AT THE beginning of this week, two old men lay dying on opposite extremes of the South American continent. After Augusto Pinochet was rushed from house arrest to a hospital in Santiago at the weekend upon suffering a heart attack, the nonagenarian ex-tyrant’s family arranged for last rites.

In Havana, meanwhile, the markedly younger Fidel Castro was a no show at a parade intended to celebrate his 80th birthday as well as the golden anniversary of the day when, accompanied by a handful of guerillas, he landed in Cuba to launch the revolution.

After crawling ashore on December 2, 1956, the aspiring revolutionary accosted a nonplussed farmer and informed him: “I am Fidel Castro and I have come to liberate our country.” Precisely 25 months later, his forces entered Havana in triumph. Since then the Cuban revolution has withstood all manner of vicissitudes, but the approaching end of the Castro era poses perhaps the biggest test of all.

Fidel Castro’s birthday fell in August, but it was decided to postpone celebrations because the president had fallen sick. The nature of his ailment remains to be clarified, but his failure to put in even a token appearance at last Saturday’s parade will lend credence to reports of inoperable stomach cancer. There have even been rumours that he is already dead. That is unlikely, but all the indicators do point towards a terminal phase.

Should that turn out to be the case, there is at least some cause for gratification in a vindicatory trend, underlined most recently by Hugo Chavez’s landslide re-election in Venezuela this week.

Fortunately, no comparable event has lightened Pinochet’s onerous burden in recent times. The date most commonly associated with his political ascendancy is September 11: on that day in 1973, he overthrew the elected Socialist government of Chile and unleashed a reign of terror whose consequences continue to divide the nation. Pinochet may have succeeded in evading a judicial reckoning for his crimes against humanity, but there was more than a hint of poetic justice in the election early this year of one of his victims, Michelle Bachelet, as the president of Chile.

The ideological ruthlessness that characterised Pinochet’s reign and made his name a byword for brutality was not restricted to the political sphere: Chile was among the first countries to become a playground for the so-called Chicago Boys, who wreaked havoc by putting into practice the prescriptions of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s favourite economist, who died a few weeks ago. This experiment not only sharply exacerbated disparities of wealth (thereby earning Pinochet the undying loyalty of a small but powerful constituency of capitalists) but also exposed Chilean resources to barrier-free exploitation by foreign corporations.

Eventually, policies of this variety were to affect every corner of Latin America (with the exception of Cuba). The so-called pink wave launched by Chavez’s first victory in 1998 constitutes an inevitable backlash. The Venezuelan leader’s success has been crucial in consolidating this trend. Had the coup attempted in 2002 by the business community in connivance with elements of the armed forces, and with the support and encouragement of the United States, proved successful, chances are that Evo Morales wouldn’t be the president of Bolivia today and Rafael Correa wouldn’t have won in Ecuador last week.

Although Correa — a young, US-educated economist — was, during his campaign, sharply critical of neoliberalism and described George W. Bush as a “dimwit” while praising Chavez, it remains to be seen how he will shape up once installed in office. His platform included leading Ecuador back into OPEC; producing a new constitution that, among other things, entrenches equal rights for the indigenous population; refusing to sign a free-trade agreement with the US; and repudiating some of Ecuador’s foreign debt. All these measures, including the debt proposal, would be justified: creating indebtedness was, after all, a cornerstone of the “structural adjustment” whereby an economic stranglehold was to be established via the World Bank and the IMF. The side-effect it produced was a powerful political lever: a tiny tweak was all it usually took for potential recalcitrants to be brought into line.

This was demonstrated when, for instance, Chavez’s supposedly left-of-centre predecessor Carlos Andres Perez, a sharp critic of the World Bank and the IMF as an aspiring president, lost little time in acquiescing in the Washington Consensus once he had been inducted into office. His perfidy provoked a popular uprising that propelled Chavez to the fore.

There have also existed alternative means of dealing with uncooperative leaders. In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins recalls how Ecuador’s president Jaime Roldos died in a mysterious plane crash in 1981 after trying to bring foreign oil firms into line by insisting that they leave the country if their activities failed to benefit Ecuadoreans. He points out that two months later, Panama’s Omar Torrijos met the same fate for his insistence that the Panama Canal be relinquished to its rightful owners.

The plots against Chavez reminded Perkins of the fate of Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh. The parallel isn’t inaccurate, particularly in view of the oil factor, but the economic destabilisation in Venezuela has also been reminiscent of what was done to Salvador Allende’s Chile to pave the way for Pinochet’s coup.

To return to Ecuador’s Correa, his excited reaction to a congratulatory phone call from the White House struck a somewhat dissonant note. The concern may be misplaced, but there’s a risk that he could turn out to be about as radical as Chile’s Bachelet or Brazil’s Lula da Silva, unwilling to go beyond tinkering on the margins of capitalism. Washington has no problem with social democrats of this variety (notwithstanding the fact that they are far more likely to be admirers of Castro than of Pinochet) because they pose no serious threat to its agenda of economic hegemony.

Chavez belongs to a different breed, and efforts to undermine him are bound to continue even though he gained more than 60 per cent of the popular vote on Sunday. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Venezuelan election was that the opposition united behind a candidate who tried to steal some of Chavez’s clothes. Manuel Rosales, the governor of Zulia state, described himself as a free-marketeer, but nonetheless insisted that the social programmes instituted by Chavez would remain in place and promised to introduce a debit card called Mi Negra which was supposedly intended to provide three million Venezuelans with hundreds of dollars of spending money each month.

If this didn’t prove to be much of a lure, that’s because most Venezuelans were under no illusions about the interests that Rosales represented, and they simply refused to take his promises at face value. Even trenchant critics of Chavez concede, on the other hand, that his social policies, based on generous expenditure of Venezuela’s oil wealth, have proved extremely popular among the millions of beneficiaries.

There is still plenty of poverty in Venezuela, capitalism remains entrenched, and a hostile private media has succeeded in generating a degree of hostility towards Chavez’s tendency to extend his generosity overseas, for instance by offering cheap oil to countries that need it most. At the same time, absolute poverty has decreased appreciably, Cuban doctors provide free treatment to those who had never before encountered a physician, and last year Unesco declared Venezuela to be illiteracy-free. Add to that the highest growth rate in Latin America and the scene is set for interesting times over the next six years, not least because the campaign slogan of Chavez’s Bolivarian movement this time around was “Red, really red” (rather than pink, presumably).

It has been suggested that the more virulent anti-Chavistas saw Rosales as a sort of Trojan horse whose services could easily be dispensed with once he had succeeded in edging out Chavez. That was not to be. Much of Chavez’s campaign rhetoric was directed against Bush rather than Rosales, and it was certainly not the latter he had in mind when he declared that the devil had been defeated. (One is compelled to presume that the extremist John Bolton’s resignation the following day as the US ambassador to the UN was purely coincidental.)

Opponents have accused Chavez of being a Cuban puppet who intends to impose “Castro communism” on Venezuela, but the cooperative relations between Caracas and Havana, although based on a personal bond between the two leaders, are mutually beneficial and purely voluntary. If anything, they could serve as a model for progressive integration among Latin American nations, which will prove essential in the medium run to warding off the unsolicited attentions of the malicious giant to the north.

It would be churlish not to admit that some tears will be shed for Pinochet. But nostalgia for the fascistic corporate militarism he embodied is restricted to tiny minorities. On the other hand, the Cuban revolution, for all its flaws, has bequeathed its essence to progressive movements right across the continent. The hopes it embodies may substantially be fulfilled by developments in Venezuela and Bolivia, perhaps even in Ecuador and Nicaragua. And the developing world as a whole will catch on, sooner or later, that there are indeed alternatives to globalisation as dictated by the Washington Consensus.

It would be premature at this juncture to produce an epitaph for Castro, but when the time comes, it may prove hard to improve upon the tribute Fidel himself paid last February to El Salvador’s guerilla leader Schafik Jorge Handal: “He was a true example of a revolutionary. He never gave in.”

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