Earlier this week we came across a very interesting article published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais by Joaquín Villalobos, a former Salvadoran FMLN guerrilla fighter turned peace ambassador. His experiences working to bring change under one of the most repressive dictatorships of the world have led him to become a prolific commentator on the vast number of uprisings and popular struggles to implement democracy across the world – including the most recent string of successful opposition movements across Arab North Africa. Below is our translation of the El Pais article.

The Arab Revolution and the Latin American Left

JOAQUÍN VILLALOBOS

In the past 50 years, a good part of the Latin American left has defined its identity under the paradigm of social revolution as established by the Cuban model, with health and education as its biggest axes of transformation. Democracy was not considered revolutionary, but rather “bourgeois.” Neither did the right wing and its dictatorships hold democracy as their paradigm, but rather modernization through economic development. Both currents believed that so long if they attended to social needs or economic progress, democratic freedoms were not important. In Latin America there was only one left-wing authoritarian state in Cuba, and the rest were right-wing dictatorships. The result, in both cases, was poverty without freedoms and instability for decades, with societies in permanent conflict.