Utopia Unarmed Jorge G. Castañeda
Page, Joseph A.
20 BOOKS Communist parties were willing to go, and ultimately led to armed conflict in various parts of the region. The Democratic Left tended to be antiCommunist and benignly disposed...
...The latter only succeeds in convincing "haves" to ship their wealth abroad or even emigrate...
...But the harsh lesson absorbed during this period was that undemocratic right-wing regimes devastated the Left, and it was only by forcing the return of representative democracy in countries lashed by dictatorships that the Left was able not only to survive but also to regain lost ground through a process of renewal...
...Castaneda points out that during the past several decades the pro-Castro Left harshly criticized democracy and labeled it a "sham...
...Yet there is an eerie similarity between some of the policies once advocated by these moderate leftists and the advice Castaneda now offers...
...21...
...One convergence is respect for the electoral process...
...A shift closer to the center, as Castaneda urges, will draw a new Latin Left closer to a spot on the political spectrum occupied in the past by the old Democratic Left...
...If Latin-American radicals had not needed this lesson but had instead pressured the Democratic Left to move more vigorously in the pursuit of social and economic justice, they might have reached the same point on the political spectrum that Castaneda now urges them to occupy, and at a greatly reduced human cost...
...The proposals Castaneda offers are plainly more moderate than the Utopian vision that animated the Latin Left during the past three decades...
...to form regional common markets (he opposes NAFTA and urges Latin nations to model their trading blocs after the European Economic Community...
...The great irony is that his prescription amounts to a more radical version of what the old Democratic Left once advocated...
...The Democratic Left tended to be antiCommunist and benignly disposed toward the U.S., which attracted for them the emnity of pro-Cuban revolutionaries...
...He recognizes that this growth must come from the dynamic potential of private enterprise, but that the stability necessary to facilitate business expansion cannot be maintained either in the face of widespread and widening disparities between rich and poor or under governments that prioritize wealth redistribution above all else...
...to rethink the role of the state (he urges a cautious, limited privatization and the development of a civil service that is professional and permanent, rather than transitory and predatory, as is the case today in most Latin countries...
...Other thorny problems from which Castaneda does not shrink include the need to redefine nationalism (here he suggests that the Latin Left cultivate progressives in the United States, but cautions that this is a two-way street and will require acceptance of a certain degree of accountability to sympathetic Americans...
...It took the failures of the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and the armed struggles of the radical Left throughout the continent to demonstrate the relative advantages of a shift toward the center...
...Castaneda also addresses with admirable candor the need to solve the dilemma of how to encourage economic growth and at the same time foster economic and social justice...
Vol. 121 • February 1994 • No. 3
