Latin America's Divided Left

...It was this step that had to be avoided...

...First it brought down its cars in parts (thus eliminating import duties...

...He asks us to believe that gm is frightened by the prospect that the makers of seat covers and spark plugs would conspire to establish their own car industry...

...Despite the disproportionate attention accorded to the option of violent revolution by the editors of this book, the cult of the guerrilla is being ignored by most Latin American Leftists today...

...both are correct...

...As John J. Johnson points out in his contribution, political violence has generally been on the decline throughout the area, and the non-Communist Left is prospering through legitimate channels...

...a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy...

...It is psychologically comforting, economically plausible and in some ways politically popular...

...But the development of an indigenous, democratic Left in Latin America has constituted a sort of Pavlovian bell to which many an American liberal has been ready to run like some slavering dog...

...imperialism...

...I do not pretend to assume that anyone outside the State Department or the United Fruit Company believes the future of Latin America lies with the Right—with the oligarchs of Guatemala or Nicaragua, or the gorillas of Brazil or Argentina, or the con men currently running Peru...

...After such an analysis, Latin America's Leftists would be doomed to a richly deserved obscurity...

...The spectacular failure of guerrilla tactics to succeed in such a context would be laughable were it not for the general damage inflicted on the cause of the Left...

...Gerassi accuses gm of a plot to create a "national bourgeoisie" in Brazil (news to the flourishing bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo, I am sure...

...Those who define Latin American problems primarily in terms of conditions external to the United States and offer assistance based on this assumption will only perpetuate U.S...

...the Marxist groups described it as an instrument of imperialism, useless for bringing about the needed change...

...The editors allege that they are offering us a "Documentary Report" on Latin American radicalism, but if these be the archives of the Left, I tremble for the future of our sister republics...

...If the uneven and sometimes contradictory contents of this book are any guide, I fear the answer is no...

...Latin America is in dire need of economic development...

...The people of Latin America are very poor, but they have not lost their profound sense of human dignity...

...Yet many Latin American Leftists are reluctant to face the fact that they are, simply and literally, dependent on capitalist sources in advanced nations for the assistance they need...

...The Left must decide, first of all, whether armed struggle, of which Latin America has seen so much in the past, represents the principal alternative for its future...

...The solution was simple [sic...

...He might as well have accused gm of creating a "national proletariat," too, since no doubt many a landless peasant flocked to Sao Paulo to get jobs in the gm assembly plant...

...I do not believe for a minute that the future of Latin American radicalism lies in the twisted hopes of violent men...

...Then it brought the entrepreneurs' capital into huge holding corporations which, in turn, it rigidly controlled...

...Then it assembled them in Sao Paulo and called them Brazil-made...

...Excluding Cuba, proportionately the most heavily armed republic south of the Rio Grande, total military spending amounts to less than 2 per cent of Latin America's combined Gross National Product...

...for an equivalent dependence on the USSR, whose onslaught against Czech independence last August he felt constrained to support...

...If Leftists choose the path of the guerrilla, they should stop being horrified by the response of the gorilla...

...He writes: "As American corporations became acutely plagued by surplus goods, they realized that they would have to expand their markets in underdeveloped countries...

...Thus General Motors first offered these local entrepreneurs contracts by which it helped finance the servicing industries...

...The truly indigenous ideas that are coming out of Latin America today spring from the Christian humanism of men like Eduardo Frei and Emilio Maspero...

...This is the view held by such genuine nationalists of the Left as Raul Prebisch, Eduardo Frei and Emilio Maspero, Secretary General of the Latin American Confederation of Christian Trade Unionists (clasc), and it is the view too often rejected by U.S...

...If the Left is to follow its all-too-powerful instinct for self-pity, its predisposition to search for blame rather than solutions, its yearning for the tabula rasa—the society that has been utterly purified because it has been utterly destroyed—what hope can there be for a future different from Latin America's past...

...John Gerassi, who sees a wicked imperialist under every bed, is typical of the latter...

...For President Frei of Chile, the enemy conies also from within...

...The American corporations, having set up assembly plants in Sao Paulo or Buenos Aires, which they called Brazilian or Argentinian corporations, actually decided to help create the subsidiary industries themselves—with local money...

...It attributes to the United States almost magical powers—more power than any nation could ever reasonably exert...

...The Right accuses him of demagogy, the Left of paternalism...

...Above all, perhaps, Latin American radicals must decide whether the enemy lies principally without or within...

...And, finally, he neglects to tell us that Volkswagen has long since captured the lion's share of Brazil's auto market by establishing a huge manufacturing plant of its own...

...It is the simplest of matters to blame every ill and affliction currently besetting Latin America on U.S...

...And they should stop whining about the revival of militarism that has taken place in Latin America over the past decade...

...For the most part, it lacks the technical and material resources necessary for modernization...

...To be quite frank about it, I tremble for the prospects of Latin American radicalism itself...

...The flaws in this tortured analysis are so pervasive one hardly knows where to begin...

...As Prebisch notes, it is privilege that is the real enemy of the Left and of Latin America itself—privilege embodied in the latifundia system in agriculture and the protectionist system in industry, privilege that has encrusted and hardened to granite firmness on the face of the entire South American continent...

...We have been aware for years that the oligarchs have frittered away Latin America's future through their own internal wrangling...

...The question is, of course, whether the reverse flow will prove any more felicitous to the cause of mankind than that load of ideological baggage with which the North has encumbered the South in times past...

...Normally, the landed oligarchy and entrepreneurs in the area would do their own investing in those subsidiary industries, and having successfully amassed large amounts of capital, would join together to create their own car industry...

...The holding corporations became very successful, making the entrepreneurs happy, and everyone forgot about a local competitive car industry, making cm happy...

...For men like Gerassi, "the best that Eduardo Frei has been able to do is to launch sewing classes in the slums...

...policy-makers in Washington, who think they know the answers better and who arc supported in this foolish belief by the machine-gun philosophers of the Latin American Left...

...As the Black Panthers and the sds will testify, the flow of political ideology is currently running south to north, shattering the old myth that all political wisdom springs from the temperate realms of Europe and her New World daughter...

...It is that "unholy alliance of the extreme Right and Left" which joined to block the Alliance for Progress from achieving its goals...

...And of this amount less than 2 per cent is supplied by the United States in the form of military aid...

...He has traded his country's economic dependence on the U.S...

...Change this social structure to meet the needs of development, he maintains, and "the foreign enterprise must inevitably change as well...

...Though using different reasons and channels, both were in accord—neither for the first time nor for the last...

...If the Left is to follow this deplorable pattern, where will salvation be found...

...And, alas, our reflexes have been foiled by too many false answers...

...Along the way we are treated, more or less at random, to a mixed bag of scholarly sociological analyses and hysterical anti-imperialist polemics, including a curiously out-of-place but interesting study of the impact of immigration on the development of Argentina...

...The victims have been the Latin American people, because this collusion prevented the reforms necessary for instituting a rapid and authentic democratic process in the hemisphere...

...But its painfully slow, patient work could be swept away overnight by romantics, the adventurers who have bought the reckless notion that development and modernization are best achieved at the point of a gun...

...Reviewed by WILLIAM P. LINEBERRY Managing editor, Foreign Policy Association Since we Americans have grown so accustomed to extracting and importing oil, copper and tin from Latin America, I suppose it should come as no surprise that we are now doing the same with ideas—although, as usual, it is the Latin Americans who are supplying the raw materials and the North Americans who are reaping the profits (two of the three editors of this $10 book are Yanquis...

...Without fundamental change in American society, violent confrontation is inevitable...

...The threat of guerrilla warfare, together with the example of Cuba, have probably done more to foster that revival than all the military aid that Washington has supplied...

...With the "creative disorder" characteristic of the New Left, the editors have slung together a disparate jumble of views, ranging from the democratic nationalism of Raul Prebisch and Eduardo Frei to the machine-gun Leftism of Regis Debray and Che Guevara...

...economic hegemony, has found out...

...These are the men who bear the Left's great heritage of compassion and devotion to the dignity of all...

...domination...

...The contributions by Guevara, Castro, Debray, Gerassi, and others indicate that they too stand in fascinated awe of America's superhuman power and influence...

...653 pp...

...But intellectually it smacks of McCarthyism in reverse...

...Consider, for example, the following comment by Fred Goff and Michael Locker: "The fate of peaceful democratic modernization in Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, or the Dominican Republic, pivots on the political, corporate, and military structures of American society...

...Some, like President Frei of Chile, have faced the issue squarely and hammered out a workable solution...

...The reactionaries, mindful of their vested interests, maintained that the Alliance was a Utopian and unrealistic program...

...Others prefer to retreat into paranoia, complaining bitterly about the profits being taken out and ignoring the investment of capital and technology coming in...

...Gerassi prefers the moral excellence of Che Guevara, who backed the Arab guerrillas in their war against "imperialist" Israel and laid it down that "Our soldiers must hate...

...The Left must also decide whether Latin America's desperate need for external capital can be reconciled with its goals of national independence The problem is not an easy one, as even Fidel Castro, who speaks so eloquently in these pages against U.S...

...But I am also convinced that the causes and cures of Latin America's troubles rest first and last with Latin Americans themselves...

...Next it shopped around for local entrepreneurs to launch the subsidiary industries?seat covers, spark plugs, etc...

...This is what the Cuban revolutionaries profoundly understood and the American people, including liberals from the Church, university, and the professions, have never confronted...

...This 'national' bourgeoisie, like all such classes in colonialized countries, had to be created by the service industries, yet somehow limited so that it did not become economically independent...

...It fosters the incredible illusion that without the United States, Latin America's problems would automatically disappear...

...These are the men who hold the future of Latin American radicalism in their grasp...

...Take General Motors, for example...

...This "Documentary Report" is important, if for no other reason than that it indicates the extent of the divisiveness and internal contradiction that continues to afflict the Latin American Left...

...The fact is that despite the machine-gun Leftists, Latin America's defense Establishment remains the smallest of any region in the world...

...To do so, however, they would have to help develop a national bourgeoisie which could purchase these goods...

...I am aware that the United States has cruelly abused Latin America in times past, and that American corporations have on occasion gouged or exploited hapless and downtrodden people...