Latin American politics has a tendency to resemble the magical realism made famous by the “boom” generation of southern-hemisphere writers a few decades ago; just when you think you’ve reached solid, stable ground, everything shifts and you find yourself more disoriented than when you started. It is with this word of caution that one should treat the enocouraging news out of Argentina and Venezuela.
In Argentina, 12 years of Kirchner rule has come to an end with the ascension to the presidency of Mauricio Macri, former mayor of Buenos Aires, whose seemingly simple campaign slogan Cambiemos (“Let’s Change”) betrayed larger unrest throughout the country. Macri, a relative unknown in the United States, has the sensibilities—and background—of a Mitt Romney. Born into a wealthy family, Macri gained visibility as president of the famed Boca Juniors soccer club (his success was turned into a Harvard Business Review case study). He entered politics in 2003, won the mayoralty in 2007, and has been slowly solidifying his center-right coalition ever since. On November 22nd, Macri defeated Daniel Scioli, darling of outgoing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose administration has been plagued by a litany of scandals.
Macri’s first order of business? Clean up the financial mess left by the Kirchners—not an easy task. As a Forbes piece recently put it:
This past Sunday, in Venezuela, the Democratic Unity Roundtable won the majority of seats in the National Assembly, marking the first time in 17 years—or marked by the time Chavez and company came to power—that the strongman’s cohorts have not held legislative dominance. President (used here loosely) Nicolas Maduro derided the victory, blaming an “economic war” inside Venezuela (with the help, of course, of “outside actors”) for the loss of his United Socialist Party. Like Argentina, Venezuela is beset by a host of economic woes, which explains some of the dissatisfaction with Chavismo. Of course, the Venezuelan opposition faces a few challenges their Argentine counterparts do not; namely, Argentina is not run by a dictator blithely intent on circumventing all opposition.
While it is difficult to mark what this portents, Santiago Canton, executive director of RFK Partners for Human Rights, recently put it to me like this: “The bloc of Alba countries and friends are loosing the steam they enjoyed for more than a decade.” Sometimes “loosing steam,” in a region beset by golpe after golpe, is the best we can hope for.
