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PrintApril 7, 2008
Hope in Peru
Once again we applaud the astute Clarice Feldman for her thoughtful American Thinker piece on Peru's Alan Garcia, who has graduated himself and his nation from a near-failed state to practically a 2nd tier nation. Let us hope this is sustained while all around him to the North and the South [re-militarizing Bolivia and Ecuador] are failing states of corruption.
South America today is indeed locked inside an epic struggle of its own making. Clarice notes the brilliant Guide to the Perfect Latin Idiot. Sadly, the authors have a current sequel- The Return of the Perfect Latin Idiot....for the "idiots" have irresponsibly returned by choice and on full throttle now. We North Americans can neither appreciate nor grasp the significance that what Garcia says when he notes that Latins are still inside a new cold war and that this resonates with Latins is because they live this.We think that the Cold War is over. Latins know it is back on the menu, never really having left, but with the vast unaccountable influx of Hugo Chavez's billions in the new Latin war of attrition, the game is afoot and none dare self delude -- as Garcia warns- behind self imposed walls.
Unlike Peru and Colombia, many Latins have just recently walled themselves off from democracy, from free speech, from even handed law and order, from open media and protections from state monopolies; in short from Western civilization which is often abnegated and forced in to state imposed irrelevancy or worse. Walling off has gotten many nations- and individual lives- into big trouble. Some Latins deceptively call this socialist-populism or "the new alternative democracy."
It is not new and it is not democracy.
Like Colombians, Peruvians do not want to go back to the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s when all liberties were controlled by the state machinery and its kissing cousin- corrupt criminal cartels. Hope for the future is palpable in Peru and Colombia these days and they wear it with justifiable pride. It is a good thing.
Let us hope they thrive and have the grace to hold themselves while those around them fall.
Maggie Petito
Washington, D.C
