The Latin American Spring

The Latin American Spring / 14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner
Posted on December 13, 2015

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, 12 December 2015 — Has the Latin
American Spring finally sprung? Perhaps. There are signs. Antonio
Machado records the doubt in his Canciones: "Spring has come, nobody
knows how."

All springs are different.

Eastern Europe's, in the second half of the eighties, was possible
because the stars surprisingly aligned themselves under the firmament of
absolute disgust with Real Socialism, sunk in economic failure and
political disrepute. It was the glorious moment of Havel, Walesa,
Reagan, John Paul II, Sakharov and especially Gorbachev, a naïve and
melancholy gravedigger for that sinister undertaker forged by the KGB
and the Red Army.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism

The blaze quickly spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. It seemed
that there was, in the Arab world, a curdled desire to establish
Western-style regimes, but that was not the case. What did exist, in
reality, was the will to put an end to corrupt and incompetent military
tyrannies that kept a substantial part of the population in poverty. To
"the people" it didn't matter if the substitutes were curacas from
radical Islam, who imposed sharia and stuffed women into burkas to
prevent the lewd exhibition of their faces.

What are the signs that allow us to speak about the emergence of a Latin
American spring? There are at least three.

First, tentatively in October, Guatemalans elected Jimmy Morales – a
television actor from the center-right with no political experience –
over Sandra Torres, a woman from the left. Morales's motto was simple
and clear: "Neither corrupt nor a thief." With this promise, he got
twice the votes of Torres. Morales did not promise a revolution, but
rather to return to republican roots, good management, honesty, and
markets, and to combat poverty freeing the productive energy of the country.

In November it was the turn of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, another
politician from the center-right. He did something that seemed
impossible a few months earlier: defeating Peronism in its Kirchner
variant, although his opponent, Daniel Scioli, was the most presentable
face of that tendency, because, at bottom, he was oblivious to it. Macri
also promised good government, tranquility, less populism, less
cronyism, and, especially, to fight against corruption and drug trafficking.

The third symptom of the Latin American spring was the parliamentary
elections of 6 December in Venezuela. The democratic opposition managed
to gain a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, with which it
can curb the totalitarian drift of Chavismo and begin to rebuild the
country after 17 years of stupidity and abuses.

Voters punished Maduro for the atrocious shortages, the highest
inflation in the world, the murderous violence that has turned the
country into a slaughterhouse, the limitless corruption, and for the
pathetic ignorance of a president who trills and can talk to the birds,
but not to the people, because his little head is filled with "millions
of penises" and uncontrollable fish, as if he were premiering a comical
version of Tourette Syndrome.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/venezuelan-president-nicolas-maduro-freudian-slip-multiply-christ-multiplied-penises-article-1.1441650

The Latin American Spring is based on a rejection of corruption, as we
have seen in the three countries mentioned, and as seen in Brazil and
Chile. It can be seen in the conviction that populism, with its constant
violations of the law, high public spending, welfare cronyism, constant
demagoguery, and that obscene anti-market, anti-American and
anti-Western language, all leading to economic disruption and
catastrophe that invariably results in a painful adjustment.

Latin America is tired of the incendiary talk of the Sao Paulo Forum, of
the devastating madness of 21st Century Socialism, of the ALBA sect
launched by Hugo Chavez and financed by Venezuelan petrodollars.

This Spring will carry away Bolivia's Evo and his anti-Republican
multinational invention, Correa's Ecuadorian experiment, Sandanista
Daniel Ortega's "neo-Somoza-ism," and will leave Cuba abandoned, more
alone than ever, languishing in poverty, while the leaders who made
possible this incredibly cruel way to mortify human beings are disappearing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales

Source: The Latin American Spring / 14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner |
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