In Latin America and the Caribbean, new developments are presented or glimpsed that should have a positive impact on the consolidation of what has come to be called the second progressive wave.
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This wave would have been unleashed with the emergence of new popular governments in the region after several defeats of progressivism from Honduras and Paraguay to Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia. Except in Argentina and Uruguay, these setbacks were due to coups; in Ecuador to a cunning betrayal.
The second wave comes with the arrival to the presidency of Mexico, Argentina and Bolivia, of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018), Alberto Fernández (2019) and Luis Arce Catacora (2020); in the latter case, as a result of a great indigenous-popular mobilization that plunged the coup and the dictatorship implanted a year earlier by the United States and the local right under a mountain of votes.
The ascent of the teacher Pedro Castillo to the Presidency of Peru adds a fourth government to the equation. Obviously, they reinforce and are reinforced at the same time by the presence, against all odds, of socialist Cuba, Bolivarian Venezuela and Sandinista Nicaragua.
But in November of this year, it is very likely that Chileans will elect a popular government to replace the ultra-neoliberal government of Sebastián Piñera. Although even more important will be the plebiscite to approve the new Constitution in 2022, from which important fundamental changes are expected in the economic, political and social structure of the country, a legacy of Pinochetism and the crudest neoliberal logic.
Meanwhile, in October of that year there are presidential elections called in Brazil, which, according to all the polls, Lula da Silva would win. If this happens, there may by then be progressive governments in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, the three largest economies in Latin America. On the other hand, an electoral victory for the left in Honduras in November of this year should not be ruled out.
These events take place in a context of growing questioning of the very existence of the OAS given its increasingly lazy attitude towards Washington and the detriment of its activity to the democratic advancement and independence of the peoples of the region. The rejection of the OAS received an important encouragement in the speech of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador before the foreign ministers of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), which put that discredited body in the pillory.
Immediately, he received support for his pronouncement from the presidents of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, and of Bolivia, Luis Arce Catacora. At the same time, the new Foreign Minister of Peru, Héctor Béjar, expressed his approval. All of them stressed, at the same time, the need for unity and integration of the region in Celac, an entity that Mexico has revitalized during its pro tempore presidency and linked to the solution of specific problems in the region, such as the issue of vaccines against Covid-19.
The undoubted opportunity and international repercussion of the aforementioned speech by López Obrador in Celac have not been sufficiently analyzed, although the rabid reaction of the right says a lot. AMLO has injected a good dose of Bolivarian and popular oxygen into the regional political environment, which the revolutionary and progressive governments have acknowledged by praising and expressing their sympathy with the positions of the Mexican.
In a previous installment I already noted it, but again I underline it for its importance: the words of the President of Mexico next to the emblematic walls of the Castle of Chapultepec appreciably counteracted the fierce anti-Cuban campaign in the social networks and conventional hegemonic media of the world and, consequently, they contributed to strengthening the process, already underway at that time, to dismantle the destabilizing operation hatched from Washington against Havana.
With very notorious participation of the Cuban-American extreme right in Miami, sectors of the European Union, the Secretary General of the OAS and the American and international reaction.
Of course, his speech could influence in that direction because he defended a just cause, and, above all, because the Cuban Government has dismantled all the lies and slander proffered by the media speakers, due to the important mobilization of the island’s people in defense of its Revolution and also, due to a wave of international solidarity of the peoples in defense of Cuba and of governments such as those of Russia, China, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Vietnam, and several Caribbean and African, among others,
The defense of the independence and sovereignty of our America and its progressive governments goes through that of Cuba. That is why the international solidarity that the Cuban people and Government receive today is so important and necessary.
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