Venezuela's Chavez is like FDR not Castro!

So far, Latin America's leftward shift has been relegated to the southern continent. However, a López Obrador victory could precipitate a tectonic shift for the Bush administration's ill-reputed Latin America team from grudging acceptance of South America's left-of-center governments to the use of Cold War-style tactics against them. Even though López Obrador, as the candidate of Mexico's left-leaning PRD party, appears to be moderate, the prospect of another new left administration - this time right on the U.S. border - would be all but intolerable to the administration's nostalgic cold war ideologues. A López Obrador victory particularly would upset Eliot Abrams, that self-confessed perjurer and booster for Central America's death squads in the 1980s who now serves as Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor and Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary for the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. Both men see regional policy exclusively through an anti-Havana prism and hardly can be comfortable with Latin America lurching in the direction of everything they loath.

One would think the Bush administration would not get so flustered by Latin America's new left regimes, as they are all democratic, practice at least a `soft' neoliberalism and are only in the earliest stages of coalescing into a regional EU-like bloc. While most other administrations would likely brush off the continent's new left tilt as a natural consequence of the region's disenchantment with the unfulfilled promises of free trade and free markets as the guarantors of social justice, the current White House will see it as a frontal challenge. This is because Bush's Latin America team, led by Noriega and Abrams, make no distinction between Fidel Castro and anyone who sports a red beret or spouts anti-Yanqui rhetoric.

A New Left Oil Bloc? While the U.S. is forced to barely tolerate Chávez so long as he keeps the oil flowing, a López Obrador victory in Mexico next year would likely scorch Washington policymakers, especially if he reverses Vicente Fox's policy and reaches out to Castro as have Chávez, Lula, Kirchner and Vázquez. If he wins, the administration will then be faced with four left-of-center hemispheric powerhouses: Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The nightmare scenario for the Bush team would then be Chávez inviting López Obrador and Mexico's state owned oil company, Pemex, into a cooperative arrangement with the Venezuelan leader's oil trading bloc, "Petrosur," which already includes Argentina and, as of March 2, Uruguay. Given that Mexico and Venezuela are two of the U.S.' top four sources of foreign oil imports (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada), a combined Obrador-Chávez alliance would account for upwards of a quarter of all U.S. petroleum imports. One can pretty easily anticipate how the Bush administration would react to such a petro bloc emerging, recalling Henry Kissinger's old adage that any threat to Saudi oil exports to the U.S. would be a casus belli.

But Just How Left-wing Are They? In contrast to right-wing jitters over Latin America's "rising red tide," a sober look at these governments - certainly Brazil, Argentina and even Venezuela - reveals a significant gap between their anti-neoliberal rhetoric and their actual economic policies. While bashing the IMF and the World Bank has become the region's polemical norm, no leader - not even Chávez - is seriously contemplating a wholesale rejection of the basic principles of Keynesian economics even if some, like Kirchner, challenge IMF mandates. What this means is that Latin America's new left governments will favor mixed markets modeled on the post World War II monetarist policies of social democratic European states, like Clement Atlee's Britain. Befitting this pattern, as Latin America's new left-of-center states go about creating safety nets for the poor, they continue to court foreign investment and encourage capitalist ventures to help pay for them. As the Economist rightly notes, "While Mr. Castro makes it spitefully difficult to set up even the smallest of micro-enterprises as a private business, his Venezuelan counterpart is cheerfully ploughing funds into the creation of as many small entrepreneurs as possible."

Latin America's New Deal On the gap between the theory and practice of the new left in Latin America, as can be seen in Chávez's government, Dr. James Petras of the University of New York at Binghamton has written that, "The euphoria of the left prevents them from observing the pendulum shifts in Chávez's discourse and the heterodox social welfare and neoliberal economic politics he has consistently practiced." Confirming Chávez's progressive bona fides while at the same time calling attention to his standard Keynesian economic policy, Professor Petras writes that the Venezuelan leader's "policy has always followed a careful balancing act between rejecting vassalage to the U.S. and local oligarchic rentiers on the one hand and trying to harness a coalition of foreign national investors . . . He is closer to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal than Castro's Socialist revolution."