Big Week for Elections in América

Five hundred thousand people poured into the streets of Montevideo yesterday in a final rally for the left-wing Broad Front (FA in its Spanish initials) party before Sunday’s general elections. It was, according to the Uruguayan press, the largest demonstration in that country’s history. Now, a demonstration of that size anywhere is a big deal, but we’re talking about more than 14% of the entire country’s population. The election is expected to be a rout by FA candidate Tabaré Vázquez, who nearly all the opinion polls now predict will win in the first round (if he does not receive more than 50 percent there will be a run-off in one month).

This may turn out to be the straw that broke the gringo camel’s back. An FA victory would be the first left-wing government in Uruguay’s history, and could deal a major blow to both neoliberalism and the drug war in South America.
Uruguay has long had influence in South America disproportionate to its tiny size, and its government has used that in recent years to fight the progressive directions of its neighbors as hard as it could. While Brazil’s Lula has tried to strengthen Mercosur, the Southern Common Market, as an independent trade bloc to rival the US and EU; while Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner challenges the rule of the IMF; while Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez openly challenges the entire neoliberal economic order and promotes a social revolution, Uruguay’s Jorge Batlle has stuck with the old Washington Consensus.

This has won him friends in, well, Washington, of course, but driven a wedge between Uruguay and its Mercosur partners, especially Brazil. (Mercosur has four full members: Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Several other Latin American countries, including Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico hold some degree of associate membership.) Uruguay has in many ways become South America’s scab. While Lula, and Kirchner have tried to steer Mercosur towards unity against the U.S. agenda - especially the proposed Free Trade Area of the Amercas - the Uruguayan government has crossed the picket line and pursued its own separate trade agreements with the U.S.  

At the Cancún meeting of the World Trade Organization last September, Uruguay opted out of the Brazilian-led G-20 group of developing nations; the G-20 essentially blocked the U.S. and European agendas at that meeting by refusing to sign any agreement until “developed” countries ended farm subsidies, among other things. Now, the leading candidate so far proposed for the new Director General of the WTO is Uruguay’s former representative Carlos Perez del Castillo. It’s almost certain that Brazil will not support del Castillo but rather propose its own candidate. This kind of major devision within Mercosur, so early in its history, threatens to undermine Lula’s leadership and could lead to Mercosur’s disintegration.

When the FA wins, all that is gonna change. There is no other party in South America more closely linked to Lula’s Workers Party than the FA. Although the new government would not take power until after December, when Mercosur must make its official nomination, the remaining lame-duck conservative government would have much less leverage to force their candidate. Mercosur would be unified again as a world power explicitly opposed to the “free trade” that has enslaved Latin America for the last twenty-five years, and in nominating a Brazilian to head the WTO could significantly alter the course of that organization as well.

A FA victory also has implications for drug policy. As far as I can tell, Vázquez hasn’t said much about this in his campaign. However, there is significant support for drug policy reform and harm reduction within the party, as congresswoman Margarita Percovich, one of the most visible advocates for this tendency, told Authentic Journalist Manuela Aldabe earlier this week. Percovich has become a powerful woman within the FA party in the last few years. In fact, her faction overrode Vázquez himself to put legalization of abortion on the party’s platform. If the FA wins not only the presidency but a majority in the Parliament, as some believe will happen, this will give socially progressive voices within the party a lot more room to maneuver. Uruguay could become both the first Latin American country (after Cuba) to legalize abortion, and a leader in a renewed debate on drug policy.

Vázquez is well aware of the stakes in this race. At the enormous campaign rally yesterday, he proclaimed that a victory

would involve the most important political and social revolution in Latin America on the part of the people of the east (an old name for the Uruguayan people, referring to their position relative to Buenos Aires), one that charts a new course and breaks old structures.

Today the people of the east are writing the second page in the revolution for liberation. It is the people that will break the rigid structures.

The first page that he is implying there is the Uruguayan independence won in 1825 by José Artigas, sort of the Simon Bolívar of Uruguay. So, this was not just an acknowledgment of the major world historical importance of what is happening in South America right now, but, I have to think, a nod to Hugo Chávez’s Boliviarian Revolution.

In fact, on the same day Uruguayans go to the polls to elect their new national government, Venezuelans will be voting in local elections all over the country. According to the opposition-run Venezuelan polling firm Datanálisis, candidates loyal to Chávez and not the old corrupt two-party system are poised to win the majority of these races.

These are good days for democracy down South. In just a few more, we’ll see if the people of a certain country up North follow that lead.