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SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- As Central America's last self-proclaimed "rightist" president packs his desk and prepares to leave office, a region that was once a bastion of right-wing dictatorships and conservative "neoliberal" governments is now pitching lefty.
Salvadoran President Tony Saca, the United States' closest conservative ally in Central America, will hand over power to incoming President Mauricio Funes of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
El Salvador and Nicaragua will now be governed by former Marxist guerrilla movements, while Guatemala and Honduras are led by their own brands of self-styled leftist governments, the first socialist-leaning administrations in either country in more than 50 years.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias remains the region's right-of-center standard bearer, while Panama's president-elect, Ricardo Martinelli, a supermarket mogul who takes office July 1, appears to be the conservatives' new hope in the region. But in broader terms, the pendulum of power in Central America has clearly swung from right to left over the past few years.
Now the question is: So what?
In an era of modern democracy and global economics, the distinction between right and left has become blurred and even irrelevant -- an anachronistic construct that means more during presidential campaigns than it does in actual governance.
"It is tempting to say that Central America has moved to the left, but that is a mostly superficial view of what is happening," said Michael Shifter, vice president of policy for the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C. think tank on Latin America.
Shifter says even the region's two newest presidents-elect in El Salvador and Panama, who ostensibly represent opposite ends of the political spectrum, have "more similarities than differences" in that they both ran as outsiders challenging a tired status quo. "It would not be surprising to find that, as presidents, Funes and Martinelli govern in similar ways," Shifter said.
"Their options on economic policy are severely limited and leave little room for bold experimentation. Despite the left-right labels attached, it will probably not be easy to find much daylight between their performances."
Even intellectuals cited by the left say the labels of right-wing and left-wing are mostly meaningless descriptions.
U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky, whose writings have been quoted by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, told The Miami Herald in an e-mail that the terms right and left have become "hopelessly corrupted by propaganda."
Perhaps nowhere else in Central America is the blur more smudgy than in Nicaragua, where Sandinista President Daniel Ortega -- a figurehead of the old-school left -- has forged new political alliances with conservative opposition leaders and the Catholic Church. Those pacts have led to such revolutionary moves as the elimination of several minority political parties and a new law to ban life-saving therapeutic abortions for women.
Despite Ortega's claims of socialism, his government's handling of the budget and macroeconomic stability has been celebrated by fiscal conservatives, including the International Monetary Fund.
'If I were to use an adjective to describe the Sandinistas' macro-management of the economy, the words that come to mind are responsible and, God forbid, conservative," said opposition Liberal Constitutional Party lawmaker Francisco Aguirre, a member of the National Assembly's Budget Commission.
In El Salvador, the distinction between right and left is also looking fuzzy, even before Funes takes office. The former TV journalist elected on the ticket of the FMLN is trying to maintain a tricky centrist balancing act and has kept his distance from the likes of Ortega and Chávez, despite meeting with the Venezuelan leader May 19.
Still, Funes has said he will not join Chávez's socialist club, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, and instead has turned to the IMF and other international lending institutions for help confronting the crisis.
In Panama, the recent election of Martinelli has Central America's beleaguered right sensing a comeback.
Costa Rica's far-right Libertarian Party is already organizing a meeting of like-minded Central American politicians next month in San José, where the invited guest of honor is Martinelli. The meeting, according to a press release, aims to unite conservative politicians to "rescue Central America from the irresponsible, sterile and impoverishing policies of authoritarian populism and retake the path toward well-being, development and modernization in our countries."
But conservatives holding office don't seem to share that same ideological zeal for change.
Even Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, the hemisphere's last right-wing president, says the difference between right and left is mostly symbolic.
"Throughout the continent, we are all committed to the rule of democracy, so the old divisions become obsolete, polarizing and of little practical sense," Uribe said during a recent speech to business leaders in Panama City.
What Uribe didn't mention is that he and his leftist Latin American counterparts also share a commitment to staying in power beyond their term limits, even if it means bending the rules of their respective democracies. Uribe is the latest president in the hemisphere seeking a referendum that would allow him to run for a second reelection in 2010 -- an aspiration that the opposition is calling "dictatorial."
Indeed in Latin America, the common goal of political power seems to trump any lesser ideological differences.
Tim Rogers is editor of The Nica Times in Nicaragua.
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