Let’s enter the 21st century – Infobae

Our region walks like crabs: backwards. In the 21st century, when the world of robotics, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology are changing our way of living, thinking, studying, training, healing, and feeding -to mention just a few issues-, the continent’s political leaders continue to think , living and acting in the last century.

The worst thing in the case is that they do not live and think like they were at the end of the 20th century, but rather continue in the 1960s, with an ideological vision of the world that takes us further back every day. In a globalized world like today, if someone leaves a space, it is immediately filled by the other; in investment, in access to technology and, therefore, in economic growth, in the development of countries and in the quality of life of citizens.

In Mexico, the legacy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is the destruction of the energy system, which could have been the great fundraiser to modernize the country. Because of his nationalist view of oil, like that of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s, he allowed hundreds of billions of dollars of today and the future to pass through; his fight with the United States over transgenic corn also shows his attachment to the past. It leaves a country that returns, in a certain way, to the six-year term of Luis Echavarría, in the 70s. Oh, yes, it leaves an airport that is useless, a train that destroys ecosystems and that does not change the destination regions at all and 35 percent cent of Mexico in the hands of drug traffickers.

Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba still live under the parameters of the previous cold war, the one from 1950 to 1990, with destroyed economies, like those of the Warsaw Pact, but a great innovation, the use of criminality for social control by a side and to obtain resources on the other.

Colombia is the last to reach this trend, but boy is it doing well. Gustavo Petro’s speech on oil is anchored in that anti-imperialist ideology of the 1960s, but now he covers it with the issue of climate change. He is going to destroy the energy system, as happened in South Africa or Venezuela, by destroying the incentive for private investment in the system and assuming control of tariffs as a dictator, if the courts let him.

The destruction of the health and pension system, which is what is coming in Colombia, has a reason: it does not accept that the private sector provides a vital service of the State. Classic 60s speech element. Highways are for the rich says Petro. They’ll figure out the rest.

Chile and Peru fell, and the advances they had are now in great danger. In Chile, because of that legacy of the Allende narrative that still lives and is still in force; the defeated constitution was an example, and Castillo is an example of Peru’s retardation of Shining Path. More than 60s is not possible.

Argentina, under the guise of Peronism, the same; the same Peronism that in the 40s strengthened a state that bankrupted the economy. Now Brazil follows the ECLAC import substitution model of the 1960s, brutal protectionism, loving the country’s globalization abroad but enemy of allowing the outside world to enter Brazil. Will it change with Lula? Probably not.

The world is transforming at speeds we have not seen before and the presidents of the supposed change remain anchored to the past. None offer modernity, they aim to increase access to the old and expensive university model; when today training is virtual, they do not propose the universalization of higher education with a virtual model adapted to today.

Modern work-sharing or individual service applications, such as Uber or Rappi, are combated through legal mechanisms, such as labor laws, again, from the last century, or registration laws that make this work impossible, and defend monopolistic sectors that end with the possibility of the individual to earn a salary with his work without intermediaries.

Instead of encouraging individual initiative, which is the great change in this century, they direct it towards comfort and not effort. These ‘change’ leaders prefer to give a subsidy rather than a loan, since the former generates addiction while the latter produces responsibility and forces work. These leaders prefer to see a society in which we are all poor (with the exception of a plugged-in kleptocracy), but, yes, equal. The inequality discourse (and yes, there is still a lot to do about it) is the umbrella they use to put an end to individual initiative, market laws and prosperous societies and countries.

That is AMLO, Castillo, Boric, Petro, Fernández, Kirchner and Lula. When there is more to innovate and there are more opportunities to innovate as a state and society, these agents of change are truly a trip to the past. It is as if it had been the left of the continent of the 60s and 70s that came to power. We can only wait for more delay, more institutional destruction and more loss of freedoms in every sense. Welcome to the past.