The Lost Continent
All right, Latin America is not exactly lost; we know where it is. But we don’t hear very much from it, as a rule. It isn’t rich or aggressive enough to compel our attention, nor is it so poor or war-torn that we are fascinated and appalled by it. No wonder it is the Cinderella of the world’s regions, in media terms. But it is one-third of the West, in the broadest cultural sense of that word, and interesting things are happening there.
22 March 2001
Zapatistas: The Dictates of Fashion
A ski-mask looks good on a revolutionary: a hint of the IRA, a whiff of Black September, but nothing that ties you to a particular agenda. And if you are a non-native intellectual leading an ‘indigenous rights’ movement like the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which is the awkward position of ‘Subcomandante Marcos’, then the mask also hides the fact that you are not actually “the colour of the earth”, as he puts it.
A pipe is another excellent fashion accessory, because it suggests maturity, patience, even wisdom. Grey-bearded university professors smoke pipes. If you want to project an impression of authority and gravitas, a pipe is your natural prop.
But not the two together: a pipe sticking out of a ski-mask is like lipstick on a donkey. It is Trying Too Hard, which is the only real fashion crime. And herein may lie a clue to the sudden auto-deflation of the world’s first designer revolutionary. He is beginning to look a little bit silly.
Marcos’s problem is that he cannot afford to take ‘yes’ for an answer. He did ten years as an apprentice revolutionary in the mountains of Chiapas, he has held the attention of Mexico and much of the rest of the world since he launched his revolt in 1994 (almost bloodless after the first two weeks), and now he has led a triumphant ‘march’ to Mexico City. But where does he go from here?
President Vicente Fox Quesada, whose election last year ended the 71-year stranglehold on power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), pleads with Marcos to come and see him – “I reiterate my willingness to meet with you without any preconditions...Marcos, it’s time to talk” – but after two weeks in Mexico City, Marcos continues to dodge. As a result, Fox is starting to win the propaganda war.
The Mexican Congress has now voted by a narrow margin to let Marcos speak before it in support of a constitutional amendment that would give special rights to the country’s 10 million Indians. It will be great theatre, but neither Marcos nor Fox (who sent the legislation to Congress on the first day he took office) can guarantee the passage of the law, since the PRI holds more seats there than Fox’s National Action Party (PAN).
Besides, Marcos isn’t only interested in native rights. He is a post-Marxist revolutionary who is using the plight of Mexico’s native peoples as a springboard for an assault on ‘globalisation’: he chose to start the revolt in Chiapas on 1 January, 1994, the date that the North American Free Trade Area went into effect, for exactly that reason. If Mexico grants his demands for indigenous rights, he loses his pulpit.
That is why he responded to Fox’s inauguration and offer of unconditional peace talks in December not with negotiations but with the media circus of a meandering two-week ‘march’ on Mexico City (complete with 280 capering Italian anarchists in matching white jump-suits doing homage to Fellini). That is why he deliberately notched up his non-negotiable demands at almost every stop along the way. That is why he refuses to meet Fox.
Fox cannot make the Congress pass the constitutional amendment, and Marcos doesn’t want the confrontation to end anyway. He NEEDS a powerful, intransigent adversary in order to sustain his own carefully crafted image as the romantic defender of the underdog. But sustaining the image is getting harder, for Fox knows how to play the game too.
Up against another master at manipulating the media like Fox, Marcos is losing his sure touch. On arriving in Mexico City on 11 March, he promised to stay until Congress passed the law on indigenous peoples. Then on 19 March he changed his mind and announced that the Zapatistas would all go home on the 23rd because they had been tricked and “insulted” by political leaders whom he called “cavemen”. But on the 22nd he changed his mind again and said they would stay.
He will almost certainly change it again and go back to the forests of Chiapas. After a while, wearing a ski-mask in Mexico City begins to seem merely ridiculous, and Marcos wants to preserve his mythic status as a post-modern Che Guevara, an all-purpose symbol of protest..
As he modestly wrote: “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa...a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the street of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the hills.” (One hopes that gang member Marcos never meets single woman Marcos on the Metro at night.)
Marcos clearly enjoys what he is doing, and he can only do it from behind the ski-mask. If he stays in Mexico City and takes it off, he shrinks to a 43-year-old grey-bearded former professor, Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, who had a little training in urban guerilla warfare in Cuba in 1982, and really likes the sound of his own voice.
So it will be back to the woods, soon enough, with or without a meeting with Fox. Even there, the myth will gradually erode. He will never seem so simple and so romantic again.
6 August 2002
Latin America: Collapse of the Consensus
After twenty years, the neo-liberal consensus in Latin America is breaking up. It survived the Mexican financial crisis of 1995 and the Brazilian crisis of 1999, but it is not likely to survive the political and economic upheavals now sweeping South America. Mexico, safely ensconced in the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), may escape the coming changes, but almost nowhere else will.
The first sign that the good ship ‘Free Markets’ had sprung a leak was former paratroop colonel Hugo Chavez’s election as president of Venezuela in 1998 on a platform that denounced the local business ‘oligarchy’ and the International Monetary Fund with equal enthusiasm. Chavez narrowly survived a coup in April that was tacitly backed by the United States, and elsewhere in the continent events are spinning out of control.
The ship began to list seriously when Argentina, long the darling of free-market ideologues, devalued its currency and defaulted on its debt last year. The Argentine peso is now down to a quarter of its former value, a large number of people have died in street-riots, the country is running out of respectable politicians willing to accept the presidency, and there is no light visible at the end of the tunnel. Around three-quarters of the population are now living in desperate poverty.
The Argentine financial crisis has dragged in neighbouring countries like Paraguay and Uruguay, both hit by riots and looting last week, and all of the Andean countries except Chile are being torn by intense confrontations between haves and have-nots. But Brazil, with almost half the continent’s population, is the place that really counts, and the almost certain prospect of a socialist president being elected there in two months’ time is panicking foreign investors and threatening to start a far bigger crisis. So where will it all end?
Start with the fact that Latin American governments almost all bought into the ‘Chicago school’ version of free-market economics during the 1980s. They didn’t abandon their previous model of protectionism and state-led economic development voluntarily. What happened was that foreign loans became ludicrously easy to get in the 1970s, when Western banks were desperately eager to lend the ‘petrodollars’ piling up in their vaults due to the huge jump in oil prices.
So Latin American governments borrowed as if there were no tomorrow – and then fell into crisis when interest rates soared in the early 1980s. The Mexican crash of 1982 was the beginning of a lost decade for Latin America, as one government after another fell into the hands of the IMF to avoid defaulting on its loans.
They all swallowed the medicine prescribed by the reigning First-World economic orthodoxy: drastic cuts to budgets and services, privatisation, deregulation and free trade . In most cases, this package (‘restructuring’, as the IMF calls it) actually lowered people’s living standards, but it seemed intellectually unassailable after the collapse of the opposite extreme model, Soviet-style state socialism, at the beginning of the 1990s. Until now, that is.
Over the past twenty years, Latin American economic growth has been markedly slower than in the bad old statist days of 1960-1980. The social welfare systems (such as they were) have been trashed and people have grown ever more desperate. They are responding by using the democratic political systems they now possess to demand change.
True, the trigger for the current crisis has been not angry locals but foreign investors. They are often berated by the analysts for their ignorance and cowardice: too stupid to tell the difference between Argentina and Brazil, they tend to flee at the first sign of trouble anywhere in the region, taking their money with them. But at bottom the ignorant foreigners are right: the extreme free-market model they thought they were investing in is going belly up.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that South American countries are heading back to dictatorship – democracy is compatible with all sorts of economic arrangements – but it does mean that they will probably bring back some of the protectionist measures that used to cushion local workers and employers from foreign competition. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that: the rich countries preach free trade now, but when they were industrialising themselves they all hid behind high tariff walls.
The problem is that Latin America used to combine protectionism (often useful to developing countries) with heavy government regulation and state-owned industries (almost always bad). Then for twenty years it has combined deregulated internal markets and privatised industries (generally good) with wide-open financial markets and an American-style assault on all the social security systems that used to protect the poor (bad, bad, bad).
And the $64 million question now is whether they will have the wit, at the end of this crisis, to combine the good bits from both strategies – or whether they will simply flop back to the formula that failed them before.
Argentina did default, refusing the IMF’s terms – and got away with it. The economy has begun to recover, unemployment is down, and its creditors have been forced to accept a very close ‘haircut’. Debt is a funny old business: if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you are under its thumb; if you owe it a billion dollars, it is under yours.
5 October 2002
Lula and the Markets
George Soros, the world’s leading currency speculator, told a Brazilian newspaper in August that the 170 million Brazilians simply wouldn’t be allowed to have Labour Party leader Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva as their president. The higher his standing rose in the opinion polls, the fiercer would be the speculative attacks on Brazil’s currency, the real. If he actually won the presidency, the markets’ reaction would be so negative that the country would have to declare a moratorium on its huge $260 billion foreign debt.
“In the Roman empire, only the Romans voted,” Soros explained gently. “In modern global capitalism, only Americans vote. Not the Brazilians.” Brazilians were so outraged that even outgoing president Fernando Henrique Cardoso was forced to defend Lula publicly – but since the former steelworker and trade union leader started climbing in the polls, the real has dropped in value by about one percentage point for every point that he has risen. Since April, it has lost more than a third of its value.
This has happened despite the fact that Lula is now closer to moderate socialists like Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder than to Fidel Castro or Salvador Allende. He has promised to service Brazil’s international debt and to continue Cardoso’s successful fight against inflation. Asked why he abandoned his old radicalism, he simply replies: “I changed. Brazil changed. Trade unionism changed. Everyone is now more organised, more mature.” But the international money markets don’t believe him.
In terms of his origins, Lula does have the classic left-wing activist’s background. He never went to school and only started learning to read when he was ten. Eventually he found work in the steel-mills of the industrial towns that surround Sao Paulo and became a union organiser. He founded the Labour Party in 1980, and led the strikes that brought down the military dictatorship in 1985. He is pure working class and proud of it – and that is precisely the problem.
A little story. Twenty-three years ago I spent some time in Brazil doing a radio series about the country – and on two successive days in Sao Paulo I interviewed the two most prominent figures of the Brazilian opposition to military rule: Fernando Enrique Cardoso, now completing eight years in the presidency, and Lula, who will have the job for at least the next four. They didn’t get much foreign attention in those days, so they each gave me a full afternoon. Their goals were similar, but the differences in style were huge.
Cardoso, who had spent years the harsh early years of the generals’ rule in exile in Cambridge and Paris, was every inch the Marxist intellectual: a sociologist of middle-class origins who lived in a book-lined apartment overlooking the city. He didn’t talk politics; he talked about ‘dependency theory’ and other then-fashionable Marxist concepts. He was a pleasant man, but it occurred to me as I left that he lived somewhere along an axis that had Lenin at one end and Jean-Paul Sartre at the other.
The next day I went all the way out to Sao Bernardo do Campo to see Lula, the up-and-coming union leader. He was your classic horny-handed son of toil, but it soon became clear that while he had picked up some Marxist vocabulary, he would feel perfectly at home among American or British trade unionists. It was only the extreme repression and inequality of Brazil at that time that had pushed him into a more radical position.
If you had asked me then, I would have said that Cardoso was far the greater threat to the interests of international capital in Brazil. In fact, neither man is a radical any more – but isn’t it interesting that the markets didn’t panic when Cardoso became president, whereas now that Lula has won they’re in a flat panic?
The answer is that Cardoso never looked threatening. Lula was a sweaty, gritty working-class hero who looked like a menace to the status quo, and frightened the impressionable, untravelled young men (and a few women) who make the market. After all, only two G-8 countries (Germany and Canada) currently have working-class leaders, and a number of major countries – France, Japan, the United States– have never had one.
Cardoso did a good job as president – inflation is finally tamed, and important indices like infant mortality, education and housing are finally moving in the right direction despite sluggish growth – but he has used up his popularity. Lula could do good work too, if he is allowed, but he still scares the ignorant because he is an actual worker.
It makes no sense for currency speculators to bring down the world’s seventh-largest economy and trigger an international financial crisis, but most of them are ignorant of the world beyond their trading rooms, and even the better-informed ones seek to anticipate the herd’s instincts rather than to be right too soon and all alone. To punish Brazilians for electing Lula by destroying its currency and forcing Brazil into default serves nobody’s interests, but it could still happen. The only people who still believe capitalists are rational are the Marxists.
Lula has done it differently, reassuring the markets through the most rigorous fiscal orthodoxy (at some cost to the Brazilian poor and to his own political popularity). This is very unfair, since right-wing politicians can run up vast deficits without panicking the markets – consider Ronald Reagan’s ‘voodoo economics’ in the 1980s, or George W. Bush’s astounding fiscal indiscipline today. But now the Brazilian currency has stabilised, the markets have calmed, and Lula is free to begin acting on his election promises. “We’ve cleared the iceberg from the Titanic and welded the holes where she was taking water,” he said in late 2003.
Lula probably won’t have time to deliver fully on promises like eight million new jobs and programmes like Zero Hunger (“If every citizen is able to eat three times a day, I will have fulfilled my life’s mission”), but if the global economy stays reasonably healthy he can probably keep enough of his promises to win another term. And he has already established something of great long-term importance: the normal democratic alternation in power between parties of the left and right will not again be a reason for panic in Brazil.
19 February 2004
Why Is Haiti Cursed?
Haiti’s trip to the brink of civil war began last September, when Amiot Metayer, the leader of a gang of street thugs called the Cannibal Army that enforced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s will in the northern city of Gonaives, threatened to reveal details of the murder of opposition figures. It was presumably in connection with some quarrel over the division of the spoils, but Metayer was promptly murdered. His widow then conducted a voodoo seance in which his soul appeared and identified his killers: local supporters of President Aristide.
Thereupon the Cannibal Army switched sides, changed its name to the Gonaives Resistance Front, and started killing Aristide’s prominent backers in the city. Meanwhile in the capital, Port-au-Prince, non-violent demonstrators protesting Aristide’s rigging of the 2000 elections were being murdered by government-backed vigilantes known as chimeres (monsters): 45 were killed between September and January. Then on 5 February the former Cannibals seized control of the whole city of Gonaives, killing and mutilating over a dozen policemen.
Since then they have seized more towns in the north and been joined by various unsavoury figures from former regimes like former police chief Guy Philippe and former paramilitary death-squad leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain. Aristide denounces them as ‘terrorists’ while his own thugs continue to attack the non-violent protests of the civilian opposition in the capital.
Just change the names, and Haitians have been here countless times before: there has been only one peaceful and more or less democratic change of president in the country’s 200 years of independence. Nowhere else in Latin America comes close to matching Haiti’s dismal record of violence, poverty, corruption and oppression – and yet Aristide was supposed to be the man who finally changed all that.
A former priest who commands a devoted following among the poorest of the country’s poor, Aristide was elected president in 1990 after the overthrow of the Duvalier family’s 29-year dictatorship. He was overthrown himself by the army only seven months later, was returned to power by 20,000 US troops in 1994 – and proceeded to go bad. Foreign aid was squandered, democratic rules were abused, vocal opponents were harassed, silenced or killed, and street gangs loyal to Aristide were granted a monopoly on local crime in return for defending his rule.
It’s awful, but it’s also perfectly normal. Eighty percent of Haiti’s ten million people are unemployed and the average income is $3 a day. The trees are long gone and the rich soil is eroding away into the sea at a frightening rate: much of the population survives only because of food aid. Average life expectancy is 53, the rate of HIV/Aids infection is the highest outside Africa, and most Haitians would like nothing better than to leave their country and live elsewhere. They know – or at least they believe – that it never gets better for long in Haiti.
But why is Haiti so much worse than anywhere else in the Americas? Other countries in Latin America have had terrible dictatorships and serial coups in their pasts, but have managed to move beyond them. Other countries in the region have lived through lengthy US military occupations and emerged without fatal damage to their national pride and culture. Other Caribbean islands also have populations of predominantly African origin, but they are peaceful, democratic, relatively prosperous places.
Haiti’s crime, for which it is still being punished, was to be the location of the one great and successful revolt by African slaves. It was France’s richest colony when the slaves who grew the sugar, inspired by the egalitarian principles of the democratic revolution that had just toppled the monarchy in France, rose in rebellion in 1791 and killed a thousand white planters in a single night. British, Spanish and French armies failed to suppress the twelve-year revolt, and in 1804 Haiti became the world’s first black-ruled republic.
But practically everyone who had not been born a slave had been killed or fled by then, and Haiti was shunned by the rest of the world, where slavery was still legal. (The United States didn’t recognise Haiti until 1862.) People whose parents or grandparents had been taken as slaves from Africa and whose only common language was that of their former slave-masters, who had been denied any education and who had no social structure beyond that of the slave barracks, were left to create and run a country without resources or friends. They made a hash of it, and that burden still weighs on their descendants today.
When slavery was abolished throughout the British empire by law in 1832, or by war in the United States a generation later, there was at least some help available for the former slaves. More importantly, they were still living in complex, modern societies that gave them models of how things are done as they tried to rebuild their lives as free men and women. Haitians had none of that, and they are still paying the price two centuries later. It doesn’t excuse how Aristide has misused the opportunity that he was given, but no matter how or when he goes, the prognosis is still not good.
8 August 2004
The Nicer Peron: Chavez and Venezuela
It is Hugo Chavez’s own fault that he faces a referendum on his rule next Sunday (15 August), because he wrote the clause about a recall vote into the Venezuelan constitution himself. His enemies, who include practically everybody with money in Venezuela, are hoping to use it to eject him from the presidency two years early. The opinion polls differ wildly, but here’s a prediction. Chavez will be in power for a long time – and as time passes, he will become as great a curse for Venezuela as Juan Peron was for Argentina.
Hugo Chavez is a much nicer man than Juan Peron: he has all of Peron’s skill in the art of populist rabble-rousing, but he is a sincere social democrat where Peron was a cynical fascist. Unfortunately, Chavez has also polarised Venezuela as Peron polarised Argentina – maybe even more so, for his obvious Amerindian and African ancestry adds a racial dimension to the class conflict in Venezuela (where most of the rich are white and many of the poor are mixed-race) that was largely absent in Argentina.
He has an uncompromising line in rhetoric, too: “The real rivals we are facing (in this referendum) are the imperialist forces....They will not take our oil!” Venezuela is the fifth-largest oil producer in the world, and most of its exports go to the United States, so it is no secret that the Bush administration would like to see Chavez gone. But the real problem is that he has divided Venezuelan society so deeply that almost any extreme outcome – even a military coup or a civil war – has become imaginable.
Venezuelan society was already divided before Chavez. The country preserved the forms of democracy through the 60s, 70s and 80s, when most South American countries fell to right-wing military coups, but in practice power just passed back and forth between two deeply corrupt traditional parties that might as well have been called Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The oil wealth circulated among a few million privileged Venezuelans while the excluded majority lived in poverty, and the political system was rigged to keep it that way.
Chavez’s parents were teachers who got one foot on the ladder through education, and he climbed higher through becoming an army officer, but he always burned with resentment at how Venezuela was run. As a young colonel in 1992 he launched a military coup that ended in bloody defeat, but made his name among the poor. When he emerged from jail, he founded the Movement for the Fifth Republic, and began his campaign for the presidency. He won it in 1998, and after re-writing the constitution won it again in 2000.
Unfortunately, his reckless rhetoric terrified the rich: he talked of the senior executives of the national oil company “living in luxury chalets where they perform orgies, drinking whisky,” and declared that the Catholic bishops of Venezuela “do not walk in the path of Christ.” He alienated the US government with high-profile visits to Fidel Castro in Cuba and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He imported 10,000 Cuban doctors to extend free medical service to the poor in urban slums and the countryside. And so the attempts to unseat him began.
The first was a military coup in April, 2002, reversed after 24 hours when masses of Chavez’s supporters flooded the streets of Caracas. (The Bush administration officially denied involvement, but it recognised the ‘new government’ with unseemly speed, and then had to accept Chavez’s return.) In December, 2002 the pampered employees of the state oil company walked out in an attempt to cut the flow of oil revenues and bring Chavez down, but he won the confrontation, fired many of the strikers, and started diverting much of the oil income into ‘missions’ to combat illiteracy, provide employment and distribute cheap food to the poor.
That was when the opposition parties (which control most of the mass media) began to demand a recall referendum. After a year-long legal struggle over whether they had gathered enough valid signatures, the electoral authorities declared in May that the requisite 20 percent of registered voters had signed the petition, and the referendum was scheduled for 15 August. If Chavez loses, a new presidential election will be held next month.
But he almost certainly won’t lose. Only 2.4 million signatures were needed for the referendum, but at least 3.7 million people (more than voted for Chavez in 2000) must now vote against him for the recall to succeed. Besides, he would then run for president again next month – the constitution does not explicitly forbid it – and he would probably win again. And again. He is still young enough to blight Venezuelan politics for decades to come.
Chavez is a man of passionate conviction who is loved and hated to extremes. Emphasising the gulf between the privileged and the poor in Venezuela is no crime if it is a step on the road to closing it, but his impulsiveness and poor follow-through offer little hope that he will achieve that goal. Instead, he has become the intensely romantic incarnation of the class war in Venezuela.
The parallel with Juan Peron is not perfect: Chavez is neither a cynic nor a scoundrel. But like Peron, his charismatic presence prevents the emergence of a more practical and moderate reform movement and drives establishment conservatives into furious resistance. The result, as in Argentina from the mid-forties to the mid-seventies, may be a prolonged period of political paralysis punctuated by outbreaks of violence.
Maybe I’m wrong about Venezuela’s future. I hope so. But the best hope for South American countries, as it probably is for African ones and has already proved to be for European ones, is to create a continent-wide organisation that goes beyond a mere common market and sets democratic and legal standards for all the members. Something like the European Union. They could call it....
6 December 2004
The South American Union
It’s not even a free trade area yet, but when it grows up it wants to be just like the European Union. The whole history of the continent is against it, of course, but then Europe’s previous history didn’t leave much room for optimism either.
On Thursday, 9 December, the leaders of every South American country except the three Guyanas will gather in Ayacucho, Peru to sign the preamble to the Foundation Act of the South American Union (SAU). They chose Ayacucho because that was where South American patriots defeated the last Spanish royal troops and ensured the independence of the Spanish-speaking half of the continent exactly 180 years ago this month – but the single, united republic that Simon Bolivar dreamed of was swiftly defeated by the realities of geography.
The Portuguese-speaking half of the continent has always been a single country, because communications are relatively easy in Brazil, but the mountains and rivers that divide up the rest of the region ensured that there would be nine separate Spanish-speaking republics (with about the same total population) in the other half. It has truly been “180 years of solitude,” to adapt Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famous phrase, with land travel between the various South American countries generally more difficult than in any other continent except Africa. Now they want to change all that.
The original concept of the SAU came from Brazil’s last president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who invited the other South American presidents to Brasilia in 2000 for a first-ever continental summit, but the idea has been vigorously backed by his successor, President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, and by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Both men, unsurprisingly, are on the left: South American solidarity has grown more attractive as the United States has moved right and many South American governments have moved left. But there is more to it than that.
South Americans were acutely conscious that as the rest of the world moved into trading blocs, their continent was being left behind once again. The European Union, the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) were old news, but Washington’s proposal for a hemisphere-wide, US-led Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) threatened to extinguish any prospect of a common South American future and goaded many local patriots into action.
Last month’s announcement that the ASEAN leaders and China, Japan and South Korea were contemplating a broader East Asia Free Trade Area raised the stakes considerably, for such a trading bloc, especially if it also included India, would embrace about half the human population and a good third of the world’s economy – the fastest-growing part, at that. If the FTAA were anywhere near ready, the lure of belonging to such a large trading bloc might trump the attraction of a mere South American Union, but it is not.
The Bush administration has been totally distracted by Iraq, and there have not even been substantive negotiations on the FTAA for two years. The Central American Free Trade Area (CAFTA), lowering tariff barriers between the US and six smallish Central American and Caribbean countries, was supposed to be a stepping stone towards the FTAA, but even that deal now faces probable defeat in the US Congress over a piddling question of sugar quotas. So the runway was clear for the SAU.
The South American Union is not meant to be just a free trade area, either, although that will be the first major step in the process. Its founders are talking about a parliament for the whole continent, and even about a common currency in the end. Their model is explicitly the European Union, which grew to its present scope of 450 million people in 25 countries speaking 18 languages by similar stages over five decades. They believe that South America, with 400 million people in ten countries speaking only two languages, can do it even faster. They may be right.
The ceremony at Ayacucho is a modest start: the ten presidents are signing a two-page preamble to a constitution whose contents will only be discussed in detail at a conference that is still six month away. However, this month should see the signature of a free trade deal between the two existing trading blocks in South America, Mercosur and the Community of Andean Nations, which together include all the SAU members except Chile. That is a real signal of intent.
It will obviously be years before anything resembling a true South American common market, let alone a unified political space, begins to emerge from the negotiations, and at least two countries, Chile and Uruguay, are openly sceptical about the prospects for success. In fact, if the United States could drag its attention away from the Middle East and re-focus on its ambitions for its own hemisphere right now, it would probably be able to seduce some potential SAU members away with special one-to-one free trade deals with the US and wreck the whole plan.
But there is little sign of that happening soon, and after a couple of years the momentum towards the South American Union will start to build up. After centuries off in the corner, South America may be joining the world at last.