Global Policy Forum

By Hector Tobar

Villa Tunari, Bolivia - Evo Morales has been known to throw rocks at police and dance through clouds of tear gas at anti-government demonstrations. In June, he came within a whisker of being elected Bolivia's president.

The near-victory by Morales, an Aymara Indian and coca farmer turned gadfly congressman, is perhaps the most striking evidence of rising anger in South America toward the forces that he names as enemies: the United States, multinational corporations and free-market economics.

As Argentina's collapse had helped drag most South American economies into recession, unemployment and debt, anti-U.S. and anti-globalization rhetoric has been rising. So has protest and violence. Of South America's nine Spanish-speaking countries, only Chile is free of political instability these days. After a decade in which governments across the region embraced open markets, privatization and other reforms prescribed by conservative gurus, there is a growing sense that South America has lost its way.

Official unemployment has reached 22 percent in Argentina and 15 percent in Venezuela. With Brazil slipping deeper into a fiscal crisis, its currency, the real, lost 20 percent of its value in two months before the International Monetary Fund stepped in this month with its largest bailout ever, a $30 billion loan.

Amid deepening distress, South Americans are searching for political saviors, raising the fortunes of many politicians who were considered, until recently, unreformed leftists or political mavericks with little hope of ever winning power. Here in Bolivia, Morales won 21 percent of the vote in an 11-candidate field and finished just 42,000 votes behind the winner, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

In La Paz, the capital, Jorge Barcena, a 50-year-old teacher, said he crossed ethnic lines for the first time in his life to vote for Morales, an Indian. "I am so angry, so completely upset," said Barcena. "All these parties make arrangements with each other to loot the country. They support this neoliberal system that only makes them rich and leaves everyone else poor."

Such complaints of cronyism and corruption abound in Bolivia and much of South America. Once, politicians who enriched themselves were tolerated because they controlled bureaucracies that could dispense vast networks of patronage - everything from lucrative business contracts to jobs as trash collectors.

Now, hard times mean that the caudillos, or benevolent strongmen, have fewer gifts to dispense. Traditionally dominant parties such as the Peronists in Argentina and the National Revolutionary Movement in Bolivia are losing influence. Violent protest has become widespread, with Peru and Paraguay both declaring a state of emergency in recent weeks in response to unrest.

In Brazil, the two left-leaning front runners in the presidential election have said they would put off negotiations on a treaty to create a "Free Trade Area of the Americas" because they see it as a U.S. attempt to impose unfair trade practices.

And in Bolivia, Peru and elsewhere, demonstrations against government plans to privatize utilities and other services have hit hard at investments by European and American companies.

Indeed, a growing number of South Americans see their governments as servile before "Yankee" domination and the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which requires free-market reforms as a condition of economic assistance.

In Buenos Aires, IMF officials visiting the country last month were greeted by protesters burning American flags. The IMF representative "thinks he's our economy minister and that he can tell Argentines how they should act," said Elisa Carrio, a congresswoman from the impoverished north. Among other things, the IMF demanded that the Argentine Congress repeal a law used to prosecute bankers who spirited money out of the country, arguing that the law chilled the investment climate there.

"We've gotten used to being treated without dignity and mutual respect," said Carrio, who has a gadfly image similar to that of Morales in Bolivia, and who is leading in polls as a candidate for Argentina's presidential elections in March.

Arguably the most important rising political critic of U.S.-backed economic policies in South America is Brazil's leading presidential candidate, Inacio Da Silva - known to his country as "Lula." At the head of his Workers' Party, he has a wide lead in all polls and may finally be elected this fall on his fourth try.

While trying to position himself in this campaign as a leader who has grown more moderate with age, Lula has remained true to the central idea of his long career in politics: that free-market policies hurt most Brazilians, especially the poor. "I am against the free trade treaty with the U.S., because it's a proposal that would mean the annexation of South America's economy to the United States," Lula said recently.

Nowhere has the leap from renegade to power broker been as stunning as that of Morales in Bolivia. Dismissed as a fringe player on the Bolivian political scene just a year ago, he now leads the largest opposition party in both houses of Congress after new legislators were sworn in this month.

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