New Generation Leftist, promising to bury Neoliberalism, is elected as President of Chile.

Gabriel Boric, the leftist candidate who won yesterday in the presidential elections of Chile, had promised to bury the Neoliberalism imposed by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Boric said, “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” Boric is part of the  brave new millennial generation seeking justice and equality.  With his age of 35, Boric is the youngest ever to become the President of Chile. He has a bold and ambitious vision of Inclusive Development much different from the old style moderate leftist leaders like Michelle Bachelet, who was president for two terms. With her limited leftist agenda, she did not pursue reforms strongly and vigorously. 
 
Boric is the most left-wing President of Chile since President Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 by General Pinochet. The US supported the coup in the name of the ‘war on communism’. Boric’s coalition includes the Communist Party of Chile. Allende should be smiling in his grave.

 
Boric has pledged to reduce inequality by raising the minimum wage, reducing the cost of education and healthcare, expanding social safety net, fighting climate change and extending rights to native peoples as well as gay and transgender. Although the Chilean economy has been stable with high growth rates, the poor and middle class people have been struggling with high cost of living while the private sector business makes high profits and pay low taxes. To pay for the expanded social programs Boric plans to  raise the taxes on the rich, increase mining royalties, increase efforts against tax evasion, and impose a “green tax.” Boric has further pledged to replace Chile’s private pension system with a universal public one.
 
Boric is unmarried, has no children and is an avid reader of poetry and history. He rose to prominence during the 2011 student protests against the high cost of education and other social injustices inherited from the neoliberal economic model devised by the Chicago Boys (economists trained in Chicago) hired by Pinochet. Boric was president of the Student Federation of the University of Chile in 2012 when he was studying in the Faculty of Law. But he left his studies incomplete and entered politics. In 2013, at age of 27, he was elected to the Congress as an independent, along with many other young leftist activists. He declared, “Don’t be afraid of the youth who want to change Chile.” He got reelected in 2017. Boric, who has tattoos caused an uproar when he showed up on the first day in the Congress without a tie and suit jacket, calling political decorum a “tool of the elite” that separates lawmakers from the people. 
 
Boric combines his idealism with a realistic and pragmatic approach. In 2019, he broke with his leftist allies and backed a political accord with center-right President Sebastian Pinera to begin a process to replace the dictatorship-era constitution in order to restore calm. In November, he distanced himself from his communist allies who offered glowing praise for the reelection of Nicaragua’s leftist authoritarian President Daniel Ortega. Boric will not be a radical pushing for unilateral extremist ideas. He knows the formidable challenges of the rightists and the fear of the people which drove them to vote for Kast. In any case, he does not have his own political party in the Congress to push through his legislative reforms. He needs to work with the parties of both the left and right to get his bills passed in the Congress. 
 
The election of Boric complements the centre-left Constitutional Assembly which is drafting a new constitution for better social justice. The Assembly has gender parity and is being presided over by Elisa Loncon, a female Mapuche language scholar. The Assembly includes 17 members from the indigenous communities who were excluded from political power by the Pinochet constitution. 
 
If Kast, the rightist, had won it would have been an anticlimax to the new movement for social justice and the new constitution currently being drawn up. Kast is opposed to the new constitution  and is an admirer of dictator Pinochet. His own brother was a member of the cabinet of Pinochet. Kast had shown solidarity with Trump and Bolsonaro. The defeat of Boric is a clear message to Bolsonaro and other aspiring far right extremists in Latin America.
 
The victory of Boric comes in the wake of the recent election of leftist candidates Xiomara Castro in Honduras in November and Pedro Castillo in Peru in June this year. Leftist candidate  Lula, is already leading in the opinion polls for the Brazilian presidential elections to be held in October next year. 
 
The peaceful elections and the graceful acceptance of defeat by the loser have demonstrated yet again the strength and maturity of Chilean democracy. The Chilean voters have given chance alternately to the left and the right in the last five presidential elections. Both the leftist president Michel Bachelet and Sebastian Pinera, the billionaire conservative had avoided extremist positions and preferred stability and continuity. When the protests erupted in 2019, President Pinera recognized that the protestors had legitimate grievances and quickly agreed to their demand for a new constitution. In the May 2021 elections for the new constituent assembly, the Chilean voters punished both the mainstream leftist and rightist coalition parties and elected mostly centre-left independent activists. Out of the 155 seats, the rightist coalition won only 37 votes while their leftist counterpart got just 25 seats.
 
It is heartening to see that Kast has accepted the defeat gracefully and promptly. He has declared even before the final count, "From today, Boric is the elected President of Chile and deserves all our respect and constructive collaboration". Kast made a remarkable and admirable gesture by visiting Boric's campaign headquarters to congratulate personally. This is in sharp contrast to  Trump’s disgraceful refusal to accept the electoral verdict and Bolsonaro’s threat to follow Trump’s shameful approach. 
 
With the election of Boric and the drafting of a new constitution, the stable and strong democracy of chile is poised to become a more inclusive and equitable democracy. This should be an inspiration for Latin America which has  similar challenges of poverty and inequality. 
 
 
 

Bolivia, rich in Lithium reserves, is missing out on the global boom..

Bolivia has 21 million tons of Lithium reserves, the largest in the world and one fourth of the total world reserves of 80 million tons, according to the US Geological Survey.

Argentina has the second largest with 17 million tons, followed by Chile with 9 million, the third largest.

Demand for Lithium was around 360,000 tons in 2020 and is growing fast thanks to the global drive for electric vehicles, in which Lithium batteries are used. Lithium is also used in many electronic devices.

But Bolivia produces a paltry 600 tons of Lithium Carbonate, while Chile produces 134,000 tons and Argentina 36,000 tons.

Australia, which has 6.3 million tons of reserves, is the largest producer of Lithium for now. Australia earned 1.6 billion dollars in 2019 from Lithium exports.

China is the largest consumer of Lithium. China controls 80% of the world’s raw material refining, 77% of the world’s cell capacity and 60% of the world’s component manufacturing.

Excessive resource nationalism and suspicion of foreign companies by ex-President Evo Morales and absence of proper vision and policies by the Bolivian governments have held back Bolivia from monetization of the valuable Lithium reserves...Pity..

Hope President Luis Arce will move fast and get Bolivia in the Lithium production map of the world.

Harsh Times – the latest novel of Mario Vargas Llosa

Harsh Times (Tiempos Recios) is the latest offering of the Peruvian nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. 

The novel is about the overthrow of the leftist Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz by CIA at the behest of the United Fruit Company. This crude regime change to safeguard the profits of a private company was labelled as “war on communism” by the US propaganda. 

It is based on the real life events of what happened in Guatemala in 1954. Even the names of most of the leading characters in the novels are real names. So the novel reads like real history. There is no Magical Realism. It is pure realism. Of course, the Latin American reality is more fantastic than fiction sometimes. Llosa has embellished the characters and exaggerated events to spice up the story. But the spice is much less in comparison to Llosa’s other historical novel “ The Feast of the Goats” ( about the Trujillo dictatorship in Dominican Republic) which has more fantasy and labyrinths. Llosa has made an interesting link between the two novels through the character of Marta Borrero Parra (Miss Guatemala), the wife of attorney Arturo Borrero Lamas who leaves him to become the mistress of President Carlos Castillo Armas, (Gloria Bolaños Pons was the real life mistress of Armas) later as lover of Trujillo’s intelligence chief Johnny Abbes Garcia followed by becoming radio propagandist for President Trujillo in Dominican Republic, and as informant of CIA which arranges asylum for her in US in the end. Llosa has also brought in the role played by Trujillo directly and in collaboration with CIA in the overthrow of the Arbenz government and assassination of President Castillo Armas.

Harsh Times is not one of the best novels of Llosa. It is a bit lame by Llosa's standards. But this is understandable given his ripe old age of 85. He continues reading (every morning) and writing even now.

It is unusual to see that Llosa, the political conservative, has shown sensitivity and sympathy to the Left in this novel. But in his political discourses he continues his right wing positions. He supports the right wing Chilean Presidential candidate Antonio Kast standing against the leftist Gabriel Boric in the elations to be held on 19 December. In the last Peruvian elections held in June 2021, he supported the rightist Keiko Fujimori who stood against the leftist Pedro Castillo.
 
The story starts with the American company United Fruit which owned banana plantations in Guatemala and exported to US. The company was the largest land owner in the country. It had bribed and coerced the Guatemalan governments to let them have such large land, own the infrastructure such as railways, power stations and ports, subject to virtually no tax and get away with very low payments to the workers who were kept in miserable slave-like conditions. President Arbenz tried to correct this injustice. He passed a land reform bill through which unused land of the company was to be taken away by the government for distribution to landless peasants. The government agreed to pay compensation to the company based on the value declared by the company itself for tax purposes. The government also proposed to tax the company and improve the conditions of their workers. But the company would have nothing of it. The company complained to the Dulles brothers, who were their shareholders and former legal advisors. One of them ( John)  was the Secretary of State and the other one (Allen) Director of CIA. The two used their combined clout and the whole weight of the mighty US government to overthrow the Arbanz government. The CIA recruited and armed mercenaries, bombed Guatemalan cities and spread terror and panic.
 
The new American ambassador to Guatemala John Emil Peurifoy was given a clear mandate to overthrow the democratically elected government at any cost. He worked on the colonels and majors in the army pushing them to rise against their own government.  He threatened President Arbenz that the American marines were ready to invade and advised him that the only way to avoid bloodshed was for him to quit. Ambassador Peurifoy told Washington DC, “Noncombatants will have to die. Panic will have to break out among the civilian population. That is the only provocation that will allow us to intervene against Árbenz”.  Peurifoy had experience of managing a successful coup in Greece where he was ambassador before. So after the Guatemalan coup, when he was posted to Thailand he asked if there was going to be a coup there too. This reminds me of a Latin American saying that “there will not be any military coup in Washington DC because there is no US embassy there”.
 
The US imposed an embargo against supply of armaments, munitions and even spare parts to Guatemala. It blockade the Guatemalan ports. This was a blow to the Guatemalan armed forces and a severe handicap at a time when there was need for them to fight against the mercenaries invading the country. This created concern among the military officers and pitted them against President Arbenz. The American bombing of the Guatemalan military academy buildings was the final nail in the coffin and pushed the Guatemalan armed forces against  their president. 
 
The US government justified their regime change operation in the name of the so-called war on communism.  The United Fruit company hired Edward Bernays, a pioneering publicist and called as the Father of Public Relations, who worked the American and Guatemalan media and portrayed a false narrative of impending communist takeover of Guatemala and the region. Although Arbenz and some of his allies had leftist outlook and sympathies the propaganda that they were communists was a blatant lie and fake news. Guatemala did not have relations with Soviet Union and there was no Russian presence in the country.
 
The American intervention in Guatemala changed the history of Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. It generated a wave of  anti-Americanism in Latin America all over again, and invigorated the Marxists. It paved the way for the success of the Cuban revolution and spread of leftist guerilla movements in the region. It hardened the anti-American conviction of Che Guavara, the leftist icon, who was in Guatemala and saw first-hand the exploitation of the country by United Fruit and the overthrow of democracy by CIA.  In fact, it was the Guatemalans who gave the nick name of “Che” to Ernesto Guevara.
 
The American intervention in Guatemala set the stage for destabilization of Central America for the next half century. The region went through a bloody civil war. Later, the US government repeated their Guatemalan play book in Nicaragua against the leftist Sandinista government in the seventies and virtually destroyed the country. The US-supported military dictatorships in the region killed hundreds of thousands of civilians including indigenous people. The end of the civil war was followed by gang wars, which have been fought with illegal American weapons. This has added to the insecurity of the Central Americans to flee from the violence in their countries. This is the fundamental reason for hundreds of thousands of Central Americans to reach the US border to get in legally or illegally. The immigration issue at the US border is nothing but US reaping what it sowed in Central America.
 

Return of the Left in the Honduras elections

Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the socialist candidate, got elected as President of Honduras in the elections held on Sunday. 

She is the first woman to become President of the country. Her victory puts the Left back in power after twelve years of right wing governments in the country. Her election assumes significance for more reasons:
 
It is a sweet revenge for her husband Manuel Zelaya, who was overthrown from presidency by a rightwing coup in 2009, with the support of US. The rightists had justified their action on the ground that President Zelaya was planning to hold a referendum asking the people if they would approve a change in the constitution to extend the mandate of president to two terms from the existing single term limit. But the US administration and the American mainstream media accused Zelaya of trying to commit a crime of violation of the constitution by proposing to change the term limit. They called Zelaya as a Honduran Chavez with dangerous leftist tendencies. The Honduran military barged into the presidential palace, picked up Zelaya in his pyjamas, put him in a plane and dumped him in Costa Rica. This was the first-ever coup in the twenty first century in Latin America which was seeing the strengthening of its democratic foundation in the first decade of the new century. 
 
Manuel Zelaya himself could not stand for elections since the rightwing administration has banned him from public office. 
 
President Juan Orlando Hernandez, elected in 2013 from the right wing National Party, changed the constitution, removed the term limit and got elected for a second term in 2017. The military, supreme court, the human rights council and other organisations which had opposed removal of single term limit during President Zelaya’s time had reversed their stand and endorsed the action of Hernandez. The American administration and media kept quiet and did not raise the issue of constitutional violation. 
 
Hernandez’s victory in 2017 was controversial. There were allegations of fraud in vote counting. When Hernandez started losing, the counting was stopped. Later, the computers started showing winning numbers for Hernandez. There were protests against the rigging and over two dozen protestors were killed in the violence. But Hernandez managed to escape the fate of President Evo Morales who tried the same trick in Bolivia but was thrown out of power.
 
Hernandez’s government is also accused of massive corruption and links with drug trafficking. Juan Antonio, brother of the President, is already in a US jail for life after drug trafficking conviction. The US Justice Department has accused President Hernandez of links to drug trafficking. The U.S. federal prosecutors in New York have accused him of running a narco state and fueling his own political rise with drug money. They might start prosecuting him when he leaves the presidency in January 2022.
 
The ruling party’s candidate Nasry Asfura, who got the second largest number of votes after Castro, was accused in 2020 of embezzling public money when he was Mayor of the capital Tegucigalpa. The third major candidate in the presidential race, the Liberal Party's Yani Rosenthal, spent three years in a US jail for money laundering.
 
The victory of the Left in Honduras should give some satisfaction to Lula of Brazil. As President, Lula tried to help the exiled Zelaya to get back to power. The Brazilians helped Zelaya return to Honduras secretly three months after his exile and gave asylum to him in the Brazilian embassy. This was a huge embarrassment for the anti-Zelaya US administration. It was the first time that Brazil challenged US in Central America which is a traditional backyard of US and playground for CIA. The Americans wanted to cut down the overreach of Brazil and President Lula and reacted ruthlessly. They put pressure on the illegitimate Honduran regime which sent its military and police to surround the Brazilian embassy. There was a war of words exchanged between the Brazilian government and the Honduran regime. Eventually the Honduran regime let Zelaya go on exile to Dominican Republic. This was a bitter lesson for President Lula who had ambitions to check American hegemony and assert Brazilian leadership in Latin America.
 
The return of the Left to power is important for the Honduran masses, majority of whom are below the poverty line. It is the extreme poverty which is the main reason for thousands of Hondurans trying to emigrate to the US legally and illegally. There is desperate need for pro-poor and Inclusive-development policies and Castro is promising to give priority to these. Further, she wants to decriminalize abortion, reduce bank charges for remittances, create a U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission and repeal laws which feed corruption and drug trafficking.
 
On the external front, Castro wants to open diplomatic relations with China and close the Taiwanese embassy. Honduras is one of the remaining fifteen countries in the world which recognize Taiwan. But the US administration is putting pressure on the Hondurans not to recognize China. It is one of the typical hypocritical examples of US foreign policy lectures to other countries: “Do not do what we do but do what we say”. Earlier the US government had unsuccessfully pressurized Panama, Dominican Republic and El Salvador with similar advice. 
 
The election of Left to power in Honduras is a boost to the larger Latin American Left which has returned to power in Argentina and Peru. Castro will resume relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, earlier shunned by the previous right wing administration of Honduras. 
 
Honduras is the original “Banana Republic” exploited by the United Fruit Company of US in collusion with local oligarchs. The United Fruit company is no more but the local oligarchs continue their exploitation with their deeply entrenchment. They will not let Xiomara Castro to make any significant reform to bring about social justice. 
 
Although Honduras is a small country of just ten million people, India’s exports were 163 million dollars last year. There is scope to increase the exports to 300 million dollars in the next four years. It is time for India to consider opening an embassy in Honduras. The Chinese  export about 1.5 billion dollars of goods to Honduras.