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.