The recent success of the extreme right in Argentina, celebrated with enthusiasm by its Venezuelan chapter and international media terrorists, is the tip of the iceberg of a whole structured plan to dismantle the Bolivarian Project of president promoted by Chavez at the opening of the XXI century, with conviction and selflessness within the playing-field of bourgeois democracy. Undoubtedly, the Bolivarian process was the project of hope for those millions of excluded people left out in the cold by neoliberalism and its governments obedient to big business, that did not hesitate to make surrender their sovereignty at the cost of human sacrifice leading to high levels of absolute poverty and ethno-exclusion.

The decade of the eighties of the last century has been tagged as the lost decade and the nineties was the era of neoliberal democraduras[1], until the progressive and anti-neoliberal social movements broke these schemes and managed to capture the feeling, the hope of millions of desperate people condemned to absolute poverty, those who had little chance of access to the basic rights of every human being: housing, education, health, employment and political participation beyond the electoral vote.

At the end of the decade of the nineties these democraduras indebted us even up to how we breath. Meanwhile, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund applied a straitjacket called the structural adjustment plan which aimed to complete the plundering of our people with the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), until Hugo Chavez began to sabotage it and president Kirchner buried it in 2005 in Argentina; and what a coincidence that ten years after, the extreme right has come back into power in Argentina, with the intention of not only aspiring to revive the FTAA, but also to bury the new forms of sovereign integration.  And if they can’t dig up the Free Trade Area, they will boost the Pacific Alliance, and threaten Venezuela that if it does not release Leopoldo Lopez and other anti-democratic Venezuelan prisoners, Venezuela will be expelled from Mercosur, by applying the democratic clause that involves "to close all or part of land borders and suspend or restrict trade, air and sea traffic, communications and energy supply and services."... what the hell …… this descendant of Mussolini.

What is neoliberal democradura?

One of the most extraordinary contemporary intellectuals of SubSaharan Africa, the Congolese Mbuyi Kabunda, applied the term "democradura" to democracies with dictatorship for some African leaders who have perpetuated their permanence in power for many years without changing the vertical structure of the state-government and worse, without sharing with the impoverished majority the wealth these countries generate. To this term, I would add to the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, NEOLIBERAL DEMOCRADURE, applied to the period of the lost decade of the eighties and nineties of the last century, where democracy was restricted to voting and did not include the democratization of our wealth. The neoliberal democradure was characterized by loss of sovereignty of our countries, handed over to the Neoliberal Holy Trinity of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, with measures imposing degrading the human condition in some countries like Colombia, for example, where alarming poverty indicators still reign, felt most in Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities.

Macri: the spoiled child

Trying to assess the causes of why the social project of Kirchner lost, is still premature. However, we cannot consider it as a total defeat for the Kirchner-Bolivarian experience. It will not be easy for the newly elected president as he does not have either the majority in parliament nor among the local governors. But we must highlight something very particular: this neoliberal man stated in his triumphal speech that Argentina was built by second-generation European immigrants. In his speech, there are no Afro-Argentinean builders, nor the Indians or Creoles who sealed independence, and much less those who fought against the dictatorship of Videla, or the relatives of thousands of missing people as a result of the Condor operation. Amid his conceitedness Macri has been very clear: to reinstate savage neoliberalism (Pacific Alliance), immediate devaluation of the peso, privatization of public services, holding back the social budget of the nation that has benefitted Argentineans for more than a decade; and beyond that, from the moral standpoint, to put a stop to the trials against murderers of the people disappeared, tortured and raped in the period of General Videla. His position on sovereign integration blocks as UNASUR, CELAC and ASA will seek disintegration. Nevertheless, to the other integration blocks such as ALBA and PETROCARIBE, it will be difficult to stretch his tentacles, although in the concrete case of energy he may do it together with the USA, thanks to Argentina’s Schist oil reserves, that he will no doubt hand over to the United States companies for exploitation as well as to Repsol of Spain. We are witnessing the emergence of a descendant of Mussolini trying to dance reggaeton out of time, and who hardly knows how to dance the over-complicated tango... we are sure that the spirit of San Martin, Che Guevara and Nestor Kirchner, accompanied by their magnificent people, will retake the streets to defend their human conquests.

Translation/Celina Castro Jaimes sh and ALAI.