World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [71]
Nationalization in Latin America was in a surprising number of cases fueled by the desire to reclaim the wealth of the nation for its true, ethnically defined owners. In country after country, revolutionary leaders sought to reverse the historical obsession with white superiority, either by glorifying Amerindian blood or by celebrating “mixed-bloodedness.” Indeed, in the early twentieth century the resentment engendered by Latin American racism, always interwoven with the struggle between rich and poor, was a powerful engine of revolutionary change throughout the region.
In Bolivia in 1951, for example, Victor Paz Estenssoro, head of the revolutionary party Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), won the presidential elections by mobilizing the largely mestizo middle class with slogans like, “The land to the Indians, the mines to the State.” Properly terrified, the distinctly “non-Indian” mining elite supported a military takeover. After the MNR recaptured power in a bloody coup in 1952, one of Estenssoro’s first acts was to extend universal suffrage and free education to the Indian majority, consciously seeking to reverse the ethnically based disdain that had imbued Bolivian society at every level since the colonial period. The government then nationalized all major mines and expropriated six thousand vast estates from the “illustrious-blooded” hacendados, redistributing them in family-size plots among the landless Amerindian majority.
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But revolutionary as they were, Bolivia’s nationalizations were not really Communist: They did not seek to abolish private property in any thoroughgoing fashion. Rather, they were majority-supported confiscations directed at a market-dominant minority. The nationalization movements in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere similarly targeted, along with “foreign imperialists,” the wealthy “white” elite with their links to foreign capital and vast latifundia landholdings.
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There are many more examples, from all parts of the developing world. Not all nationalizing leaders were democratically elected (although many were). But virtually all were supported with wild enthusiasm by the indigenous majority when they expropriated the riches of the market-dominant minority.
After 1989, many proclaimed that nationalization was a thing of the past. The Soviet Union had fallen, Communism had been discredited, and developing countries would never again be moved to nationalize. Unfortunately, all this is true only if nationalization in the developing world genuinely rested on Communist ideology. But as I have tried to show, this is not the case. To a far greater extent than has been recognized, nationalization movements in the developing world have been fueled by popular resentment among abjectly poor majorities against market-dominant minorities. Thus it should be no surprise that nationalization and confiscation persist today, even after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Indeed, almost everywhere market-dominant minorities exist, post-1989 democratization has generated a volatile combination of anti-market sentiment and ethnic scapegoating. As a result, in a striking number of countries, even as markets triumphantly swept the world in the 1990s, a backlash of nationalization and confiscation began.
These nationalizations and confiscations have been anti-market, but only in a limited sense. They target not the institution of private property itself, but rather the wealth of a hated ethnic minority. They are based not on an ideal of a Communist utopia, but rather on a deluded vision in which the indigenous masses somehow step into the capitalist shoes of the minority so that they, “the true owners of the nation,” can be the market’s prosperous beneficiaries. In Zimbabwe, the ongoing mass seizures of white-owned farmland are hardly motivated by socialist