Bandung in Latin America: The hope for another world

Latin American countries were not invited to the 1955 Bandung Conference, possibly because they were all out of sync with the dominant anti-imperialist stance adopted by the newly emerging African and Asian nation states which participated in this historic conference. Roberto Bissio reflects on the astonishing transformation that has taken place in the continent since then, which has made it possible for it to make common cause with Afro-Asia.

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LATIN America was not in Bandung. It was not invited.

Sixty years on, as a Latin American I feel excluded.

I read with envy the passionate description by African-American journalist Richard Wright in The Colour Curtain of how 'the streets were packed with crowds and their black and yellow and brown faces looked eagerly at each passing car, their sleek black hair gleaming in the bright sun, their slanted eyes peering intently, hopefully, to catch sight of some Prime Minister, a U Nu, a Chou En-lai, or a Nehru...'. 

It makes me want to have been there at what Wright sensed was 'an important juncture of history in the making ... Lenin had dreamed of a gathering like this, a conglomeration of the world's underdogs ... and many Western writers ... had long predicted the inevitable rise of these nations, but in their wildest intuitive flights they had never visualised that they would meet together in a common cause'.

I feel that I should protest to the Group of Colombo, the organising committee of the Bandung Conference, formed by Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India. If 'colour' was the criterion for invitation, why not invite Latin Americans, who are a variety of mixes of indigenous people (actually early migrants from Asia), Afro-descendants, Arabs, Japanese (at least four million in the megalopolis of Sao Paulo), Javanese (in Suriname), Indians ('East Indians') in the Caribbean and Chinese along the Pacific coast?

I would probably be told that Bandung was an Afro-Asian conference and therefore off-limits to Latin America. But in that case, why wasn't South Africa invited? Or Israel? Or either of the Koreas?

I can imagine the Colombo Group members saying, 'Can't you see that the presence of any of those would have derailed Bandung?' After all, diplomacy, like politics, is the art of the possible.

And on second thought, I can agree that there were good reasons for not inviting Latin America.

On the one hand, whatever the colour of its peoples, Latin American governments at that time were invariably formed by members of an elite that self-identified as 'white'. Just as the white settlers in Rhodesia proclaimed independence in 1965 in order to keep ruling over the African majority, the Latin American independence from Spain and Portugal in the 19th century had been to a large extent a way of consolidating the power of the privileged classes. The Declaration of Independence of Central America (1821), issued by the colonial political and religious authorities plus a handful of landowners and lawyers, says as much in its first article: 'Independence from the Spanish government being the general will of the people . Mr Political Chief should declare it in order to prevent the consequences which would be fearsome in the event that it were in fact proclaimed by the people themselves.'

Even more importantly, since 1947 all Latin American countries had been formally aligned with the United States as members of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (commonly known as the Rio Treaty) - a military alliance similar to NATO - and could not in any way be considered as 'neutral' in the Cold War that was at its peak in 1955. As part of the US-led bloc, all Latin American countries at that time had diplomatic relations with the government of Taipei and refused to recognise the People's Republic of China.

Hence the solitude of Latin America, looked down upon as underdeveloped and 'non-white' by Europe and the US, excluded by Africa and Asia for its subservience to the former.

Maybe it is no coincidence that the word 'solitude' appears in the titles of two of the best-known Latin American books outside the region: The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz (published in 1950) and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967).

Octavio Paz points out that Mexicans (as well as many other Latin Americans) are symbolically the fruit of the rape of the 'Indian' (meaning indigenous) mother by the Spanish conquistador. They admire the powerful father but hate his violence towards a vulnerable mother whom they love but who makes them feel ashamed: 'The Mexican does not want to be either Indian or Spanish. Nor does he want to be descended from them. He denies them. And he does not affirm himself as a mixture, but rather as an abstraction: He is a man. He becomes the son of Nothingness.'

Tunisian writer Albert Memmi explored a similar psychology in his 1965 book The Colonizer and the Colonized, and the theme is also echoed in Martinique-born Frantz Fanon's first book Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Historically, that foundational 'rape' was not a single isolated act, but the cultural and institutional result of three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese colonisation in the Americas, where the indigenous population was decimated by the brutality of forced labour and diseases such as smallpox from which they had no immunity. Millions of Africans were forcefully displaced to work in Latin America's plantations and mines.

Rebellions by the oppressed never ceased, however, and in 1804 victorious slaves established in Haiti the world's first black republic. By 1821 all of the continent was independent, but with the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe the young republics feared the return of European monarchies.

Relations with world powers

In 1823 the US proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine stating that 'Europe should stay out of North and South America'. Latin Americans were however sceptical of this unilateral friendship. Since the US was not yet a world power and was itself fighting British attempts to recover its colonies (the White House was burned in 1812 by Canadian forces), many Latin American countries preferred to ally with Britain to keep Spain and Portugal away. The price to pay was to open up to free trade.

The Monroe Doctrine was reinterpreted in 1845 by US President James Polk to support his view of a 'manifest destiny'. Polk worried that France and Britain would insist on maintaining a balance of power in North America, but in fact, Britain peacefully surrendered its claim to the Oregon territory south of the 49th parallel in 1846 and no European power supported Mexico in the 1848 war in which it lost to the US the territories that are now Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah.

In 1862, when a French invasion imposed Maximilian of Austria as Mexican emperor, the US was involved in civil war and failed to apply the Monroe Doctrine and help its southern neighbour against the Europeans. Only in 1898 did the US actually invoke the doctrine against a European power, declaring war on Spain to side with Cuban independence fighters. As a result, the US ended up with the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam as bounty, as well as the Cuban base of Guantanamo and the 'right' to intervene at will in Cuba.

In 1902, Venezuelan harbours were bombed and invaded by the navies of Britain, Germany and Italy, which proceeded to occupy their customs in order to secure repayment of Venezuela's pending debt. Argentina protested and Foreign Minister Luis Maria Drago announced the doctrine (now known as the Drago Doctrine) that it is illegitimate to use force to claim payments on sovereign debt. US President Theodore Roosevelt rejected this as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, declaring, 'We do not guarantee any state against punishment if it misconducts itself.'

Five Latin Americans participated in the First International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism convened in 1927 in Brussels at the Palais d'Egmont. For them anti-imperialism meant resisting the aggressive US policy in Central America and the Caribbean, and the Congress passed a resolution in support of the struggle of General Sandino in Nicaragua against the invasion of US Marines.

Two years later, in 1929, the US stock market crash triggered the Great Depression. With American and European industry in crisis and subsequently diverted to war production, manufactures started to become scarce and expensive in Latin America and imports began to be substituted by local production. In a few years the region's economy bloomed and a new industrial bourgeoisie and working class emerged, protected and subsidised by the state. New political parties and leaders also came to the fore, such as Peron in Argentina, Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Cardenas in Mexico, who nationalised oil and other natural resources, expanded universal education and promoted strong state-led trade unions.

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, the Truman Doctrine announced in April 1947 led to the start of the Cold War. Latin American countries were pushed to sign on to the Rio Treaty, a regional equivalent to NATO. All Latin American governments became signatories, including Mexico that had traditionally adopted a foreign policy of neutrality. At the same time, however, a 'third path' movement rejecting alignment with either of the two blocs led by the US and the Soviet Union became popular among Latin Americans, gaining traction in the universities.

The early rejection of the Cold War was inspired by US political leader Henry Wallace, former vice-president of Franklin D Roosevelt and a campaigner for a global 'new deal', and French leaders Leon Blum (socialist) and Jacques Kayser (radical), who proposed a 'third bloc' with peace as the major concern.

Yet, by November 1947, Uruguayan journalist Carlos Quijano, who had been a delegate at the Brussels anti-colonial congress, concluded that 'Western Europe is unable to build a third force to establish some balance between Washington and Moscow' while 'Latin America has not managed to escape the gravitational force that pulls it to the US'. Not only had all countries of the continent signed the Rio Treaty of military cooperation with Washington but many of them were signing treaties of 'Friendship, Commerce and Economic Development' committing themselves to 'accord[ing] equitable treatment to the capital of nationals and companies of the other party'. This is the essence of what are now called 'investment agreements'.

Such 'equitable treatment' of American investments did not imply only that US-based companies should be allowed to operate in the countries and be properly compensated in case of expropriation. It also implied no performance requirements on their operations, such as the obligation to transfer technology, reinvest a percentage of profits or hire local expertise and buy local products. This constraint clearly limited the contribution of those transnational corporations to the development of the countries in which they operated.

Latin American prosperity started to fade in the early 1950s. European industry was rebuilt under the Marshall Plan and American industry, not damaged by the war but strengthened by war expenditures, was eager to reach markets abroad. Latin America's import-substitution policies and its corresponding nationalism became an obstacle. As anti-communism became an obsession in the US during the McCarthy era, all kinds of corrupt and cruel dictators all over Latin America were hailed as defenders of the 'free world'. That was the case with Anastasio Somoza, whose dynasty governed Nicaragua from 1930 until 1979, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-61) and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay (1954-89), among others.

In 1955 Brazilian President Getulio Vargas, 'the father of the poor' who had started industrialisation with the steel furnaces of Volta Redonda and nationalised oil (Petrobras), was cornered by US-supported opposition and committed suicide in the presidential palace in Rio de Janeiro. In Argentina nationalist general Juan Per¢n was overthrown by a violent military coup, and in 1954 the democratically elected and reform-oriented government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala was overthrown by a CIA-inspired coup that triggered three decades of violent repression against popular and indigenous movements.

Structural constraints to development

In such a scenario, the Colombo Group that organised the Bandung conference could not find anybody to invite in Latin America. It took six more years for one Latin American country - Cuba - to join the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade (1961) and another decade for Chile and Peru to actively become members of NAM (at the 1973 Algiers summit).

The US reaction against Cuba and the latter's alignment with the Soviet Union was twofold. Firstly, the island was blockaded and expelled from the US-led regional body, the Organisation of American States headquartered in Washington. Secondly, an 'Alliance for Progress' was initiated by US President John Kennedy with the idea that bringing people out of poverty would deprive communism of its social roots.

Kennedy's Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, in his new job as President of the World Bank, announced in 1973 in a famous speech in Nairobi the expansion of that idea to the whole world: before 'the end of this century' extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than 30 cents a day, would be eradicated, by a combination of foreign aid and reforms at home, starting with agrarian reform.

That model never worked in Latin America because the elites never initiated genuine agrarian reform; aid was never significant; international rules were not conducive to channelling foreign investment to genuine development activities; and the terms of world trade were worsening.

From his position at the head of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch started to study the evolution of the terms of trade - the declining prices of commodities as opposed to those of manufactured products and capital goods - and, in general, how the global economy was structurally biased against 'periphery' countries. For development to work, trade needed to change.

Latin American countries rallied around this notion, pushed for the creation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 and, in the process, were active in the creation of the Group of 77 (G77) as a negotiating group of developing countries in the UN concerned with economic issues (in parallel with NAM, which focused on peace and security issues).

Latin America was an active campaigner for the New International Economic Order in the early 1970s because the region felt that global changes were needed to overcome structural constraints to development. For a brief period it seemed that an alliance with a social democratic Western Europe, as expressed by the Independent Commission on International Development Issues led by Willy Brandt, could create that earlier envisioned 'third bloc'. But those efforts were blockaded by the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution internationally and by the national security regimes at home.

A wave of right-wing military coups in Brazil (1964 and 1968), Chile and Uruguay (1973), Bolivia (1974), Peru (1974) and Argentina (1976) violently disbanded all communist, socialist and democratic parties, illegalised trade unions and massacred activists. Internationally, the national security regimes formed an axis with the apartheid regime in South Africa and the government of Taiwan, with active support from the Unification Church of South Korea's Reverend Moon and sectors of international organised crime.

But in contrast to the present-day European right-wing nationalists who abhor globalisation, the national security regimes embraced it. They privatised state enterprises and even social security, and opened up borders to trade and investment.

When democracy was gradually restored in Latin America in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was collapsing, the US was proclaiming its victory in the Cold War and the most-heard phrases were 'the end of history' and 'TINA' (acronym for 'there is no alternative', the slogan of Margaret Thatcher). Economic liberalisation policies became part of the conditionalities imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for their loans to countries. Some countries, like Ecuador and El Salvador, even abolished their own currencies so as to guarantee investors that there would never be a state strong enough to regulate them.

In the 1990s nothing seemed to move in Latin America. Inequalities increased, and people lost faith in their leaders and started to demonstrate and demand a still undefined 'change'.

The first surprise came in Venezuela, where an obscure career military officer called Hugo Ch vez won the elections in 1999 without any of the major political parties supporting him. He promised to lead the country towards '21st-century socialism' with a radical anti-imperialistic discourse.

In 2001 a group of non-governmental organisations, trade union leaders and environmental and social justice activists convened a meeting in Porto Alegre - the first major city of Brazil governed by the emerging Workers Party - under the slogan 'Another world is possible,' the exact opposite of TINA. That first World Social Forum was scheduled to coincide with - and be the counterpoint to - the annual World Economic Forum which brought the global business and political elites together in Davos, Switzerland. Three thousand people were expected at the WSF. Twenty thousand showed up.

A few months later Luiz Inacio da Silva, popularly known as Lula, was elected President of Brazil. A new wave of popular, reform-oriented leaders took over South America. Their life stories captured the imagination of the public: Lula was born into a family of poor migrants fleeing the drought of the Northeast for Sao Paulo, where he did shoe-shining before becoming a metal worker and then union leader. Bolivia's Evo Morales was born to an indigenous family and led a peasants organisation. Michelle Bachelet is the daughter of a Chilean general killed by the dictator Pinochet and she and her mother suffered imprisonment and torture, the same as Jos‚ Mujica from Uruguay and Dilma Rousseff (Lula's successor) from Brazil.

The personal lives of the highest political figures dramatically illustrate how the victims of four decades ago are now at the top. But what does that change for the people?

The change is enormous. Former human rights violators have been tried and jailed, and rights are not only respected but have been expanded to include, in some cases, the right of women to decide over their bodies, everybody's right to marry the person of their choice, the right to social security and the right to free education. Inequalities have decreased, thanks to the expansion of social programmes. Taxation policies are being made more progressive and the state has recovered a role in the economy. Indebtedness has been reduced and, with it, dependence on IMF conditionalities.

A year ago I organised a debate between the Uruguayan government and civil society activists from around the world. We heard from the ministers who led the process how, after the financial crisis of 2002 that impoverished the population, the policies they applied were the opposite of what the World Bank and the IMF were recommending. The minimum wage was increased, trade unions were strengthened, collective bargaining was made mandatory and social security was expanded. As a result, a virtuous circle was created, unemployment was reduced to a historic low and foreign investment, instead of leaving the country, increased. This is the opposite of the austerity policies that are the recipe for a similar crisis now raging in Europe and in many developing countries.

The success of Latin American redistribution policies is not yet recognised by mainstream economists, but is endorsed by the peoples that have voted these governments back in power. Never before in history has the region had such a long period without coups d'etat and with functioning democratic institutions.

But this 'first generation' of reforms has not yet changed basic structures of land ownership or the patterns of production. Latin America is still largely an exporter of commodities and importer of manufactures. In spite of all the changes so far, levels of income inequality, crime and social violence are still the highest in the world. The region also needs and hopes for global rules to change so that its domestic efforts find an enabling international environment.

Thus, in 2014 Argentina spearheaded efforts that led to the UN General Assembly launching a process to establish a fair workout mechanism for sovereign debts (something that UNCTAD has been demanding for decades), while Ecuador initiated a similar process at the UN Human Rights Council to agree on binding rules for transnational corporations to respect human rights. These moves have been motivated by their respective experiences: Argentina is being attacked by 'vulture funds' which oppose restructuring of the country's debt, and Ecuador has been fighting for 30 years against major oil companies to remedy the damage they wrought upon the Amazon jungle and its peoples. Both resolutions at the UN were passed with support from the G77 and China and a handful of other countries, despite the partial abstention of Europe and the negative vote of the US and its close allies.

In international politics the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Cancun in 2003 provided for the first time dramatic evidence of a new Latin American role. Led by Lula, the Latin American members of the Cairns Group of agriculture exporters (a mix of countries that included Latin American and Asian agriculture exporters in alliance with Australia and New Zealand) that promoted further liberalisation of farm trade, decided to form a new alliance of developing countries that was named the G20 (no relation to the G20 major economies grouping) to defend notions of food sovereignty. Brazil and India started to coordinate their positions at the WTO and that changed the whole balance of forces. The Cancun meeting 'collapsed' but developing countries celebrated that result because 'no deal is better than a bad deal'.

Two years later, in Mar del Plata (2005) Latin American countries rejected the proposal of US President George W Bush to establish a Free Trade Area of the Americas because they perceived further liberalisation as running contrary to their interests. Instead, in 2008 the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was created, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) came into being in 2010.

The launch of the Banco del Sur (Bank of the South) to pool regional funds to finance development and the moves towards promoting intra-regional trade and financial collaboration are the major results of those regional efforts.

CELAC met in January 2015 in Costa Rica and agreed on a comprehensive action plan that includes the consolidation of a CELAC-China Forum and the organisation in 2015 of a CELAC-India Forum and a CELAC-Russia Forum. That is a major contrast with the Summit of the Americas in April 2015 in Panama attended by those same countries plus the US and Canada. The handshake between Cuban President Ra£l Castro and Barack Obama was the only noteworthy outcome of that meeting. It was welcomed as it signified the end of 50 years of hostility towards Cuba by the US, something that Latin America had been requesting for many years. But no common communiqu‚ emerged from the summit, which shows how enormous the gap is between the aspirations of the US and its southern neighbours.

Some signals coming from Latin America in recent weeks are worrisome though. The dramatic drop in oil prices has created economic difficulties in Venezuela, where political polarisation between the government and the opposition is intensifying; corruption scandals in Petrobras are tarnishing the image of the Workers Party in Brazil; and Argentina is entering a turbulent electoral period in the midst of economic uncertainties. Falling commodity prices are having an impact everywhere. Does this then mark the end of a cycle?

I cannot predict the future and can only turn once again to one of our great writers. The final paragraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude reads:

'Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.'

That is the end of the book and of its fictional town of Macondo, which many see as a metaphor for Latin America. Is this tragic end a destiny or a warning? I believe that our fate as Latin Americans is not written in any parchment and therefore cannot be read. The solitude of Latin America will not last one hundred years and the way to avoid repeating the curse of the past is to reach out to Africa and Asia and together build the future.                        

Roberto Bissio is Executive Director of the Third World Institute (ITeM) and coordinator of Social Watch. This article is based on a speech delivered at the Bandung - Third World 60 Years forum held in Hangzhou, China, on 17-19 April 2015.

*Third World Resurgence No. 296/297, April/May 2015, pp 45-49