Jon Lee Anderson: "Today, being center-left is a privilege of the upper middle class."

He knows Latin America like few others, its geography and politics, with local detail. Jon Lee Anderson has just published Adventures of a Young Wanderer on the Docks , a memoir in which he reconstructs his first experience as a traveler and witness in Africa, during his adolescence. Born in California and with a global childhood, a correspondent for The New Yorker magazine and author of an exhaustive biography of Che Guevara, he specializes in armed conflicts and has always been involved in leftist political culture, maintaining a critical capacity even within ideological consensus.

"Is the center holding?": that's what we went to ask him, almost reciting the poetry of Irishman William B. Yeats, with a century of pessimistic interpretations behind us. Also, considering that in the last decade, two uncontested dictatorships—in Venezuela and Nicaragua—have consolidated themselves in Latin America, while some far-right leaders have come to power through elections.

In recent weeks, Anderson has issued strong opinions. The new revolutionaries are far-right (alluding to Presidents Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Javier Milei). Narcoculture has destroyed utopian idealism. The new Latin America is in the shantytowns, solving its needs through the narcoeconomy . We spoke about these topics and about woke culture via Zoom.

–In terms of generation, you were formed by the concept of the Third World. Now you're replacing it with the Global South. How precise and fruitful is this category?

–Yes. I'm just echoing things I hear all the time because what we're seeing is that a kind of new political era has opened, with categories that need to be rethought.

–Some analysts, not just your followers, observe that this isn't just a temporary situation, motivated by election results, but rather an expanded period of time; will we face a prolonged period with the far right? Defining the Global South seems pressing.

–It's the category used today by institutions like the UN, its demographic and malnutrition analysts, among others. Speaking of the Global South is more politically correct; we are in the era of the ideologization of semantics. It's true that calling it the Global South is so all-encompassing and full of variants... But there is clearly a South and a North. The North is small, indeed: it includes the United States, Canada, part of Western Europe, and perhaps Australia and New Zealand. It also includes some Asian countries, like the giant India, and occasionally the Gulf countries, which are a kind of mirage. The world is more diverse than it was 50 years ago, strongly marked by the flow of migration from the South to the North. This is a factor that largely determines the social changes of the time.

–Do you think it’s the main one?

–One of the main ones, yes; migration from the South of the Americas to the United States, coexisting at the same time with the flow of populations from Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia to Europe. The North feels besieged and, consequently, what was always there, albeit more entrenched, is resurfacing: xenophobia and nativism, ultranationalism, and even the stale fascism of a century ago. But it is taking on new forms and seizing a share of political power. The world will be different, but its old problems remain.

–What is the most striking difference compared to the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War?

–First, there are more goods and greater access to those material goods. At the same time, there is the same amount of poverty and hunger. Another decisive factor that brought a whole new dynamic to Latin America is drug trafficking. Sixty years ago, there was no narco-economy or narco-states. In the US, there were only a few potheads and jazzers snorted coke. Consumption began in the postwar period and spread in the 1960s and 1970s. This has had an enormous impact on the region's politics.

–We tend to identify that it's the politicians themselves who polarize the debate. But it could be more serious... Could it be that, after all, politics is driven by the audience?

We're all scratching our heads trying to understand what this whirlwind is all about... Until the 1980s, there were young Marxists and guerrillas in Latin America; they imagined a better world, took up arms to fight against dictatorships. That no longer exists. Today, you have cartels and gang members, soldiers and gangsters. A poor young man no longer wants to change the world; he just wants more money to solve problems, and he can access money easily in the narco-economy.

–We haven't mentioned Canada, a beacon of that lost center. Today, Canada is the American Democratic Party in exile!

– Haha! That's true. But let's consider the fact that there are center-left governments in Latin America, like those of Lula da Silva in Brazil and Gabriel Boric in Chile. What I do see around the world are the consequences of the inability to come together and agree, to form a dialogue-oriented center, equidistant between the extremes. I tend to think the crux of the matter is that we're just beginning to notice the negativity of the internet and social networks.

–Isn't it an exaggeration to think that everything is due to direct manipulation?

–Five years ago, the US was still pushing the internet. The notion that it was, let's say, the ultimate expression of freedom wasn't a bad idea. No one realized that X (formerly Twitter), which we assumed was like Public Square, would become the hammer of the far right in Elon Musk's hands.

–The assaults on the Capitol and the Plaza of the Three Powers, in Brasilia, were motorized there.

–I had a fascinating conversation with the president of Brazil six weeks ago. I asked him: “How do you deal, Lula, with a communications apparatus in the hands of the richest man on earth, who also advises the president of the most powerful country? They’ve decided you’re a communist, and that the judge in charge of the investigation into former President Jair Bolsonaro is another communist.” Network X is a transnational organization that transcends borders. Where is the balance of power? What do sovereignty, political power, and the borders of a country mean today?

–Where does President Lula place his hopes (and his international presence)?

–He's looking for an alternative in China, which isn't exactly a utopia on earth... That's interesting. The Chinese are exploring a currency other than the dollar to gain independence, although I don't think they'll succeed. There are many conflicts involved and great suspicions between countries. With all this, where will the Brick Nations end up? The only thing that gives me some optimism is that we're already aware, after two decades, of the reach of the virtual world. The internet has brought us instant gratification, Netflix, and so on. But it's also brought us the rise of fascism and pornography, the barbarities of ISIS, and the expansion of drug trafficking. We know that this magic mirror in the palm of the hand is also toxic. If critical thinkers want to counter the messages of this new trend, they will have to take to the streets, like politicians. Perhaps we journalists will too. The new extremists have understood that virality is the greatest virtue.

–In Latin America, the left is also responsible for polarization, right? In Argentina, the lack of self-criticism and purging of its leaders prevailed. According to you, Venezuela and Nicaragua drifted toward militarism combined with plutocracy.

–On the one hand, among the radical romantic left, heir to the 1960s, the great totemic figure was Fidel Castro. Always with his beard and olive-green suit, he erected a masculine totem to which one had to adhere and emulate. What the hell! Nicolás Maduro wears fatigues even when he didn't spend a single day in military service... The same goes for Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega. Even Yasser Arafat, in Palestine, imitated Castro... Militarism became part of the left's fetish. And because of their victimhood, generations of survivors of the dirty wars continued to claim it. And they accepted Maduro and Ortega as the only ones who opposed Uncle Sam, in the face of the silence of an overwhelmingly pro-capitalist society that disdained to look to the past. In turn, almost all Latin American countries eventually acknowledged their tragic past, but decades passed before they did so.

–Which figures do you highlight in Latin America?

–For me, Lula represents the historic generation; but at the same time, he has been a great pragmatist. He is a centrist. And although he personally comes from the outspoken left, Chilean Gabriel Boric also presents the possibility of a centrist left, capable of breaking the molds of silence and self-censorship that his country has had in the past.

–The far-right victories of Trump and Javier Milei have been interpreted as a reaction to doctrinaire wokeism. Do you agree?

–In the US, wokism has been part of the mess , given that instead of identifying with workers, leaders and activists dedicated themselves to trans politics and semantic shifts, with notes of great narcissism. All these concepts emerged on our university campuses and, therefore, had a strong export effect to other elites in the rest of the world. It turns out that, in the world we live in, being center-left ends up being a privilege of the new upper-middle-class elites, while being far-right is the natural destiny of the worker. And it happened because the left forgot its true bases. Today, these demands must be unmoored from their socialist origins; we must find new anchors for them.

–You mentioned workers, what an enigma... Isn't this atomized whirlwind you evoked what comes with the robotization of work and deunionization?

–It's true, unions were important and have been destroyed everywhere since the era of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan. A curious case is Uruguay; they're still strong there. And it's interesting because it's a country without undocumented immigrants. It's the opposite of what's happening in Chile, where the flow of undocumented immigrants has grown so much (referring to the recent episodes with criminals from the Aragua Train). It's striking that this new problem in Chile is a product of its economic success, after having crushed the unions under Pinochet and Reagan.

–How can we recover the original idea of ​​social progress and, therefore, hope?

–Somehow, we need to revive the notion of labor dignity, oppose temporary employment, and oppose the use of immigrants from wherever they come at the expense of native workers. The whole labor frenzy seems to me to be a consequence of the post-Cold War Western triumphalism. It's the result of capitalism at the expense of everything else, while our intellectuals, instead of paying attention to the real problems, have spent their time insisting on demanding sexual rights and seeking their new gender. Something very decadent, actually. That's my point of view. We have to swim in those waters, be uncomfortable for a while, and seek and find new solutions.