In my childhood, Latin America had only three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba. ABC. I would hear of Argentina and Brazil every few years, when the soccer World Cup came around. Its legends became our legends. Pelé, of course, was a hero in India. I saw him play in Kolkata in 1977. The following year, Argentina sizzled at the World Cup, from Leopoldo Luque’s volley against France in the first match to Mario Kempes’s goal in the final. These names, and their pictures from the newspapers and an early issue of Sportstar, adorned my room.
The third country, Cuba, had a different place in my consciousness. Somewhere in the attic of my memory, I remember first seeing the iconic image of Che Guevara, and feeling the immense power in his Christlike revolutionary look. But more than that, it was hearing of the Cuban Revolution: its audacity and its inventiveness. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment visually introduced me to Cuba and seared its powerful hopes into my imagination.
I first saw Fidel Castro in Durban, at the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in 2001. Lucky to have passes to both the ministerial and the nongovernmental meeting, I got to see him speak twice. At both events, Castro received standing ovations. He was extraordinary, schooling us on the massive ecological and economic crisis faced by the planet, and then, with his inimitable sense of optimism, he said, “History has demonstrated that great solutions have only emerged from great crises.” The Durban conference culminated several years of political work to raise issues of oppression and to seek a common solution to several injustices. But a few days after the final ceremony, the September 11 attacks occurred. The Durban dynamic was an early casualty of the war on terror.
Walking the streets of a still shell-shocked New York City with my friend and editor Andy Hsiao, I told him I wanted to write a book about Durban, to excavate the ruins of the WCAR. My first stab, a journalistic book on the conference itself, stumbled. I found myself being overly critical of the WCAR, of the multiplicity at the venue, and of the inability of the many to create a common horizon. Similar problems became evident at the World Social Forum (WSF), held mainly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, but also in other cities, including once in the megacity of Mumbai, India, in 2004. The ideological terrain of internationalism appears saturated by the champions of neoliberalism (and there were many at the WCAR) and those who carp about its failures (the majority). Alternatives were called for but remained unrealized. The few pages I wrote were not historically grounded, not fully exploring why it is that the planet’s people share no common project for social justice. I put the book to rest.
To document our current predicament, I first had to settle accounts with an earlier project that dominated the world from the interwar years to the 1980s: that of the Third World. The Third World, for me, was not a spatial marker, the omnibus name of underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It was, rather, the name of a project, cultivated by the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and its intellectuals from the 19th century into the 1940s.
From the Peruvian Aprista Party to the Indonesian National Party, political leaders realized that the Atlantic countries that dominated world affairs had neither the will nor the ideas to solve the planet’s problems. The solution had to come from elsewhere, from the anti-colonial movements and from the international institutions they would create. This became the framework for my study, to explore the lineaments of the Third World project and to show how it dissolved in the 1980s. If I could show how it was killed off, I would better be able to understand the lack of such a vision in our present day. The mechanism that killed it might help us understand what must be at the centerpiece of the new project, the project of Durban, of the WSF, and beyond.
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In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia looked to each other for support and solidarity in a still hostile world. In 1955, leaders from 29 countries—as diverse as Ghana and India, Tanzania and Indonesia, Egypt and China—came to Bandung, Indonesia, for the Asian-African Conference. Latin American representatives did not attend largely because their imperial orbit lay elsewhere; their target was not Old Europe but New Yankee, and in this they differed greatly from most of Africa and Asia (except for the Philippines). Additionally, Spanish was their lingua franca (except for Brazil and the Dutch colonies), whereas most of the anti-colonial leaders from Africa and Asia spoke English or French, and many of them met in their continental sojourns, whether in London, Paris, or Geneva.
Latin America was not present, but neither was it absent. In the most unobtrusive way, Latin American leaders had done these countries an immense deed: They had fought to extend the charter of the United Nations so as to include human rights and to open UN institutions to the countries that would become independent after 1945. Although the African and Asian countries had no seat at the San Francisco conference that inked the UN Charter, since most were still colonies, the Latin American delegates did their work for them. The Atlantic powers wanted only a security pact, but the Latin Americans demanded more. Drawing from the 1938 Declaration in Defense of Human Rights passed by the Inter-American Conference, the Latin Americans came to San Francisco armed with legal and moral challenges. Panama led the fight. Its delegate, Ricardo Joaquín Alfaro, was not only a veteran diplomat but had also served briefly as the country’s president.
At San Francisco, Alfaro quickly submitted a proposal for an expansive definition of human rights, including rights to education, health care, social security, and work. Panama’s feint was backed by fellow Latin American states, including Chile, Cuba, and Mexico. When this enlightened measure fell apart, the Latin American bloc was joined by two newly freed countries, Lebanon and the Philippines—an early sign of the coming Third World alliance. Alfaro also found important allies in Chile’s Felix Nieto del Río and Hernán Santa Cruz, in Ecuador’s Carrera de Andrade, and Uruguay’s Eduardo Jiménez de Aréchaga, as well as the dynamic Guy Pérez Cisneros of Cuba and Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic.
Lebanon’s Charles Malik introduced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN General Assembly in 1948 with thanks to Santa Cruz in particular, because he “kept alive in our mind the great humane outlook of his Latin American world.” Exaggerations aside, the fact that the Latin American states had membership within the United Nations before the end of the 1940s meant that their input into its Charter created the pathway that would be used by the Third World project.
Latin America formally joined the world of the Afro-Asian gatherings in 1961 to create the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This was largely through the new Cuba’s forceful intervention. When Castro’s platoons descended into Havana, it not only inaugurated a new moment for the island nation, but it also built a bridge between Latin America and the newly constituted Third World project. Cuba’s president, the well-respected lawyer Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, went to Belgrade as the only Latin American representative at the founding of the NAM. At the conference, Dorticós carefully parsed the rhetoric of “peaceful coexistence“ to ensure that it would not mean the continued imperial domination of smaller countries.
In doing this, Dorticós and Cuba established a left pole within the NAM, one that Cuba continues to hold to this day (the most recent NAM conference, the 14th, was held in Havana in September 2006). That left pole consolidated in 1966, when Havana hosted the first Tricontinental, a meeting of governments and national liberation movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Morocco’s Mehdi Ben Barka, who was assassinated just before the conference, had predicted that “two currents of the world revolution would be represented at [the Tricontinental]: the current born with the October Revolution and the national liberation revolutions’ current.” Cuba brought these two currents together.
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When I went to work on the darker nations, people I met and archives I consulted kept pointing to two Latin American men who are little known outside their areas of specialization: Raúl Prebisch, an Argentine economist, and Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan politician. Both were crucial figures in constructing the Third World project. As it developed at Bandung and at Belgrade, the project had three legs: for peace (an end to the nuclear confrontation and nuclearism), for justice (dignity for the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America), and bread (a new international economic order). Prebisch and Pérez Alfonzo were the architects of the third leg. Everyone I spoke to pointed to Prebisch, whose reputation suffered as the Third World project collapsed. While there are fairly good books on him in Spanish, there is no full-length biography or comparably intellectual treatment of him in English.
Prebisch conceptualized import-substitution industrialization, the mechanism by which the new nations would jump-start their battered economies and the political process by which they would create national economies (which would trade, of course, but foreign trade would not be the raison d’etre of economic development). His 1948 paper for the Economic Commission for Latin America was compulsory reading from Santiago to Jakarta: It launched structuralist economics and provided the intellectual fodder for the Third World project. No surprise, then, that in 1964 Prebisch became the founding secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the headquarters of the Third World. Prebisch would be roundly criticized from the left, particularly from the school of dependency theorists, but their foray would have been impossible without his pioneering intellectual and institutional work.
One of Prebisch’s ideas was to create a commodity cartel. Colonialism distorted the historical dynamic of the parts of colonized world in many ways, one of which was to create single-commodity economies. Cuba grew sugarcane, the Gold Coast grew cocoa, northern Bihar grew indigo. The new nations inherited this lack of variety, and even while free, the countries were at the mercy of corporations that controlled the purchasing of raw materials. Instead of allowing these corporations to set prices, Prebisch and others suggested that the Third World project create a cocoa cartel, a bauxite cartel, a sugarcane cartel, and so on, allowing Cuba and Jamaica and Ghana to protect their main assets. The idea went nowhere for most commodities.
But one Venezuelan, Pérez Alfonzo, and one Arab, ‘Abdullah al-Tariqi, the Saudi petroleum minister, found the idea valuable. They first met in Cairo, and then in Baghdad in 1960 they inaugurated the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a child of the Third World project. Pérez Alfonzo, the architect of OPEC, was an intriguing man. A founder of Venezuela’s Acción Democrática, he believed that oil, as the nation’s asset, should be used for the people’s good. He walked where he could and kept his own house in darkness.
Two years before he died in 1979, Pérez Alfonzo wrote, “I am an ecologist first of all. I have always been an ecologist first of all. Now I am not interested in oil anymore. I live for my flowers. OPEC, as an ecological group, has really disappeared. Still I feel OPEC is a good instrument of the Third World. It has just not been used properly.” There is no good biography of him in English (in Spanish there is Pedro Rodríguez Rojas’s underwhelming 1997 study, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo: mito del nacionalismo petrolero?).
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Castro, the colossus of the Third World, came to New Delhi in 1983 to pass the NAM baton from Cuba to India. At that meeting, the Third World project imploded. The accumulating debt crisis that began a few years before claimed Mexico in 1982, and it threatened most of the planet. Castro came with strong medicine. He wanted a debt strike: All indebted countries would simply refuse to pay and demand debt forgiveness. This could work only if all NAM countries went along with it. Finance capital, an unfamiliar social force in the 1940s and early 1950s, had exploded across the planet and constrained the Third World project. Castro’s fight-back was, as usual, creative, but it was insufficiently attractive for the other governments.
The Bandung generation had either died or fallen prey to the very populist authoritarian structures it had created, especially the military. Its heirs were not disposed to the Bandung ethos, even as they continued to pursue some parts of the Third World project. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed for the “structural adjustment” of the internal economies of the NAM countries, it found a relatively willing state bureaucracy and an eager economic elite. For them, the patriotism of the bottom line was more important now than the socialist constraints placed on them by the nation-state and its international partners (like UNCTAD). This structural adjustment of the states occurred just as transnational corporations found the technological means to assert their dominance over the increasingly porous boundaries of the nation-state. This dynamic assassinated the Third World idea. But Castro survived to fight another day.
When he took the stage in Durban in 2001, it was this resilient Castro, now the representative of the planetary upsurge against the triangular forces of neoliberalism, globalization, and finance capital. Political and social movements across what is now called the Global South regrouped in the 1980s and 1990s, initially in the IMF riots, then in single-issue struggles (rights to livelihood, medicine, water, dignity), and finally in a battle for political power (whether this is indigenous rights or else a new kind of anti-imperialist nationalism).
The use of the word south comes from the independent commission under the chairmanship of former German chancellor Willy Brandt (set up in 1977, with its influential Brandt Report released in 1980). Brandt’s team divided the world at a latitude of 30 degrees (with some exceptions, like Australia and New Zealand). What is above the line, the North, is the affluent part of the world, and what is below, the South, is the impoverished. The term has been swept up, partly through its use by NGOs, then by the United Nations, and finally by those who are part of the WSF dynamic. The “South” or the “Global South” refers to those poorer nations that are not left out of development, but whose labor and lives pay for the affluence of the North. Castro, at Durban, spoke for the exploited millions.
In Latin America this Global South dynamic translates into political office, whereas in Africa and Asia it pushes into and around the centers of power. When Hugo Chávez, the new Castro as far as the Global South goes, comes to India and Iran or to the podiums of the 2006 African Summit or the 2006 NAM, he is greeted as the vanguard of a new, as yet unspecified, project. Chávez evoked the history of the NAM in Havana and called for the creation of a new project of the South: a set of proposals needs to be articulated by a commission that draws together those proposals that are often thrown to the wind. What might they be? Some of the institutional elements should include a bank of the South (“to finance our development”), a university of the South, a TV network of the South, and “a petroleum energy pact for the South,” the already inaugurated PetroSur. “El sur también existe,” Chávez said, quoting the Uruguayan poet Mario Bendetti, “The South Also Exists.” Or at least the Bolivarian Revolution will try to make its existence manifest.
How all of Chávez’s initiatives will be funded is in question. Venezuela, with a 56% increase in government spending almost entirely due to its oil revenues, has begun to offer finance in Africa, Asia, and across Latin America. But can it counteract the role being played by Beijing, whose own position is as yet unclear? Is the Beijing Consensus going to be any different from the Washington Consensus, and what will be the position of the new Latin America between Washington and Beijing, or indeed Caracas? How will the new project, that of the Global South, be able to handle financialization, a social force that appears to have no location and to be uncontrollable? How will the Global South make finance bend to its will? These questions are on the table for Latin America and for the world.
In 2005, when Chávez traveled to Argentina to lead a protest against George W. Bush at Mar del Plata, he walked the road with a legend, Diego Maradona. From 1977 to 1994, Maradona dominated world soccer—even when he didn’t score as much as one expected, all eyes in the stadium remained on him. He was the shining star of the 1980s. Maradona called Bush “human garbage” and attended the rally alongside Chávez. Next to Argentina, Brazil and Cuba, Venezuela now stands.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and the Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford. He is working on a book titled The Poorer Nations: A People’s History of the Global South, a follow-up to The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007).
