A Latin Third Way

As President Bush criss-crosses Latin America stalking his hemispheric rival President Chavez of Venezuela, it is useful to keep in mind that the choices available to other Latin American nations are not restricted to the Washington Consensus (what's good for global finance capital is good for you!) or populist grandstanding (the Yankee behemoth to the north is responsible for all of Latin America's problems!)

There are models of democratically regulated market capitalism that can offer productivity and entrepreneurship without closing out democratic oversight and a concern for economic and social justice. Both Brazil, where President Lula is pursuing a strategy aimed at serving his working class constituency without driving off foreign investment, and Mexico, which is trying to grow its economy without asking the working class to carry all the burdens of development, represent a kind of Latin "third way." Mexico is aided by its fossil fuel wealth, but hindered by its immigration issues -- not just to the North, with the United States, but also to the South, with Guatamala. In the face of these challenges, former economics and then foreign minister Luis Ernesto Derbez has articulated such a vision, and is exploring it at his new Center for Democracy and Globalization at the Monterrey Institute.

The U.S. media are spinning the President's trip as a competition between Baghdad Bush, too distracted until now by Iraq to pay any attention at all to the hemisphere, and cheeky Chavez, using polemics greased with, well, oil, to entice his neighbors. As if one or the other must/will win.

But the best possible outcome for Latin America, and one that is perhaps more likely than either of the two caricatures offered by Washington and Caracas will be a Latin Third Way which can avoid neo- Peronism without falling into the lap of the Washington neo-cons.