AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman.
We return to MIT professor Noam Chomsky.
Democracy Now!’s Juan González and I spoke
to him on Tuesday.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about
Latin America.
We had a period, for about 10 years, of enormous
social progress in Latin America—all these
socially minded governments, reduction of
income inequality, the only part of the world
where there are no nuclear weapons.
And yet, now we’ve seen, in the last few
years, real steps backwards.
Quite a few of the popular governments, with
the exception of Ecuador, recently have been
thrown out of office, and a deepening crisis
in Venezuela.
Your sense of what has happened, in that,
after so much promise, all of a sudden it
seems that the region is going backward?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there were—there were
real achievements.
But the left governments failed to use the
opportunity available to them to try to create
sustainable, viable economies.
Almost every one—Venezuela, Brazil, others,
Argentina—relied on the rise in commodity
prices, which is a temporary phenomenon.
Commodity prices did rise, mainly because
of the growth of China.
So there was a rise in the oil price, of soy,
and so on and so forth.
And instead of trying to develop a sustainable
economy with manufacturing, agriculture and
so on—like Venezuela is potentially a rich
agricultural country, but they didn’t develop
it—they simply relied on the commodity—raw
materials commodities they could export.
That’s a very harmful—it’s not only
not a successful, it’s a harmful development
model, because when you export grain to China,
let’s say, they export manufacturing goods
to you, and that undermines your manufacturing
industries.
And that’s pretty much what’s been happening.
On top of that, there was just enormous corruption.
It’s just—it’s painful to see the Workers’
Party in Brazil, which did carry out significant
measures, just—they just couldn’t keep
their hands out of the till.
They joined the extremely corrupt elite, which
is robbing all the time, and took part in
it, as well, and discredited themselves.
And there’s a reaction.
I don’t think the game is over by any means.
There were real successes achieved, and I
think a lot of those will be sustained.
But there is a regression.
They’ll have to pick up again with, one
hopes, more honest forces that won’t be—that
will, first of all, recognize the need to
develop the economy in a way which has a solid
foundation, not just based on raw material
exports, and, secondly, honest enough to carry
out decent programs without robbing the public
at the same time.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Venezuela?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Venezuela is really a disaster
situation.
The economy relies on oil as to a great—probably
a greater extent than ever in the past, certainly
very high.
And the corruption, the robbery and so on,
has been extreme, under the—especially after
Chávez’s death.
So, it’s a—I mean, if you look at it,
it still has—if you look at, say, the U.N.
Human Development Index, Venezuela still ranks,
say, above Brazil.
So it’s the—there are hopes and possibilities
for reconstruction and development.
But the promise of the earlier years has been
significantly lost.
