Caracas, Venezuela | Latin America's leftward swing, cemented by Hugo Chavez's landslide re-election in Venezuela, Rafael Correa's triumph in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega's return in Nicaragua, doesn't necessarily reflect a yearning for Cuban-style communism. Instead, it's all about delivering life's basics - food, shelter, health care - to people excluded from the benefits of the free market that Washington has championed in the region for more than two decades. "They say there's Castro-style communism here, but the government hasn't taken anything away from anyone," Sigilfredo Tineo, 61, said Sunday, when like-minded voters gave Venezuela's president another six years in office.
"On the contrary, it's delivering houses, credits, vehicles to people. There's more liberty and equality than ever," said Tineo, an electricity company worker who received a $1,800 low-interest government loan to help buy a car. It's easy to find Venezuelans like Tineo who have benefited from Chavez's efforts to more equitably distribute the nation's oil wealth.
While Chavez opponents complain they can't get government jobs or contracts, millions of Venezuelans now enjoy subsidized food, free health care and education, and low-interest loans to get businesses started. Malnourished, landless Indians clamoring for a greater share of their nations' oil and natural-gas riches helped propel Correa to power in Ecuador on Nov. 26 and a year ago elected Bolivia's champion of the excluded, Evo Morales, as president.
One in four Latin Americans lives on less than $2 a day. That helps explain the new heft of the region's political left - not just in Argentina, Chile or Brazil, where social democrats hold the presidency, but also in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, where the left lost presidential races but proved itself a formidable force. Latin America has the world's most unequal distribution of wealth outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
Its richest 10 percent earns 48 percent of the total income, while the poorest earns just 1.6 percent, according to the World Bank. In the 1980s and '90s, most Latin American leaders heartily embraced a U.
S.-advocated push for privatization of state industries and a lifting of trade barriers. But per capita gross domestic product in Latin America and the Caribbean declined by 0.
7 percent during the 1980s and grew by just 1.5 percent annually in the 1990s, the World Bank says. There was no significant decrease in poverty levels.
Now the legions of the poor have registered their displeasure, electing the likes of Chavez and Morales. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto calls the two "anti-market," "anti-capitalist" charismatic leaders who are filling a power vacuum and benefiting from the huge unpopularity of President Bush's administration with their anti-American rhetoric.
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