Over Christmas break, while Georgetown students all slept in past noon and senators wrangled over oil in Alaska, a man who billed himself as the United States’ “nightmare” won the presidency of Bolivia in a landslide. Evo Morales’ election is a sign of the distaste Latin America and the developing world have for America’s hemispheric domination and the political and economic exploitation that goes with it. Perhaps it is also a sign that they have learned how to resist. That does not bode well for the U.S., or for the hegemonic comfort Americans take for granted.
As a child, I spent two years in Ecuador while my father worked for a U.S. oil company. If my family had tried to hide the rampant poverty from me, they surely would have failed—it was on every street corner, every sidewalk, in every neighborhood. Even at home, we were not isolated from it; the gardener, maid and guards went home to deplorable conditions every night. While 36 percent of Latin Americans live in poverty, the vast, disproportionate majority of the region’s African descendants and indigenous people live in extreme poverty, largely ignored by the international community and by their own governments.
Bolivia, especially, has always been destitute. The country is rich in natural resources, especially natural gas, but the profits always seem to slip out of the country or into the deep pockets of the rich, instead of helping fund infrastructure improvements or social welfare programs. As David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column on Morales’ election, “Economic policies can’t work where culture is ailing.”
Since the late 1800s, the U.S. has supported right-wing dictatorships in almost all of the countries of Latin America. In recent decades, we did so to fight the specter of communism, and impose our pet economic policies of free trade, privatization and fiscal austerity on our neighbors.
The Washington Consensus was built, a group of pro-American governments which heeded our presidents’ every call. Despite worthy aims like building infrastructure and modern economies, our reforms are crumbling in the face of the severe growing pains they caused.
Morales is an Aymara Indian without a high school education, but he tramps across the Andes in his trademark black jeans and torn sneakers and each community greets him like a conquering hero. And he doesn’t need a university education to unearth the unwelcome monuments of American influence. He can simply point to the 700-mile wall under construction along our southern border, or to Latin America’s U.S. embassies, where foreign nationals stand patiently in day-long lines for visas, waiting to get refused.
Morales’ rallying cry is the decriminalization of coca, the main ingredient of cocaine. It’s a crop the U.S. has attempted to eradicate across South America, building military bases and flying sorties over the jungle to fumigate suspected plantations. In Ecuador and Colombia, the herbicides have entered the water supply of Amazonian peoples, and they are blamed for the increased rates of cancer and birth defects.
The uneducated, poor mass of people in Latin America remain overlooked even as we profit off of them and treat the entire continent like a Petri dish for our economic theories. Morales sees that, and something else—that resentment against every vestige of American influence has grown so powerful and so deeply ingrained that it can win elections. Any candidate willing to reverse the reforms of the Washington Consensus will be viewed as a savior, and if elected democratically, the U.S. risks duplicity in denouncing them. Are the only good presidents the ones who agree with us?
Morales is obviously not the first man to campaign by railing against U.S. policies—Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezeula jump to mind. And Morales’ speeches are not the fieriest among his contemporaries. He is also unlikely to become the most radical of Latin America’s leftist leaders, but that is not what makes him significant.
Morales embodies the hands that are peeling off our chokehold on Latin America’s jugular––dark-skinned and speckled with dirt—the same people I saw begging in the streets as a child. And if these once-silent peoples continue to use the institutions we have emptily promoted for a dozen decades—democracy and diplomacy—how will we ever fend off the blows? Perhaps it is time Americans showed their neighbors respect by allowing them to stand on their own. And it is time Americans, especially the highly educated among us, remembered that our hegemony is anything but static.
