Jair Bolsonaro's rise should make the West rethink its history with Latin America

The nations chosen as a staging ground for Operation Condor – the decades-long conspiracy of oppression between Latin America’s right-wing dictatorships, helpfully facilitated by the CIA – do not forget the relevance of bloody history as easily as the wider world. Political violence of the kind Jair Bolsonaro has promised is not, regardless of Western handwringing, an aberration in Latin America.

That is because the new fascist president himself is no aberration; just as Donald Trump was no misfit of American conservatism, but the logical result of where it has been marching for half a century – Bolsonaro is the consequence of a quiet war in Latin America that was adapted, but never abandoned.

From the age of Vietnam onward, the United States grudgingly understood that the unilateral imposition of American will upon its jealously-held ‘backyard’ would be difficult. Rebellion was, if anything, more inherent to the post-colonial history of Latin America than the violence inevitably called upon to suppress it.

To account for this, sympathetic structures would need to be nurtured; similarly-minded national elites and militaries pressured or bought off to achieve the abiding, uncomplicated shared goal of killing off communism, as well as anyone incautious enough to be mistaken for its adherent or sympathiser. Operation Condor achieved precisely what it set out to do. Hundreds of thousands died or simply vanished because of that.

Former East Kilbride factory workers, from left: Stuart Barrie, Robert Carson Fulton, Robert SOmerville and John Keenan

The justly acclaimed documentary Nae Pasaran recently reminded Scotland of that brutal history, illustrating at once how East Kilbride workers grounded Pinochet’s air force, and also how tragically rare it was for international acts of solidarity to yield real effect.

When the Reagan administration was covertly funding a gaggle of murderers and drug-runners known as the Contras, my father came to know some of those brave men and women who tried to transform Nicaragua, and whose battles had found them driven far from home. From these primary sources, he had some knowledge of what they were fighting.

He also knew the challenge of reaching out from a cold, damp little corner of the world, and trying to make a difference in a place that lay hundreds of miles and generations of struggle beyond what he would experience. A variation on that challenge stands before us now.

The challenge is perhaps even greater. When my father was my age, what the US and its tawdry, blood-drenched allies were trying to achieve amongst its southern neighbours was relatively well understood, if only intermittently condemned. That understanding has been largely lost.

Yet in the aftermath of the Cold War, the baggage of Latin America’s right-wing authoritarianism – the torture, death squads, mass arrests, and the neverending executions of subversives who could apparently be found anywhere from churches to schools – were widely presumed to be behind us. For those congratulating themselves on a 'new world order', arranged under triumphant capitalism, 1994’s NAFTA accord seemingly secured the empire that so many had been killed to preserve.

To the surprise of many, much of Latin America formed a different consensus – one decidedly and defiantly different from Washington’s model, even in the depths of a neo-imperial ‘War on Terror’. A counter-hegemonic bloc emerged across the region that held for almost 20 years, and encompassed Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, Chile and Honduras. In a difficult and un-idealistic present, the inspiration of that example is already fading from many memories.

It did not fade from Bolsonaro’s, however. The insurgency centred around what some called “21st century socialism” also included Brazil, under its now-imprisoned former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, pictured above, who provides Bolsonaro’s followers with their favourite hate-figure. The spectre of Latin American leftism – much of which now stands fragmented or embroiled in its own conflagrations – was a similarly useful tool on the election trail.

Chief among the tidal wave of misinformation that aided Bolsonaro’s victory was the contention that his opponents in the centre-left Workers’ Party (PT) – who have been on the back foot since the judicial-parliamentary coup that removed president Dilma Rousseff from power – was plotting to turn Brazil into a communist state. Almost precisely the same justification was employed when the Brazilian military ended the rule of the democratically-elected João ‘Jango’ Goulart in 1964. Bullshit still works.

Just as it did then, the United States has no apparent problem with the new regime, or the methods it has used – and may yet use – to cement itself. Even the most naive of political observers have not exactly been stunned by the fact that Bolsonaro and Donald Trump have taken to each other. Like recognises racist, xenophobic, misogynist, fascistic like.

This meeting of the warped minds is further informed by the fact Trump has repeatedly threatened military intervention against Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, a possibility balked at by the majority of Latin America, including, until recently, Brazil. Bolsonaro however – who has presented the crisis-stricken Venezuela as an existential threat to Brazil for so long he might actually believe it – has no such objections.

Should Trump decide that a shiny new war before the next election might not hurt his chances, he now stands with a sympathetic regional ally whose lunatic rhetoric matches his own. Those in the West who have spent far longer than Brazil’s new president using the Venezuelan example to deride their own nations’ leftists will have some explaining to do if the worst occurs.

Yet support for Brazil’s new government extends beyond the ever-weirder halls of the West Wing. The financial institutions that prop up the US, the world’s largest debtor nation, are also quietly but undeniably pleased by the outcome.

In his seminal work Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano observed that none of the generals who ran the right-wing Latin American regimes of the 1970s were named by the International Monetary Fund. “But whose is the hand that executes, whose the mind that gives orders?” Galeano asked. “He who lends, commands.”

Economic crisis, we are relentlessly told, is simultaneously the fault and the invalidation of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro – despite inheriting an economy ravaged by a series of neoliberal reforms imposed since the advent of 2016’s soft coup – has been judged ‘market-friendly’ by those who define their world views in such terms. Brazilian fascism is what happens when you confuse the endorsement of the Wall Street Journal with a measure of political morality.

Not so long ago, Americans were asked to lend their vote to the former secretary of state who remained intensely relaxed about the 2009 Honduran coup and the government of Manuel Zelaya it deposed, and who remains silent about those who died in consequence. One cannot expect purity and perfection, they were told by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – not when the alternative is Trump.

It is likely that this lesson will be carefully forgotten when considering the freshly demarcated divide in Latin America, where a struggling but defiant Left still stands. Where will we throw our support, when the alternative is Bolsonaro?

The Latin American Left will be judged, as it always has been, by a far harsher standard than the powerful forces arrayed against it. And, if history is any indication, it will probably stand alone.