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The dispute over Latin America

by Alfredo Serrano Mancilla

Source: CELAC

The 4th CELAC Summit is taken place in the middle of the world (Quito, Ecuador) with a background of a Latin America in clear dispute. The post neo liberal processes surely confront the most complicated moments to date to achieve this change of era. Tensions are more pressing. They are tensions of the many contradictions arisen from the heat of a dynamic vertiginous process of change. A few years ago, in 2009, Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera had warned of this dispute for Bolivia in his book The creative tensions of the revolution. This warning can be freely extrapolated and is of vital importance for everything happening in the region.

In this point, also, it is important to differentiate between fundamental tensions and secondary ones. The first are those existing tensions between antagonic blocks of power. The metabolism of capital is not extinguished nor disappears so easily as once thought. Neo liberalism has many forms to continue participating and being a protagonist in economy although the policy takes a different route. Regarding this point, Mészáros, explains in his book, Beyond Capital calling it post capitalism. Capitalism will not depart so easily although the exit has been pointed out to it. It remains, reinvents and readjusts. The profit seeking importer is a clear demonstration of how capitalism responds to satisfy it growing internal demand. The private sector inserts a new economic order disputed in part by profits (recovered privately) with an economic importer active, idle, speculative, unproductive that has used large amount of currency that were fleeing with no return for internal development. This leads to vicious circles of profit that leads to new difficulties within each process. See the case of Venezuela or Ecuador.

Referring to the second, secondary tensions that are those produced within the national-popular block; that is it emanates within the people themselves as Chinese President Mao Tse Tung explained. The reality today barely refers (fortunately) to those inherited from the neo liberalism of the end of the 20th century. Numerous social improvements have been implanted, as well as improvement on the level of consumption and alterations of the socioeconomic composition. A new common sense has emerged, still in movement.

The new image of most social inhabitants is a far cry from the demand for basic rights made in the past decades. Today there is a new subjectivity in construction that has to be analyzed as such.

This category, called people, can no longer be conceived as a static photograph. The common person of this era thinks, has illusions and sees its demands fulfilled. And the new right if very wary. See the case of Argentina.

This characterized Latin America is also in dispute because there is another world outside that moves and transits geopolitically at great speed. The geo economic order has nothing to do with previous years.

New emergent blocks appear. Economic relations have diversified in favor of the BRICS (primarily with China). However, the return of the caravels is constant. The United States and European Union continue

signing agreements of free trade with the Pacific block. Mercosur is also in full dispute internally. The contraction of world trade serves as an excuse for large Brazilian and Argentina business to have access

to the European market. In this sense, it cannot also neglect the role of translatins in this new struggle when it comes time to define what will be the economic map in the coming years.

On the other hand, ALBA hasn´t been able to make the real leap to dispute the economic sphere. Political integration demands a larger economic relationship to overcome the current external restrictions. If this does not occur, then, this Bolivarian block is condemned to marginalization now that the Pacific Alliance speeds up it process of dependent insertion with the center of economic power worldwide,

CELAC is in this scenario of dispute as a political substitute to the OAS and should also take a step forward. The economy of today is too important politically to turn its back on. There are too many tasks to do in this sense: creation of a Latin American Agency for the qualification of risk (regarding the debt); implementing new economic mechanisms of defense against attacks of the vulture funds put in practice in the system of trade exchange without passing over with the dollar since this currency is scarce; design of a joint plan of CELAC inversion at a regional level in strategic sectors, preparation of a new regional map of small and medium size businesses as new Latin American providers; planning of production chains to create the largest possible added value in Latin America.

There are many economic and political challenges to prevent Latin America from becoming torn apart as intended from abroad. The dispute is served. The point of forking of the region is just around the corner: either a balkanized Latin America directed from abroad by neo liberal hegemony or, on the contrary, a more integrated block not monolithic.

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