Writer Carlos Fuentes calls for Roosevelt-inspired approach to solve global woes at Baker Institute lecture

Writer Carlos Fuentes calls for Roosevelt-inspired approach to solve global woes at Baker Institute lecture

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Carlos Fuentes called for a “new New Deal” to address challenges faced by the developing world as well as the developed world at a lecture at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy April 28.

Speaking at the inaugural event of the Vecinos Lecture Series, sponsored by the Baker Institute’s Latin American Initiative, the noted Mexican author, scholar and diplomat invoked the memory of former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a way to unite disparate groups for the common good. The Vecinos Lecture Series brings Latin American political and cultural leaders to Houston to discuss major issues facing Latin America.

	CARLOS FUENTES

Globalization poses a series of problems and opportunities for developing nations, including Mexico, Fuentes said. Latin America was the subject of what he called “the first globalization,” when Spain and Portugal colonized the region to claim its resources. The Industrial Revolution constituted a second era of globalization, as Latin America became an object of European and U.S. attempts to exploit those resources.

The current phase, which Fuentes said he preferred to describe as “internationalization” rather than globalization, comes with Latin America at a crossroads in terms of culture, politics and beliefs, he said. Most Latin Americans believe in democracy, Fuentes observed, but its benefits are not always evident. The question is whether the region’s population will be partners in this era of globalization, or remain the subjects, or objects, of the process.

For its part, Latin America must transform itself to take advantage of the global challenges, Fuentes argued. Citizens of individual countries already identify themselves as Bolivians, Brazilians, Mexicans, etc. That is a step that many people in some parts of Africa, Asia and even Europe have not yet made, he said. What Latin Americans need now is to move from identity to diversity, Fuentes said, meaning they must enrich themselves and others by embracing other cultures.

Fuentes cited Roosevelt’s example for how to bring along the population on great undertakings by meeting local needs first. “There is no globality without locality,” he said. While other countries sought to counter the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s through authoritarianism, Roosevelt was able to use democratic means. “What FDR did was to overcome the worst effects of the Depression while safeguarding constitutional liberties,” Fuentes said.

Using Roosevelt’s model, Fuentes called for “global governance that begins from the bottom up.” Such a new New Deal would emphasize education, he said. With an estimated one billion people in the world illiterate, education is the “true foundation of development,” Fuentes asserted. Building from below would also entail projects like microloans, which empower people (often women) at the lowest levels of society. And the information revolution provides both challenges and opportunities for global development. “Information and education become prime elements of social cohesion and personal achievement,” according to Fuentes, “but also of international relations, of the understanding between nations.”

While neo-Luddites decry globalization, Fuentes maintained they will not stop it. The extraordinary challenge, he said, is not to halt the process, but to “give it the human obligations, the social concerns, the legal constraints it is now lacking.”