Isacson points out that rather than what Diehl suggested in his piece, the latest outcome of elections in South America do not stand in direct correlation with either sympathy or dislike of Hugo Chávez and his revolutionary agenda.
Diehl has made an impressive set of sweeping conclusions: that by the election of ‘the industrialist and champion of free markets’ Sebastián Piñera in Chile and the ultimately failed coup by Chávez sympathiser Manuel Zelaya in Honduras ‘Latin America has quietly passed through a tipping point in the ideological conflict that has polarized the region’ and that ‘the turning point in the battle between authoritarian populism and liberal democracy in Latin America has passed’. Most bizarrely, he also notes that the outcome in Honduras was ‘a victory for the United States’, apparently the sole proprietor of democracy in the world.
So while Diehl is busy playing good cop, bad cop, Isacson in turn relays that ‘Chileans didn’t elect Sebastián Piñera … because of their antipathy for Hugo Chávez’ and ‘Bolivians didn’t re-elect Evo Morales in December out of admiration for Venezuela’s president’ as he points out it is ridiculous to think a president of a country of 28 million people would be able to determine his neighbours’ political destiny. Nevermind one who is so increasingly unpopular at home. Notably he also states that with Diehl’s almost victorious tone it would be a ‘huge error to imagine a significant change in U.S. relations with Latin America as a result’.
But if I were actually discussing this issue with Diehl and I was in need of a poignant comeback the last paragraph would suffice: ‘There are no cold wars in Latin America, no rising or falling tides to be fostered or contained. Just democracies going in different directions, occasionally directions quite distant from the United States. Here in the United States, we have to get used to that, and stop viewing each electoral outcome as a harbinger of triumph or tragedy.’
Posted on February 1, 2010
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