THE TIME OF THE UNDERDOG: RAGE AND RACE IN LATIN AMERICA

"To judge from the childhoods of Latin America’s most powerful men, the streets of the continent, much as the Spaniards dreamed, could still be paved with gold. Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, as he himself admitted, did not eat a solid meal until the age of 7. Peru’s Alejandro Toledo famously worked as a shoeshine boy. And Bolivia’s Evo Morales – whose decisive victory in the 18 December elections opens his route to join the exclusive presidential club – was born with the help of a witch-doctor, tended llamas on the long walk from high-altitude Oruro to semi-tropical Cochabamba, and chewed the orange peel thrown by passengers out of bus windows.

For societies long synonymous with rigid stratification and the bleakly condescending looks of the Hispano-Creole ruling class, the intrusion of leaders who are darker, and once desperately poor, is a genuine novelty. Similarly, in the predominantly white European societies of the south – Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – the reins of government are now in the hands of those who were arrested, tortured or exiled under their respective military dictatorships of the 1970s. The rise of the left may be the main (acclaimed or lamented) political dynamic of the time, but it has been driven and framed by an even wider trajectory: the ascent of the underdog".

Face à falta de informação sistemática e fundamentada, na comunicação social portuguesa, relativamente às enormes transformações sociais que estão a acontecer um pouco por toda a América Latina, a partir de hoje, e com maior incidência a partir de Janeiro de 2006, a Formiga Bargante vai estar atenta a este tema, e, por arrasto, todos aqueles que queiram saber um pouco mais.

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