Monthly Archives: August 2020

Political Report # 1450   Walking the Tightrope: Latin America's Pink Tide by Frederick B. Mills, New Politics   Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings Steve Ellner, ed. Foreword by Boaventura de Sousa Santos Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. 355 pp. Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings, edited by economic historian and prominent Latin Americanist Steve Ellner, offers a critical ethical theoretical framework for assessing the performance of left and left-of-center governments in Latin America during the Pink Tide. The “Pink Tide” refers to the wave of progressive governments beginning with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. These progressive governments provided alternatives to the neoliberal economic model that had brought growing economic and social inequality, austerity, privatization of public resources, and political subordination to Washington to most of the region during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Pink Tide governments were brought to power by widespread disillusion with traditional political parties and were buoyed by social movements that sought economic and social justice and more democratic participation in the political life of their nations. The Pink Tide brought a period of economic nationalism, progress toward regional integration, and the inclusion, [...]

Political Report # 1449   What is Next for Washington After Its Failed Venezuela Strategy? by Steve Ellner, Consortium News   It’s come out in the open now in Washington that the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy is an embarrassing failure but will the next administration wise up, or double down?, asks Steve Ellner. Senator Chris Murphy’s recent characterization of U.S. policy toward Venezuela as an “unmitigated disaster” makes it conspicuously clear that many in the political establishment recognize the need for a change in course. The statement by such an influential Democrat may signal a policy revision toward Venezuela, though not particularly comprehensive, on the part of a Joe Biden administration. Murphy (CT-D), who made his remarks to Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams at an Aug. 4 Foreign Relations Committee hearing, pointed out that dissension within the Venezuelan opposition threatens the leadership of self-proclaimed “president” Juan Guaidó. Murphy asked Abrams: “Is Juan Guaidó [for the Trump administration] going to be the recognized leader of Venezuela permanently, no matter how conditions change on the ground?” The question was a good one because the success of Trump’s Venezuela strategy is predicated on Guaidó’s continued undisputed leadership. There’s no fall-back strategy. Since [...]

Por Rodrigo Yáñez[1] and Daniela García Grandón[2] | Aug. 10, 2020 Por Rodrigo Yáñez[1] and Daniela García Grandón[2] With the expansion of the COVID-19 the society has experienced a return to history. Although we have never escaped it, it seemed as if the levels of hyper-connection and technological advances had put us in another dimension, that of the end of history, different from all time before. To a certain extent, the contemporary view was more open to the idea of colonizing Mars than to remembering past events such as the epidemics that struck Egypt, Rome or Tenochtitlan. This distancing from history can be associated with a growing appreciation in recent decades for the narratives of memory. In Latin America, memory has gained particular relevance since the 1980s and 1990s with the imperative to confront the historical traumas of death and horror that many societies did not always want to remember. Memory became a moral value according to which the past had to be made present so that it would never happen again. In this way, the dispute over memory opened up as a space for redefining societies themselves, a narrative effort by individuals to give meaning to the facts [3]. Revisiting the recent [...]