The Latin America thread (VE, BR, AR, CU, MX...)

There was a good chance that he wouldn't win.

But then he got stabbed and that alone shot up his popularity and polarized his voter bases even more.

Motherfucker, if you are going to stab someone, hit a fucking femoral artery and not the abdominal area.

Or really, just used a gun, given Bolsonaro rants all the time about turning gun regulations to ash.

Hitler vs Lenin in a rural town

It's official. My country is a meme.

Translation: Hitler, the best comes back!◊

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 22nd 2018 at 10:04:32 AM

How do you even name your child Hitler by accident?

Just Peruvian things.

We have stuff like a soccer player named Osama Vinladen.

Brazil's Bolsonaro says he will not accept election result if he loses

As fascists do.

For the record, the accusation that the Worker's Party is trying to rig the election is projecting. If anything, it's the current government that is trying to rig the elections by suspiciously disqualifying thousands of voters on technicalities about their voting ID. These voters being, naturally, for the most part, minorities who are more likely to vote left.

Complete coincidence, I'm sure.

Hmmm... in light of his stabilization (no growth in the latest polls, from what I've gathered), and the rumours that there's some disagreements within the ranks, this might be a bit of an entrenching rhetoric.

Edited by Quag15 on Sep 29th 2018 at 4:26:44 PM

Bolsonaro is literally just lifting Trump's playbook wholesale. He's made his reverence for the man clear multiple times, which is hilarious because it is one of the many things that speaks to him being even worse; how awful a man do you have to be when you consider Donald Trump an example to be emulated?

His supporters are in complete sync with him as well, all their arguments are pretty much identical to trumpists, from the cult of personality, asserting that he isn't corrupt despite evidence to the contrary, making false equivalences and accusing anyone who doesn't like the guy of being a communist and/or opposition party shill who doesn't care about corruption, rejecting anything that puts him in a negative light as "fake news"/out of context/bad faith interpretation of his statement, etc.

It's to the point of being eerie.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Sep 29th 2018 at 8:21:43 AM

Argentina Is Nazi Land should be renamed to Brazil is Nazi-land.

Nah. We Latin Americans have a natural fondness for authoritarians. We don't need nazis giving us ideas (though it certainly "helps").

The more time passes, the more sense I see in Don Jose de San Martín's initial plan to bring to the Latin American countries foreign princes and install (Constitutional) Kingdoms instead of straight out Republics. I mean, Brasil had its empire and for a time was the potency amongst the Latin American countries whereas we in Perú had the time of the Military Warlords once the independence was won.

Edit:

In fact, and with all due respect to fellow Latins here - Americans, Europeans and Asians alike - I think the problem is somewhat ingrained by our cultural pattern as Latin peoples. We must remember that one of our cultural ancestors was Rome itself, Trope Namer of The Empire and showcaster of the Populists (in the good sense of the word) and the Dictators (with the two combining eventually under Julius Caesar).

Now, that sometimes Authoritarians can be "good", well, it depends on how bad the situation is and the agenda of the Autocrat in question. For instance, we here had General Velasco Alvarado, a militar dictator who also was involved in breaking the power of the elites in the mountains and the coast and for passing the Agrarian reforms that gave the land to the workers of the aristocracy, hence why he's now regarded as a grey-to-positive by some (the Agrarian reform being a failure in execution and planning rather than intention).

Edited by raziel365 on Sep 29th 2018 at 7:10:50 AM

Democracy in Brazil, as modernly defined, isn't even over 30 years old yet.

I was born in 1989, just one year younger than our standing constitution. Before that it was dictatorships and populist democracies that were democratic in name only.

Though I am worried, that Bolsonaro might win without resorting to actual cheating.

I usually say that Brazil likes to copy the US, but it happens that Brazil likes to copy the worse the US can offer and mostly lacks the nuance to see, even if something works in the US (or just looks to work) shouldn't be applied in Brazil.

My only hope to see Bolsonaro out of the presidency is if the poor sectors of the Brazilian population aren't as mesmerized as our middle class is, since they'd get the worst of the Bozonaro's policies.

Though I would be amused with him winning the election and see the mental gymnastics by his followers trying to justify if he say the elections were rigged and he won, what does this means? That he rigged the election in his favor or it wasn't rigged and he was bullshitting you all this time?

It is a sort of amusement I'd rather do without though.

My country barely had 20 years without Dictatorships.

I've heard that is a sad tale that you can found in pretty much every place that isn't Europe or USA. Our democracies are almost comically weak.

My bad, I forgot about Oceania. I think that East Asia —despite it's social issues— still have somewhat stable democracies, right? Bad populist presidents but still a democracy (Except China sadly). Right?

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 30th 2018 at 5:12:24 AM

Oceania has managed to avoid having a dictatorship, though the Australian government's actions in recent years have been... sketchy, to say the least. A large portion of that probably has to do with how isolated and remote Oceania is from the other inhabited continents, though.

Edited by CookingCat on Sep 30th 2018 at 3:04:24 AM

USA, Canada, Western Europe and Oceania, in general have centuries of culture and a history where the political landscape are build around the institutions responsible for governing.

Which is no coincidence, since the United Kingdom spearheaded the the concept of rule of law and the checks and balances with the Magna Carta being imposed on the regent, followed by the French after Napoleon and the Germans after the Lutheran revolution. The US ended up applying a lot of the Enlightenment ideas.

It doesn't help either that while Canada, Oceania and the US were intended to be livable colonies, South America ended up being basically an exploitation colony. So all the institutions and ground work needed to make a functional country became an after thought by the Portuguese and Spanish colonizers. Brazil, as a country wasn't developed until the Portuguese Royal Family moved to Brazil, to escape the Napoleon Wars.

South America, in general, since it didn't go through that phase had insteadthe power was concentrated in the hands of a few, and the perception that the continent still needs a strong hand to rule everyone and everything still common. Despise of all our current issues being caused by that strong rule to begin with.

Edited by AngelusNox on Sep 30th 2018 at 7:58:33 AM

@raziel:

That is understandable, and I can understand that (looks at Salazar - even if he disliked caesarism), but I think a key flaw in us that allows some of our folks to relate to a dictator figure - and it's something which doesn't just happen in our countries, it happens across most of the world - is that we don't seem to protect our democracies for long (either due to apathy, or a desire for someone to take care of us in a paternalistic way and provide us with financial and job security). I like to think the current third Portuguese Republic will last for a few more decades, but I suspect there will be a feel for an authoritarian figure if economic conditions get worse at a time when the people who lived through the dictatorship and the Carnation Revolution end up dying and the collective memories disappear.

More than Rome, a more particular problem is that our democracies are still fairly young in the grande scheme of things and time. While we Portuguese here in the rectangle seem to be more or less on our way to democratic maturity (in spite of stumbling a bit every now and then), I think things haven't quite reached that maturity status/phase in some Ibero-American countries (heck, even Spain has problems with their remnants of Francoist/post-Francoist elements in politics and even football). As Angelus said, Brazil's current democracy isn't even 30 years old (the Portuguese one is 44 at the moment, which at least allows for some degree of maturity - partly thanks to the European Union and the youth's cosmopolitanist attitudes in general, as well as a strong presence of collective memory of the fascist days).

Edited by Quag15 on Sep 30th 2018 at 2:55:46 PM

Or in the case of the "Republica de Indios" and the Amerindian Nobility in the Spanish Viceroyalties, the problem is that the Spanish didn't rock the boat too much in the matter of government when they conquered and supplanted the Aztec and Inca empires, which were more or less at the point of development of the Bronze Age Kingdoms: Command Economies too centralized in the event of a major crisis, which is what happened in our case with what plague, the Tawantinsuyu being too young to prevent insurrections by its conquered peoples, and a civil war that ended up with both claimants to legitimate rule dead; aside from that, the land they were managing dwarfed the holdings of the English Crown in America and the incentive of "Get a new patch of land and make a new life" wasn't present in the American Viceroyalties after the conflict of the Encomenderos put that idea to death.

And technically, Democracy became the only acceptable way of government in Western Europe after World War I showed why kings shouldn't have access to unrestrained power in a modern country -looking at you Wilhelm II- and World War II gave us Fascism and Communism, which both ended up causing a lot of suffering during the last century across the globe.

Don't forget the problem of corruption, that's also one of the prime reasons why people can get fed up with a democracy if they see that the system can't purge its criminals efficiently.

Edited by raziel365 on Oct 1st 2018 at 7:24:39 AM

At least you guys try to make an actual effort at democracy. East Asia is an authoritarian wet dream. There democracy is more or less a hollow joke.

A few examples:

1. There's mainland China and Taiwan. The former is a country where the guy in charge can ban a cartoon character since he doesn't like being compared to it and there's nothing to stop him. The latter is a corrupt inefficient mess of a democracy where one of the major parties once committed a brutal purge on the populace and is still considered the better one by a large chunk of Taiwanese citizens.

2. There's Japan. A long history of brutal imperialism doesn't make for a solid foundation for liberal democracy. And it shows. Japan has effectively been a one-party system for a long time. Which is worse since the current leaders are righting nationalist history whitewashing war crime denying assholes.

3. There's the Koreas. The DPRK...'nuff said. But the ROK was a dictatorship for a long time too. And then there was that recent impeachment mess...especially since it was eventually revealed that the government was prepared to begin a violent crackdown on protestors if the impeachment didn't pass. The people of the ROK literally dodged a bullet.

4. Macau is run by Beijing. 'Nuff said.

5. Hong Kong wants to be free and independent and democratic...but again. Beijing.

6. If one considers Mongolia part of East Asia instead of Central Asia, then I guess Mongolia's okay. It's occasionally praised as being an "oasis of democracy". Which doesn't speak well of the rest of the places surrounding it.

And they all hate each other.

Edited by M84 on Oct 1st 2018 at 12:39:30 AM

Who considers Mongolia Central Asian? While they might be similar culturally to Central Asia, they are disconnected from and further east than them, and have had a large impact on the rest of East Asia, especially China. If you aren't going to consider them East Asian, then North Asia (like Asian Russia) would be a better region to include them in, especially considering the Republics in Asian Russia (which is part of North Asia) have more Mongolian influences in them.

Edited by CookingCat on Sep 30th 2018 at 9:52:08 AM

Here's Wikipedia's page on it

The section itself points out that the definition of Central Asia is pretty vague. To emphasize this, the list on the sidebar doesn't include Mongolia.

I simply included Mongolia for completion's sake, since the Wiki page on East Asia also includes Mongolia, and actually lists Mongolia in the sidebar.

Edited by M84 on Oct 1st 2018 at 1:00:22 AM

In most cases (including here and in most pages of Wikipedia), it's specifically the former Soviet Republics east of the Caspian Sea (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan) that are Central Asia. Back on the subject of East Asia, though, while Mongolia may be the only really Democratic state in the region, they unfortunately lack in resources and industry compared to the rest of East Asia.

Edited by CookingCat on Sep 30th 2018 at 9:58:07 AM

Is weird how despite that, Latin American culture still like to see them as bastions of peace and progress.

The grass is greener in the other side I guess.

That's only because East Asia burned out its bloodlust a long time ago through centuries of brutal warfare. They still hate each other but would rather stick with economics, diplomacy, and espionage rather than actually shooting and bombing the crap out of each other.

Part of the problem with Brazil specifically is that despite brazilian academia largely coming to the conclusion that the only authoritarian regime in living memory (the military dictatorship) was a rotting dumpster fire, this information hasn't really filtered down to the public and the military was not adequately punished. All the torturers got off scott free. And so for years there have been many people saying that things were better back then, there was less corruption, more safety, less violence, quality education and health care, etc, all of which are half-truths at best and most frequently just complete fabrications and historical revisionism. This is what happens when countries don't make the proper effort to repudiate authoritarian regimes and atone for their sins; the people forget.

And more related to the general messiah complex problem, after the dictatorship we had Fernando Collor, someone people also thought was magically going to solve all our problems but instead just had a corrupt as fuck government and made inflation even worse. Apparently people haven't learned that salvador da pátria doesn't exist.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Sep 30th 2018 at 1:32:23 PM