Ollanta Humala, a leftist nationalist seeking the Peruvian presidency, is "surging in popularity," according to an AP story in Salon. Have a look at Helmut's previous posts on (and from) Venezuela here and here--paying attention to the theme of dignity therein--and then consider this excerpt:
Helmut spends a lot of time on dignity--I used the search function to locate the two posts from Venezuela and had to sort through lots of other hits on "dignity." So here's a call for a discussion of that concept, especially in light of the current political turn in South America . . . Helmut? Autres?Wearing a green military-style jacket and an Andean Indian scarf, Humala also proclaimed deep admiration for the 1968-75 leftist dictatorship of Peruvian Gen. Juan Velasco, who carried out a largely failed agrarian reform, nationalized industries and forged close military ties with the Soviet Union.
"You could question his macroeconomics, but Velasco gave dignity to the people who lived in the countryside," Humala said, referring to Velasco's reforms, which freed rural workers from serf-like conditions on large estates.
5 comments:
It's great to see one after another of those South American countries vote for the dignity of their countries. Great to see their peoples aren't intimidated by Bush & his Corporate 'base'.
Humala is ahead of the 09 April presidential race. That if we believe a survey published in El Comercio, a daily newspaper, and produced by Apoyo firm. Here are the numbers:
Ollanta Humala 28%
Lourdes Flores 25%
Alan García 15%
Bad news the guy is a populist. I mean one thing is not liking Bush, another is suporting leftist populist who always end up increasing poverty and inequality and becoming tyrants.
I know what you mean. The passage here citing his "deep admiration" for Velasco makes me a little squeamish. But it isn't exactly the populsm, is it?
Is it really that leftist populists have some intrinsic defect or is it the objective conditions which always coalesce to defeat them? Western governments immediately work to undermine them, global finance works to undermine them, internal opposition from entrenched capital works to undermine them.With Chavez they tried a coup and an oil production strike, with Castro they attempted assasination and embargoes, Allende they killed, the list goes on and on as you must know.I believe the times call for solidarity rather than purity.
Barba -- sorry, I'm really late on this one. Just one comment. "Dignity" matters when you're talking about half the population suffering from poverty and thus being/feeling excluded from the basic conditions of life and citizenship. That's a first step. I don't caremuch about populist or non-populist in this context. It's often rabble-rousing and prejudice-fomenting in the context of wealthy countries, as it is in "developing" nations. But there's more bite in the latter because one has to view government -- in the abstract and in terms of concrete institutions -- as legitimate before one can begin to participate in their transformation. Dignity is a good place to start because it enables the excluded and marginalized to at least believe, often effectively so, that they have input into political processes. We could use a dose of that in the US political system as well.
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