Why Stop at Two?
Greg Grandin
London Review of Books
October 22, 2009
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/print/gran01_.html
Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left edited by
Jorge Castañeda and Marco Morales
`The people of South America are the most ignorant, the
most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman
Catholics in Christendom,' John Adams, the second
American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they
could form a `confederation of free governments', as
the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had
proposed, was as `absurd as similar plans would be to
establish democracies among the birds, beasts and
fishes'. Until recently, scholars pretty much agreed.
The region had plenty of liberals, but a category that
includes both Miranda - who corresponded with Thomas
Paine, participated in the American and French
Revolutions and led Venezuela's break from Spain - and
Porfirio Díaz, Mexico's strongman for around 30 years
at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as the
politics that the term `liberalism' seeks to explain.
Historians tended to think that liberalism, which had
no roots in the continent, masked a colonial legacy of
patrimonial royalism and Catholic monism which produced
authoritarians like Díaz and utopians like Miranda, a
knight errant, Adams wrote, `as delirious as his
immortal countryman, the ancient hero of La Mancha'.
After the 1959 Cuban revolution, figuring out how to
stop the swing between authoritarianism and utopianism
- and how to prevent the spread of Communism - became a
central preoccupation of social scientists in the US.
Latin America served as a testing ground for
modernisation theory, a project aimed at shepherding
developing countries to democracy. In the early 1960s,
the goal was to set up functioning welfare states. The
purpose of society, Walt Rostow wrote in Stages of
Economic Growth, published in 1960, is not `compound
interest for ever'; human beings were not `maximising
units' but `pluralist' beings who deserved to live in
dignity. `The future of the hemisphere did seem bright
with hope,' Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote after JFK
announced the Alliance for Progress, which promised
`homes, work and land, health and schools - techo,
trabajo y tierra, salud y escuelas'. JFK `pronounced
the Spanish manfully', Schlesinger said, `but with a
distinct New England intonation'.
By the mid-1970s, however, nearly all of South America
was ruled by juntas and Central America was convulsed
by civil wars. Union members, peasant activists,
reformist politicians, priests and teachers were
persecuted; hundreds of thousands were killed by the
security forces; more than a million people in Central
America alone were driven from their homes.
Keynesianism had given way to neoliberalism, and Latin
America was now the laboratory for a more stringent
form of modernisation. Samuel Huntington was frank:
`democracy,' he wrote in 1989, `is clearly compatible
with inequality in both wealth and income, and, in some
measure, it may be dependent on such inequality.' By
the time the Berlin Wall came down that November,
almost every Latin American country had returned to
some form of constitutional rule. Manuel Noriega held
out in Panama, but he was dispatched a month later by
US troops in Washington's first post-Cold War invasion.
There was still Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated,
having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June
1990, Bush père could claim that a `rising tide of
democracy, never before witnessed in this beloved
hemisphere' would soon make possible a `free trade zone
stretching from the port of Anchorage to Tierra del
Fuego'.
Latin America's conversion to free trade was short-
lived, however. In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected
president of Venezuela, and Latin America began another
turn to the left. In one country after another, self-
described socialists, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in
Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Evo Morales in
Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, came to power. In
April 2008, Fernando Lugo, a priest, became president
of Paraguay, ending more than six decades of one-party
rule, 35 of them under the dictatorship of General
Stroessner. Morales broke through Bolivia's political
deadlock in August 2008 by submitting to a recall
referendum, which he won with nearly 70 per cent of the
vote; he then presided over the ratification of a new
social-democratic constitution. A year earlier, more
than 65 per cent of Ecuadorians had voted for a new
charter. In February this year, Venezuela's
constitution was amended, allowing Chávez to run for
re-election when his term ends in 2012. And in March,
Mauricio Funes, of the Farabundo Martí National
Liberation Front, was elected president of El Salvador.
Surveying the resurgent Latin American left, policy
makers and commentators tend to divide it into social
democrats whom Washington can work with, and demagogues
who must be contained. As Michael Reid, an editor at
the Economist, puts it, it is `hard to overstate what
is at stake in this ideological rivalry, this battle
for Latin America's soul' between liberal democrats and
a new generation of knights errant who have learned to
manipulate the rites of democracy - that is, elections
- while hollowing out its substance. The Mexican
political scientist and former foreign minister Jorge
Castañeda also divides the left into two camps:
pragmatists, forward-looking reformers such as Lula and
Bachelet, who have made their peace with a globalised
world and the reality of US power; and irreconcilables
such as Chávez and Morales, nostalgists more than
populists who cling to `introverted and archaic'
notions of sovereignty and anti-imperialism. `The
revolution, the assault on the Winter Palace,' he
writes, `is still ever gently on their mind.'
But why stop at two lefts? Latin America's presidents
embody distinct traditions: trade-unionism, indigenous
peasant organisation and progressive military
nationalism, in the cases of Lula, Morales and Chávez;
left developmentalism with Correa, who has a PhD in
economics, in Ecuador; middle-class social democracy
with Bachelet and Tabaré Vázquez, both doctors, in
Chile and Uruguay; liberation theology with Lugo in
Paraguay; and Peronism in Argentina with Cristina Ferná
ndez, who along with her predecessor and husband,
Néstor Kirchner, has returned her party to its populist
roots after a disastrous embrace of neoliberalism. The
insurgent New Left has its standard-bearers in Raúl
Castro and the still lingering Fidel in Cuba as well as
the tarnished Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The only
current not represented is old left Communism, though
Communist Parties are part of the governing coalitions
in Bolivia, El Salvador and Uruguay.
Latin America's new leftists, led by Lula and Chávez,
have brought about a significant realignment of
hemispheric relations, drawing even American allies
such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico into their orbit and
coming close to achieving Miranda's wished for
`confederation of free governments'. Latin American
governments met twice last year, without Washington:
they condemned Colombia's US-supported raid into
Ecuador to attack a Farc camp and supported Morales in
the face of separatist attacks that left scores of
government supporters dead. On a range of issues -
opposition to the war in Iraq, normalisation of
relations with Cuba and ratification of the
International Criminal Court - they have shown a degree
of unanimity and an independence from the US that would
have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
In Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia and
Bolivia, indigenous movements have upheld social
democratic traditions. In Peru, an indigenous protest
recently forced the revocation of laws aimed at opening
up large swathes of the Amazon to foreign logging,
mining and oil corporations. There have been advances
in gay and women's rights, including access to
abortion: Uruguay, for example, this year made it legal
for gay couples to adopt. Rights, it seems, have been
expanding in Latin America at a moment when they seem
to be contracting elsewhere. Despite this, much of the
literature on Latin America continues to emphasise the
fragility of democracy in the region. This may
sometimes be true of government institutions, but it's
not true of social movements and political culture,
where the idea of democracy has proved remarkably
resilient.
#
Over the last two decades, social and intellectual
historians have revised their interpretation of
Hispanic liberalism. The revitalisation in Europe of
Thomist rational natural law - one of the foundations
of the notion of inalienable rights - has been traced
back to debates among the Dominicans about the
brutality of Spanish conquest and colonialism. Stuart
Schwartz found an unexpected degree of religious
toleration in Iberian colonial society,* while legal
theorists have come to appreciate the blend of moderate
French Girondism with an Anglo-American concentration
on rights that defined the first generation of
independence leaders such as Miranda. Early 19th-
century republican constitutions and civil codes in
Mexico, Argentina, Nueva Granada, Alto Perú and Chile
balanced the liberal imperatives of separate powers and
limiting the role of government with the ideal of
promoting a virtuous society.
Yet liberalism did not generate stable and enduring
governments. By the middle of the 20th century, Latin
American countries had approved a total of 186
constitutions, an average of just under ten per
country. Venezuela alone had 24. `Treaties are scraps
of paper,' Simón Bolívar said, `constitutions, printed
matter; elections, battles; freedom, anarchy; and life
a torment.' One reason for this volatility was that, in
the decades before independence, profoundly illiberal
societies had developed in South America in tandem with
export-based economies. Rather than spread power and
wealth, Latin American capitalism, which was based on
seignorial estates and forced labour, concentrated
privilege. While demands for pure Spanish blood were
relaxed, new forms of cultural racism took their place.
The United States is often the standard by which Latin
America is judged, but it's important to remember that
Latin America didn't have a `north', a region with a
free labour system in which liberalism could develop.
In Latin America, every liberalisation was the result
of violent social conflict, from the Túpac Amaru
rebellion in the Andes in the 1780s, the 1794 Haitian
revolution and the insurgencies led by the priests
Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos in Mexico in the
1810s, to the Cuban independence wars of the second
half of the 19th century and the Mexican revolution of
1910. These and dozens of lesser-known peasant and
slave revolts not only weakened the system of forced
labour but infused liberalism's abstract promises of
equality with examples of collectivism in action.
Generations of conflict over labour and land rights
made Latin America famous for its revolutionaries, but
less well known is its contribution to social
democracy. In 1917 Mexico produced the world's most
elaborate social democratic constitution, prohibiting
child labour, affirming the right to form unions and
hold strikes, enacting land reform, abolishing debt
peonage, and mandating healthcare, pensions,
unemployment and accident insurance for workers. Every
Latin American country followed suit, ratifying ever
longer constitutions with chapter-length sections on
social rights and duties, labour, education, family and
economic order. Between 1944 and 1946, Latin America
experienced its first, forgotten `transition to
democracy': nearly every country in South America and
most of those in Central America, along with the
Dominican Republic and Cuba, became a democratic state;
those that were already democracies extended the vote,
strengthened labour rights and implemented social
security programmes. Social democracy became synonymous
with modernity. `We are socialists,' Guatemala's first
truly democratically elected president, Juan José
Arévalo, said in 1945, `because we live in the 20th
century.'
Latin Americans also pushed for reform abroad: 21 Latin
American representatives - the largest regional caucus
- joined 29 others from around the world in San
Francisco in 1945 to found the UN, pressing it to
confront the problem of colonial racism and to adopt a
human rights policy. Chile and Panama supplied the
draft charters on which the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights was based, and the Chilean academic Hernán
Santa Cruz served on the committee, chaired by Eleanor
Roosevelt, which wrote the final text. A well-heeled,
Jesuit-educated socialist, and a friend of Salvador
Allende, Santa Cruz was the committee's most forceful
advocate of social rights: the right to welfare, to
work, to unionise, to rest and leisure time, to food,
clothing, housing, healthcare and free education. Cuba
inserted into the charter the right to an adequate
standard of living, the Dominican Republic included a
provision on sexual equality, and Mexico had the phrase
`without any limitation due to race, nationality or
religion' added to the clause guaranteeing freely
contracted marriages.
Latin American lawyers, notably the Chilean diplomat
Alejandro Alvarez, also challenged the assumptions of
Great Power diplomacy. Alvarez argued that the `liberal
and democratic spirit of all the nations which compose
the New World' provided an opportunity to establish a
new co-operative diplomacy. Washington had long
insisted on its right to intervene in its `backyard'.
But Franklin Roosevelt, hamstrung by the Great
Depression and forced to extricate the US from a series
of marine occupations in the Caribbean basin, dropped
this when he recognised the sovereignty of Latin
American nations late in 1933, his first significant
foreign policy achievement. Legal theorists in Brazil,
Argentina, Chile and Colombia supported his Atlantic
Charter, hoping that it would lay the foundation for an
international social democratic order. By 1943,
Roosevelt was holding up the `illustration of the
republics of this continent' as a model for postwar
liberal multilateralism. Though he took credit for
overcoming `many times 21 different kinds of hate' to
`sell the idea of peace and security among the American
republics', the inspiration could just as well be
traced to Bolívar's call in 1826 for the creation of a
confederation of American nations.
From 1947, though, the landed class, along with their
defenders in the clergy and military, took advantage of
the Cold War to stage a counter-offensive. Within a few
years, a majority of Latin American countries were once
again under military rule. The US State Department
supported this turn, believing that the region's
`excessively rapid trend towards the adjustment of
social rights' had resulted in unacceptable levels of
`political instability' that threatened access to
resources and paved the way for Communist penetration.
George Kennan, the theorist of containment, argued that
it was `better to have a strong regime in power' in
Latin America `than a liberal government if it is
indulgent' to Communists. And Washington helped make
sure things stayed that way, funding and training
security forces to disastrous ends in one country after
another. Kennan wrote in a long memo to Dean Acheson
that the US should accept that `harsh governmental
measures of repression may be the only answer.' `South
America,' he added, `is the reverse of our own North
American continent,' its geography tropical, its
mongrel people `unhappy and hopeless', and its history
`unfortunate and tragic almost beyond anything ever
known'.
#
In the debate over what is and isn't different about US
hegemony, little attention has been paid to the most
important factor in the rise of the US: Latin America.
`South America will be to North America,' an essayist
wrote in the North American Review in 1821, `what Asia
and Africa are to Europe.' Not quite. Modern capitalist
empires - France, Holland and Great Britain in Africa,
Asia and the Middle East - ruled over culturally and
religiously distinct peoples. Anglo-American settlers,
by contrast, looked to Iberian America not as an
epistemic `other' but as a rival in a fight to define a
set of nominally shared values. John Winthrop urged the
first generation of Puritan settlers to build a `City
upon a Hill', yet as they struggled to survive one
freezing winter after another, their thoughts turned to
the rumoured `magnificence' of an already existing New
World metropolis - Americana Mexicana - so advanced it
boasted `1500 coaches drawn with mules', as Samuel
Sewall wrote in his diary in 1702. While Cotton Mather
taught himself Spanish, Sewall elaborated what may be
the earliest version of the shock doctrine. Spotting a
blaze in the night sky, he hoped the comet would strike
Mexico City and spark a `revolution' that would lead to
a mass conversion. `I have long prayed for Mexico,' he
said, `that god would open the Mexican fountain.'
Within a generation of its independence from Britain,
the US would begin to measure its progress against the
`deathlike sleep of Spanish dominion', aristocratic in
its pretensions, indolent in its industry and
superstitious in its beliefs. `I hate the dons,' the
future American president Andrew Jackson wrote in 1806,
while he was involved in machinations to separate
Florida and Louisiana from Spain; `I would delight to
see Mexico reduced.'
Pan-American relations developed into an ideological
contest over who best represented common principles,
which helps explain why Latin America remained social
democratic while US liberalism became missionary and
evangelical. The very idea of `Latin' America took
shape after Washington's annexation of more than a
third of Mexico's territory in 1848. `They would
concentrate the universe in themselves,' the Chilean
liberal Francisco Bilbao complained after William
Walker's 1856 invasion of Nicaragua, where he brought
back slavery years after it had been abolished: `The
Yankee replaces the American; Roman patriotism,
philosophy; wealth, morality; and self-interest,
justice.' When Washington attempted, at the 1889 pan-
American conference, to strengthen the Monroe
Doctrine's `America for the Americans' clause - which
Latin Americans tended to interpret as `America for the
US' - Argentina countered by proclaiming `America for
humanity'. As efforts to overcome the region's feudal
past coincided with the US's rise to global hegemony, a
diffuse cultural anti-imperialism developed first into
social democratic non-interventionism, then into New
Left militancy.
Washington's first experiences with foreign nation-
building - a few decades after Reconstruction in the
South - were in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Nicaragua and Panama. But the `New Latin America' was
as hard to build as the New South. While it was easy to
disparage the defeated Confederacy's manorialism and
belief in white supremacy, throughout the 20th century
US diplomats found themselves in competition with Latin
American nationalists honed in struggle against their
own agrarian lords over who best represented
progressive democracy. During the Cold War, this
contest forced Washington to respond to Communism and
nationalism with social democracy, promoted by
modernisation programmes such as the Alliance for
Progress. It was a tough sell, since the US was
simultaneously arming the region's landed class and its
constabulary. Reagan shifted emphasis, enlisting
Bolívar, Augusto Sandino, José Martí and even the
`Bolívarian teachings' of Miranda in the new right
crusade for `political liberty': code, in part, for
unregulated capitalism.
It is in this context that the Washington Consensus - a
term coined by the economist John Williamson to
describe the application of the neoclassical economic
model adopted by Chile to the rest of Latin America -
needs to be placed, as the latest attempt to `open the
Mexican fountain'. The two-year-long, tight-money
programme - run in the early 1980s by Paul Volcker, the
chair of the US Federal Reserve - greatly inflated the
value of dollar-denominated Latin American debt,
leading the IMF to step in and order a structural
adjustment programme. In exchange for refinancing their
loans, the IMF forced a majority of Latin American
governments to privatise industries and services, cut
tariffs and subsidies, deregulate finance and weaken
labour law. Governments adopted ruthless anti-
inflationary regimes, slashing budgets, forsaking
deficit-financed efforts to spur industrial growth, and
handing central banks over to technocrats who paid more
attention to the US Treasury than to their own people.
The success of this model depended on the creation of a
new urban class of consumers with access to cheap
credit, who could make up for the decline in real
wages. But this worked only in a few urban areas in
Mexico, Colombia and the southern cone. Between 1980
and 2000, a 9 per cent per capita GDP growth rate - not
9 per cent a year, but 9 per cent over the whole two
decades - badly affected the middle class and
manufacturers. Cheap agricultural imports destroyed
peasant communities, reducing neoliberalism's support
base to a small transnational class. Deregulation led
to financial meltdowns, while the privatisation of
everything from nurseries to pensions fostered an orgy
of corruption. A recent study by the Brazilian
economist Carlos Medeiros reports that more than $100
billion of Latin American state assets were sold off in
the 1990s, resulting in a vast transfer of wealth to
foreign corporations and a new class of domestic super-
billionaires, such as Mexico's Carlos Slim Helú, whose
worth is equivalent to that of the poorest 17 million
Mexicans. The retreat of the Mexican state under Nafta
led to a rapid expansion of the drug trade. It's often
said that narco cartels - which were responsible for
more than 6000 drug-related murders last year - have
made Mexico ungovernable; even a potential `failed
state'. But in many places the cartels serve as an
effective parallel government, taxing legitimate
businesses, providing employment, and funding such
basic infrastructure projects as phone lines,
electricity and road-building. And drug revenue ($23
billion a year) helps keep the country's deregulated
banking system solvent.
#
The problems with neoliberalism encouraged the turn to
the left among voters in Latin American countries, and
the record of populist and pragmatist leftwingers alike
has been impressive. Poverty and inequality have fallen
in nearly all left-led countries, according to a recent
UN report, with Venezuela narrowing the gap most, by
increasing the wealth of the poorest by 36 per cent.
Chile and Brazil's GDP has grown by 5 per cent annually
over the last couple of years, Argentina's by 7 per
cent; even desperately poor Bolivia has seen more than
4 per cent growth under Morales. Critics attribute
Venezuela's pace-setting 8 per cent yearly increase to
high oil prices, which makes one wonder why petroleum-
exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico
grew at only 3 per cent. The answer is that Chávez's
massive spending on public works, education,
healthcare, housing, co-operatives and small businesses
has worked as a scattershot stimulus package. Much of
this expenditure may be wasteful, chaotic or corrupt,
but the country's unemployment rate has fallen from
nearly 20 per cent in 2004 to 9 per cent, the fastest
drop in Latin America. As Keynes himself pointed out,
the waste involved in public works projects is
infinitely less of a vice than the waste of intractable
unemployment. `Two pyramids', he said, are `twice as
good as one'.
There is variation in style and policy among Latin
America's new leftists, but it has more to do with
regional history than ideology. In the southern cone,
civilian and military dirigisme from the 1930s to the
1970s created complex, relatively diverse societies.
The neoliberalism introduced in the 1980s deepened
inequality and generated new social organisations -
such as Brazil's landless workers movement - but there
wasn't a complete collapse of the old political order.
In Chile, Bachelet is the fourth civilian president
since Pinochet left power in 1990, and has continued
her predecessors' efforts to rebuild a social safety
net. Lula also rose within an established political
system, and now presides over Latin America's largest
economy, with successful financial, agricultural,
energy and financial sectors. In the Andes, especially
in Bolivia and Ecuador, where racism is more
entrenched, class power more extreme and foreign
control more barefaced, privatisation and deregulation
stripped the economy to its core and destroyed the
existing order. The region's new leaders have
established unapologetically fortified executive
branches held accountable by elections and a mobilised,
socially diverse rank-and-file. They are more willing
to challenge the rules of the global political economy,
to nationalise industries, push land reform and
negotiate higher royalties from petroleum and gas
exports.
Critics such as Castañeda argue that populism is
unsustainable, but Morales in Bolivia and Correa in
Ecuador are managing so far. From 1998 until Correa's
election in 2006, no president in Ecuador had completed
a full term, as one after another was driven out of
office on corruption charges or by popular protests.
Bolivia before Morales was rocked by a series of
`resources wars' over gas and water privatisation which
led to the ousting of two presidents. In Venezuela,
after a raucous decade in power, Chávez's popularity
hovers around 60 per cent, and in regional elections
last year his newly formed United Socialist Party won
about 54 per cent of the vote. It is true that
plummeting oil prices might threaten Venezuela's social
gains, but Chile and Brazil are equally vulnerable to
this. Declining export revenue could, however, make it
difficult for Chávez to broker the demands of his
different supporters. Chavismo is both a governing
coalition and a social movement: this diversity
accounts for its vitality, but also limits it. The
global downturn might force a showdown between the new
Bolivarian bourgeoisie, or `boligarchy', and the
activists who believe they are building `21st-century
socialism'.
#
Along with Venezuela, Brazil has played a key role in
establishing Latin America's growing independence from
Washington. When Brazil announced last September, after
Morales's right-wing opponents in Bolivia tried to
destabilise his government, that it would not accept a
coup in South America, it was an act of solidarity as
well as an assertion of its own regional doctrine;
Washington's silence was taken as a show of support for
the plotters but also an indication of the inattention
of a declining superpower. If Obama normalises
relations with Cuba, as Lula has been pushing him to
do, Brazilian and not US agro-industry is set to become
the major developer of the island's sugar economy, and
will gain access to US markets. Lula has advanced his
country's economic interests in Bolivia, Ecuador,
Paraguay and Uruguay - `Brazil's backyard', according
to the Uruguayan analyst Raúl Zibechi - while at the
same time defending Morales, Correa and Chávez, not
just from Washington but from Brazilian investors
threatened by resource nationalism, land reform and
higher taxes. The Brazilian president is as popular
abroad as he is at home, becoming the Third World's
proxy at international financial summits like the G20,
a prominence just ratified by the International Olympic
Committee's decision to pick Rio over Chicago and
Madrid for the 2016 games. Washington will be paying
close attention to Brazil's 2010 presidential election,
hoping that whoever wins will share Lula's moderation
but not his charisma.
Castañeda writes that any viable Latin American left
will have to come to terms `with a basic fact of life:
the United States will not go away'. But, over the
years, its refusal to come to terms, its insistence on
not just the rhetoric but the substance of sovereignty,
has served as a check and balance on US power. In the
years since the Bush administration supported the
failed coup against Chávez in 2002, the Venezuelan
president has represented this historical stubbornness
with antics that many think befitting a `clown or a
madman,' as the Argentinian novelist Luisa Valenzuela
wrote in 2007. But `it's worth keeping in mind',
Valenzuela went on, that a `very heady dose of
megalomania is a prerequisite for even dreaming of
confronting a rival as overwhelmingly powerful as the
United States.' In addition to Brazil, a number of
South American countries are scheduled for elections
that could scramble the political landscape. At the end
of October, it seems likely that Uruguayans will elect
as their president José Mujica, a 74-year-old former
leader of the insurgent Tupamaros who spent most of the
1970s and 1980s in jail as a political prisoner. In
early December, Bolivians will, it appears from current
polls, overwhelmingly elect Evo Morales to a second
term. But later that month, the right might regain
power in Chile. The Christian Democrat former president
Eduardo Frei is locked in a close election with the
conservative Sebastián Piñera; a third-party dissident
socialist, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, is poised to act as
a potential spoiler.
Whatever direction Latin America's new left takes, the
global economic meltdown might just bring about the
long-sought convergence between Latin America and the
United States, though not in the way that might have
been imagined: `On bad mornings,' Paul Krugman recently
remarked, `I wake up and think we are turning into a
Latin American country.' As to the election of the
first African American to the US presidency, Lula
called it an `extraordinary gesture', and hoped that
Obama would transform it from one exclusively for the
`US people into a gesture for Latin America . . .
respecting our sovereignty and an equitable
coexistence'.
[*] All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation
in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale, 352 pp., £30, July
2008, 978 0 300 12580 1).
Greg Grandin is the author of The Last Colonial
Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War and, most
recently, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's
Forgotten Jungle City