LAz wrote:He has gone far in improving socioeconomic conditions. How is that bad?
So has Lula, yet his level of acceptance by developed markets is much greater, since he doesn't have an extremist positioning. Chavez's, Morales's, Correa's and Ortega's anti-imperialist discourses cause uncertainty about the economy (there is nothing guaranteeing they won't break the contracts and nationalize everything, after all) and about politics (there is nothing guaranteeing there won't be a popular revolt, as the politics in those countries are heavily divided), so that scares investors away from your country. And that is especially harmful, considering they need developed countries to buy their resources.
This discourse that the "imperialist" developed nations make it impossible for Latin American nations to prosper, and that only by ditching them, we can develop properly, is bullshit. Brazil became a newly industrialized country (NIC) in the last 50-70 years, not because we ditched the US and Europe, but because we developed our industry and started selling our products in their markets. Did they do anything to prevent us from doing that? No. But 20 years ago, no one would have imagines that one day, the USAF would be buying military aircraft from Embraer. And we did it ourselves, not by adopting an anti-US discourse, but precisely by accepting that the US is a strategic economic partner for our market.
If you analyze the last 2 centuries, you will see that the reason why the Hispanic world never prospered was due to several caudillos, coups, constitutions changing etc, which caused the countries to become politically and economically unstable. Juan Manuel de Rosas, Francisco Solano Lopez, António Lopez de Santa Anna, Simon Bolivar, Augusto Pinochet, Alfredo Stroessner, Juan Peron, Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, Rafael Correa etc are pretty much the only reason why this region has been so chaotic for the last 2 centuries.
Brazil avoided that chaos during the 19th century, but ended up falling into the hands of dictators three times in the 20th. But now Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico etc seem to be doing fine. And the reason why Brazil is doing so much better than the Hispanics isn't really due to a huge population. Our population was really small in the 1940s, for example. The reason is that we had one century of stability and economic prosperity ahead of all Hispanic countries. And even in the 20th century, we managed to remain somewhat more stable, with only 4 chaotic periods (1889-1894, 1930-1934, 1937-1945, 1964-1985). And the only one that seriously affected us was the last one (the military rule), though it wasn't as bad as what was going on the rest of the region, since we managed to keep a steady economic growth. So, since there was no political chaos, we ended up industrializing first. And we are also one of the only two Latin American nations that have manufactured goods as the main exporting product (the other being Mexico).
The
caudillo discourse has never led Latin America anywhere, I doubt it will start being good now...
PoFo ethnic party statistics: http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8&p=14042520#p14042520