LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

Miami Herald

By JACQUELINE CHARLES, TYLER BRIDGES, AND JUAN O. TAMAYO

One was a member of Uruguay's Tupamaros, an icon of Latin America's armed left in the 1960s. The other is among the owners of the LAN airline, an icon of Chile's free-market successes. Both are viewed as moderates.
They are two of the most important and new candidates in an unusually busy electoral season in Latin America and the Caribbean -- a dozen presidential and parliamentary elections over the next 14 months.
A 12-month period in 2004-2005 saw leftists win nine of 12 elections in the region. Yet the upcoming ballots might well show that the swing to the left has lost its momentum, and that candidates on both sides of the political spectrum have learned the value of moderation, analysts say. In the region's most recent election, conservative Ricardo Martinelli won Panama's presidency in May over the candidate of the ruling left-of-center party.
Most of the races so far appear to be based more on economics than ideology. No new candidates from the radical left have emerged. And leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's influence might have peaked along with oil prices, the analysts argue.
``Conventional wisdom is that an economic crisis like we have now favors the opposition, but I don't see any Chávez-type candidate running and most of the countries having elections have strong institutions,'' said Susan Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami.
``The Latin American left is defining itself more and more through elections and through experience,'' said Phil Peters, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think thank. ``Meanwhile, Chávez has shown some authoritarian practices in politics and weird snake oil [in] economic policies.''
URUGUAY AND CHILE
Two of the most-watched contests will be in Uruguay and Chile, where term limits will force center-left Presidents Tavaré Vásquez and Michelle Bachelet to leave office.
In Uruguay, José Mujíca, jailed from 1973-1985 for Tupamaro guerrilla activities and now candidate of the ruling Broad Front coalition, seems headed for a run-off against right-of-center former President Luis Alberto Lacalle. Mujíca has campaigned as a pragmatist who favors some private investments in state enterprises, while Lacalle has campaigned as a centrist who favors maintaining most of the country's strong social-benefits system.
In Chile, right-of-center businessman Sebastian Piñera, one of the owners of the LAN airline, is running ahead of Eduardo Frei, the candidate of Bachelet's ruling coalition, and Marco Enriquez-Ominami of the left-of-center Coalition for Change.
And in Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla of President Oscar Arias' centrist National Liberation Party is expected to handily defeat Ottón Solís of the left-of-center Citizen Action Party in February elections and continue the moderate economic and social policies of the very popular Arias.
The left is all but certain to score a victory in Bolivia, where even the harshest critics of Bolivian President Evo Morales predict he will win re-election on Dec. 6 and continue pushing his country toward Chávez's vision of ``21st Century Socialism.''
And at the Organization of American States, Secretary General José Miguel Insulza has already said he will seek reelection in the spring of 2010. His handling of the Honduras coup crisis and efforts to readmit Cuba to the OAS drew some criticism from Washington, but it remains unclear whether other candidates will emerge. ``He'll need a very good year to work himself up to the level of mediocrity, but I don't see anyone willing to spend any political capital opposing him,'' said Roger Noriega, a senior Latin America policy official in the George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2005.
But after those elections, the rest are far more uncertain.
UP FOR GRABS
In Honduras, Elvin Santos of the Liberal Party was leading Porfirio Lobo of the National Party until President Manuel Zelaya, of the Liberal Party, was ousted and forced into exile on June 28. Lobo now leads the polls, while Santos has been trying to unify his party before the Nov. 29 vote.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, very popular and one of the region's pure-blooded conservatives, still has not announced whether he will seek re-election in May if Congress and the Supreme Court lift the ban on more than two presidential terms.
Without Uribe, the race seems likely to come down to Juan Manuel Santos, the right-of-center former defense minister who spearheaded a successful campaign against leftist FARC guerrillas, and left-of-center Sergio Fajardo, who during four years as Medellín's mayor oversaw a dramatic reduction in crime.
It's also unclear which way the political winds will blow in the Caribbean, where the island nations of Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are scheduled to hold parliamentary elections within the next year. These will follow other elections in the English-speaking Caribbean that saw voters boot several ruling parties in 2007 and 2008.
Dominica and St. Vincent are now members of the Chávez-led alliance known as ALBA, and Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has been a stalwart supporter of Chávez despite some domestic grumblings. In return, Venezuela has poured millions of dollars in aid and investments into both nations.
``People are preoccupied with the cost of living since the recession has hit hard,'' said Caribbean pollster Peter Wickham. But the opposition in the three countries seems weak, and ``if Skerrit wins again he could influence the outcome of all the other races.''
Haiti's presidential election, due late next year, is expected to feature candidates backed by President René Préval, whose government has earned relatively high marks, and former President Jean Bertrand Aristide, still popular despite his ouster in an armed rebellion in 2004 and a split in his Lavalas Family Party.
THE TOP PRIZE
The top prize at play will be Brazil -- the region's biggest economic and foreign-policy power -- and where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a very popular moderate leftist, is constitutionally banned from running on the Oct. 3, 2010, ballot.
Lula da Silva has tapped a former top aide, Dilma Rousseff, as his preferred candidate, But she has never run for office and has been battling cancer. Polls give an edge to José Serra, the market-friendly governor of Sao Paulo, the country's economic capital.
Overall, most analysts agree, the elections likely will confirm that most of the Latin American left is democratic and that Chávez's version of ``21st Century Socialism'' is not likely to spill beyond Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.
``Chávez took the low-hanging fruit in those troubled countries, where you had toxic political classes,'' Noriega said by telephone. ``But the vast majority of the countries in the hemisphere had respect for institutions. . . . The overarching view is that democracy works.''