Latin America and the ‘end of capitalism’

The saddest thing about outgoing Uruguayan President José Mujica’s statement this week suggesting that capitalism is agonizing is not that he said it as the New York stock market was reaching its all-time high, but the fact that it’s an idea that is being happily repeated by many Latin American presidents as if it were an indisputable truth.

Hardly a day goes by in which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his counterparts in Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and several other countries do not proclaim — some more explicitly than others — the “end of capitalism.” Former Cuba ruler Fidel Castro has been proclaiming “the inexorable demise of capitalism” since the early 1960s.

Mujica, who ends his term on Sunday, was quoted by Cuba’s official Prensa Latina news agency as telling the Mexican daily La Jornada this week that “capitalism is exhausted.” His exact quote in La Jornada’s Feb. 22 interview was that capitalism “seems to have already given everything it had, ” and that it is likely to be replaced by “democratic socialism.”

Trouble is, while U.S.-styled capitalism could and should be perfected, many Latin American presidents are sitting idly by waiting for its death. Meantime, China, India, Vietnam, and virtually all Asian countries are growing and reducing poverty at record rates, and they have been doing so precisely since they started embracing capitalism in the 1980s.

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