Bolivia's Leftward March

The Monroe Doctrine may be falling apart. With Chavez and Lula, along with elections in Chile, this news coming out of Bolivia may mean that the US will no longer be able to force tyrannical regimes over the people of Latin America.

NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON – With presidential elections in Bolivia on Sunday, Washington is buzzing with talk that another Latin American country may be “lost.”

Evo Morales, a former president of Bolivia’s coca-growers’ union and the leader of the Movement Toward Socialism party, is the current front-runner, according to the latest polls. If he wins the election, Mr. Morales will be the latest head of state to join the ranks of the region’s burgeoning New Left, already comprised of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. For the Bush administration and conservative pundits, this would qualify as an unmitigated catastrophe.

Bolivia, however, is far from lost. By proposing a new path to development, a Morales administration would offer genuine hope of alleviating endemic hardship and inequality in South America’s poorest country. And if spreading democracy is truly the goal of US foreign policy, the United States should welcome such new approaches rather than demanding that other nations elect officials subservient to the views that currently prevail in the White House.

The Bush administration’s consistent mistake in dealing with Latin America has been to equate freedom with the pursuit of a rigid program of its preferredeconomic policies. It has valued “free” markets over democratic independence.

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Ari Paul has written for The American Prospect, In These Times, Tikkun, Z, Punk Planet, openDemocracy.net, Reason and other newspapers and magazines. He is also a reporter for The Chief-Leader, a New York weekly covering labor in the city.