was due in part to popular discontent with decades of unchallenged PRI hegemony, Fox’s opponent, president Zedillo, conceded defeat on the night of the election—a first in Mexican history. A further sign of the quickening of Mexican democracy was the fact that PAN failed to win a majority in both chambers of Congress—a situation that prevented Fox from implementing his reform pledges. Nonetheless, the transfer of power in 2000 was quick and peaceful.
Fox was a very strong candidate, but an ineffective president who was weakened by PAN’s minority status in Congress. Historian Philip Russell summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of Fox as president:
Marketed on television, Fox made a far better candidate than he did president. He failed to take charge and provide cabinet leadership, failed to set priorities, and turned a blind eye to alliance building….By 2006, as political scientist Soledad Loaeza noted, ‘the eager candidate became a reluctant president who avoided tough choices and appeared hesitant and unable to hide the weariness caused by the responsibilities and constraints of the office….’ He had little success in fighting crime. Even though he maintained the macroeconomic stability inherited from his predecessor, economic growth barely exceeded the rate of population increase. Similarly, the lack of fiscal reform left tax collection at a rate similar to that of Haiti….Finally, during Fox’s administration, only 1.4 million formal-sector jobs were created, leading to massive immigration to the United States and an explosive increase in informal employment.
President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, 2006 – 2012
President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (PAN) took office after one of the most hotly contested elections in recent Mexican history; Calderón won by such a small margin (.56% or 233,831 votes) that the runner-up, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), contested the results.
Calderón’s government ordered massive raids on drug cartels upon assuming office in December 2006 in response to an increasingly deadly spate of violence in his home state of Michoacán. The decision to intensify drug enforcement operations led to an ongoing conflict between the federal government and the Mexican drug cartels. And, despite imposing a cap on salaries of high-ranking public servants, Calderón ordered a raise on the salaries of the Federal Police and the Mexican armed forces on his first day as president.
President Enrique Peña Nieto, 2006 – Present
On July 1, 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto was elected president of Mexico with 38% of the vote. He is a former governor of the state of Mexico and a member of the PRI. His election returned the PRI to power after 12 years of PAN rule. He was officially sworn into office on December 1, 2012.
The Pacto por México
The Pacto por México was a cross party alliance that called for the accomplishment of 95 goals. It was signed on December 2, 2012 by the leaders of the three main political parties in Chapultepec Castle. The Pact has been lauded by international pundits as an example for solving political gridlock and for effectively passing institutional reforms. Among other legislation, it called for education reform, banking reform, fiscal reform, and telecommunications reform, all of which were eventually passed. Most importantly, the Pact wanted a revaluation of PEMEX. This ultimately resulted in the dissolution of the agreement when in December 2013 the center-left PRD refused to collaborate with the legislation penned by the center-right PAN and PRI that ended PEMEX’s monopoly and allowed for foreign investment in Mexico’s oil industry.
Northern South America
Learning Objectives
- Evaluate the role of Hugo Chávez in Latin American politics.
- Analyze the importance of Northern Latin America in the late 20th century.
Venezuela and Chavismo
Under the presidency of Hugo Chávez from 1999 to 2013, Venezuela saw sweeping and radical shifts in social policy, marked by a move away from the government officially embracing a free-market economy and neoliberal reform principles and a move towards the government embracing socialist income redistribution and social welfare programs.
Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela
The Bolivarian Revolution is a leftist social movement and political process in Venezuela that was led by late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez—the founder of the Fifth Republic Movement and later the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. The “Bolivarian Revolution” is named after Simón Bolívar, an early 19th-century Venezuelan and Latin American revolutionary leader, prominent in the Spanish American wars of independence, which led to the independence of most of northern South America from Spanish rule. According to Chávez and other supporters, the “Bolivarian Revolution” seeks to build a mass movement to implement Bolivarianism: popular democracy, economic independence, equitable distribution of revenues, and an end to political corruption in Venezuela. They interpret Bolívar’s ideas from a socialist perspective.
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez, a former paratroop lieutenant-colonel who led an unsuccessful coup d’état in 1992, was elected President in December 1998 on a platform that called for the creation of a “Fifth Republic,” a new constitution, a new name (“the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”), and a new set of relations between socioeconomic classes. In 1999, voters approved a referendum on a new constitution and in 2000, re-elected Chávez, also placing many members of his Fifth Republic Movement party in the National Assembly. Supporters of Chávez called the process symbolized by him “the Bolivarian Revolution” and were organized into different government-funded groups, including the Bolivarian Circles. Chávez’s first few months in office were dedicated primarily to constitutional reform, while his secondary focus was on immediately allocating more government funds to new social programs.
However, as a recession triggered by historically low oil prices and soaring international interest rates rocked Venezuela, the shrunken federal treasury provided very little of the resources Chávez required for his promised massive populist programs. The economy, which was still staggering, shrunk by 10% and the unemployment rate increased to 20%, the highest level in since the 1980s.
Chávez sharply diverged from previous administrations’ economic policies, terminating their practice of extensively privatizing Venezuela’s state-owned holdings, such as the national social security system, holdings in the aluminum industry, and the oil sector. Chávez worked to reduce Venezuelan oil extraction in the hopes of garnering elevated oil prices and, at least theoretically, elevated total oil revenues, thereby boosting Venezuela’s severely deflated foreign exchange reserves. He extensively lobbied other OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) countries to cut their production rates as well. As a result of these actions, Chávez became known as a “price hawk” in his dealings with the oil industry and OPEC. Chávez also attempted a comprehensive renegotiation of 60-year-old royalty payment agreements with oil giants Philips Petroleum and ExxonMobil. These agreements had allowed the corporations to pay in taxes as little as 1% of the tens of billions of dollars in revenues they were earning from their extraction of Venezuelan oil. Afterwards, Chávez stated his intention to complete the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil resources.
In April 2002, Chávez was briefly ousted from power in the 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt following popular demonstrations by his opponents, but he was returned to power after two days as a result of demonstrations by poor Chávez supporters in Caracas, as well as actions by the military.
Chávez also remained in power after an all-out national strike that lasted from December 2002 to February 2003, including a strike/lockout in the state oil company PDVSA. The strike produced severe economic dislocation, with the country’s GDP falling 27% during the first four months of 2003, which cost the oil industry $13.3 billion. In the subsequent decade, the government was forced into several currency devaluations. These devaluations have done little to improve the situation of the Venezuelan people who rely on imported products or locally produced products that depend on imported inputs, while dollar-denominated oil sales account for the vast majority of Venezuela’s exports. The profits of the oil industry have been lost to “social engineering” and corruption, instead of investments needed to maintain oil production.
Chávez survived several further political tests, including an August 2004 recall referendum. He was elected for another term in December 2006 and re-elected for a third term in October 2012. However, he was never sworn in for his third term due to medical complications. Chávez died on March 5, 2013 after a nearly two-year fight with cancer. The presidential election that took place on April 14, 2013, was the first since Chávez took office in 1999 in which his name did not appear on the ballot.
Chavez’s ideas, programs, and style form the basis of “Chavismo,” a political ideology closely associated with the Bolivarianism and socialism of the 21st century. Internationally, Chávez aligned himself with the Marxist–Leninist governments of Fidel and then Raúl Castro in Cuba, and the socialist governments of Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua). His presidency was seen as a part of the socialist “pink tide” sweeping Latin America.
Chávez described his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary of the United States’s foreign policy as well as a vocal critic of U.S.-supported neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism. He described himself as a Marxist. He supported Latin American and Caribbean cooperation and was instrumental in setting up the pan-regional Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Bank of the South, and the regional television network TeleSUR.
Nicolás Maduro
Nicolás Maduro has been the President of Venezuela since April 14, 2013, after winning the second presidential election after Chávez’s death with 50.61% of the votes against Henrique Capriles Radonski, who had 49.12% of the votes. The Democratic Unity Roundtable contested his election as fraudulent, and as a violation of the constitution. However, the Supreme Court of Venezuela ruled that under Venezuela’s Constitution, Nicolás Maduro is the legitimate president and was invested as such by the Venezuelan National Assembly.
Since February 2014, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have protested over high levels of criminal violence, corruption, hyperinflation, and chronic scarcity of basic goods due to policies of the federal government. Demonstrations and riots have left over 40 fatalities in the unrest between both Chavistas and opposition protesters, as well as led to the arrest of opposition leaders such as Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma. Human rights groups have strongly condemned the arrest of Leopoldo López.
In the 2015 Venezuelan parliamentary election, the opposition gained a majority.
The following year, in a July 2016 decree, President Maduro used his executive power to declare a state of economic emergency. The decree could force citizens to work in agricultural fields and farms for 60-day (or longer) periods to supply food to the country. In mid-2016, Colombian border crossings were temporarily opened to allow Venezuelans to purchase food and basic household and health items in Colombia. In September 2016, a study published in the Spanish-language Diario Las Américas indicated that 15% of Venezuelans are eating “food waste discarded by commercial establishments.”
Attributions
Attributions
Source image provided by Wikimedia Commons: Brazil Carnival
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Carnival#/media/File:Desfile_Portela_2014_(906185).jpg
Chapters adapted from:
https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/boundless-worldhistory/argentina/
https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/boundless-worldhistory/chile/
https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/boundless-worldhistory/brazil/
https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/boundless-worldhistory/conflict-across-latin-america/
https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/boundless-worldhistory/crisis-points-of-the-cold-war/
https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/boundless-worldhistory/the-americas-in-the-21st-century/