1. An Emerging Populist Threat?
- Author:
- Mark Falcoff
- Publication Date:
- 06-2001
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
- Abstract:
- On May 14, Jackson Diehl, the deputy foreign editor of the Washington Post, raised an intriguing question in an op-ed for that newspaper: Is Latin America about to “drift back toward its one-time status as semi-hostile territory for the United States”? Some of the evidence he cited was certainly enough to give pause. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, that country’s former Marxist president—voted out of office in 1990—seemed poised to finally regain power later this year. In Peru, Alan García, the leftist-populist windbag—the consummate Latin demagogue, almost a caricature of the type—who drove his country to the verge of collapse in the 1980s, has reemerged as a presidential possibility in a runoff scheduled for June 3. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the perennial standard-bearer of the Left, is leading in the polls for next year’s presidential race. “Even in El Salvador,” Diehl writes, President Bush “may see the election of former FMLN guerrillas.” As to Venezuela, the machinations of its president, Hugo Chávez, hardly require comment; he makes no secret of the fact that his principal foreign policy objective is to forge a new, worldwide, anti-U.S. alliance.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Economics, Populism, and Hugo Chavez
- Political Geography:
- South America, Latin America, and Venezuela