Latinos and the American Left

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Everyone understands that the debate over immigration in the United States is really about the migration of Hispanics, particularly Mexicans, into the country.

It’s not, for those who oppose it, simply a matter of racism – after all, not many people are overly concerned about Vietnamese, Sri Lankans or Jamaicans coming to America. It’s really about the clash of American Protestant culture with that of what many consider an encroaching Latin American civilization.

The American left, on the other hand, which wholeheartedly supports Latino entry into the country, has always had a fascination with what it considers the progressive nature of politics south of the Rio Grande.

Starting with the Mexican Revolution almost a century ago, its adherents have admired the socialist politics of Latin America and condemned American imperialism in the region.

In the 1930s, President Lazaro Cardenas made Mexico a haven for radical émigrés, including the most famous, Leon Trotsky, in exile from Stalin’s USSR.

As we know, the United States throughout much of the 20th century snuffed out revolutionary forces in the Americas.

The CIA overthrow of the reformist Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Washington dispatched 42,000 troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent Juan Bosch, a friend of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, from assuming power. Folk singers like Phil Ochs wrote songs condemning American actions.

The New Left threw itself into the struggle to prevent Washington from toppling the Communist regime in Cuba after 1959. New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews made Fidel Castro a legendary figure.

Many young people, supportive of movements for social change, travelled to Cuba to help the regime.

The Venceremos Brigades were formed as a coalition of idealists attempting to show solidarity with the Cuban Revolution by working side by side with Cuban workers and challenging American policies towards Cuba, including the U.S. embargo.

Castro and Che Guevara were lionized by radical academics such as Andre Gunder Frank, C. Wright Mills, James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin. Dependency theorists, who concentrated on American relations with Latin America, contended that poor states in the region were impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way the former were integrated into the world capitalist system.

For some Americans, 9/11 refers not to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001, but the Sept. 11, 1973 coup that killed Chilean President Salvadore Allende, who had been elected with Communist support in 1970, and installed the repressive Augusto Pinochet regime, with the collusion of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

In the 1980s, some left-wing Americans, nicknamed “Sandalistas,” provided assistance to the left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

The guerrillas, led by Daniel Ortega, had overthrown the hated Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and were trying to build a more equal society.

But the Reagan administration saw them as a Communist beachhead in Central America and sponsored insurgent counter-revolutionaries known as Contras, to strangle the revolution.

The U.S. also supported the Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments in their brutal civil wars against left-wing insurgents during that time.

Some 300,000 Central Americans (out of a population of just 30 million) were killed between 1975 and 1991, the overwhelming majority of them at the hands of U.S.-backed dictatorships.

In 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, named after Emiliano Zapata, the agrarian reformer in the Mexican Revolution, took up arms against the Mexican state in Chiapas, a largely Mayan and impoverished state.

Zapatista ideology synthesized traditional Mayan practices with elements of anarchism and socialism. It too became a cause for many on the American anti-globalist left.

More recently, there were also those who supported the “Bolivarian” socialism of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Seeing only the bright side of Latin America has long been a tradition among American progressives.