V Summit of the Americas
Supplement No.
2
April 15, 2009
Empire and Latin America in
the Obama Era
• Empire and Latin America in the Obama
Era
- Manuel Pérez-Rocha, Foreign Policy In Focus,
April 1, 2009
• Hillary Clinton and James
Steinberg "Talk Tough" on Latin America
- April Howard, Council on Hemispheric Affairs,
February 27, 2009
• Losing Latin America: What Will
the Obama Doctrine Be Like?
- Greg Grandin, TomDispatch, June 10,
2008
Empire and Latin America in the Obama Era
- Manuel Pérez-Rocha*,
Foreign Policy In Focus, April 1, 2009 -
Barack Obama's rise to the U.S. presidency has
left most Latin
Americans suspended between skepticism and hope. That's bound to make
the V Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, to be held on
April 18 and 19, especially interesting.
A promising sign of meaningful change in U.S.
foreign policy toward
the hemisphere would be the official demise of the Security and
Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America, whose apparent failure
none of the three governments so far have dared to acknowledge. This
creature of Bush's imperial
presidency was agreed to and announced with great fanfare by the U.S.,
Canadian and Mexican presidents in 2005. Since then, it has been an
obscure process in which the executive powers of the governments, along
with the CEOs of 30 of the largest corporations in the three countries
— many of them military contractors
— have extended the security perimeter of the United States to "ensure
that North America is the safest and best place to live and do
business."
The strongest sign that this trinational
militaristic and
deregulation project is dead may be that some of its strongest
proponents, including Robert Pastor in the United States and Tomas
D'Aquino in Canada, have declared it so. A close second may be that
during Obama's meetings with President Felipe
Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper the SPP was not
mentioned once.
Why did it fail? It rapidly became evident that
the SPP wasn't going
to perform as advertised to provide more security and prosperity to
"North American" people. What better proof of this than the failed war
on drugs in Mexico that took about 6,200 lives in 2008 alone? The SPP
has failed also thanks
to the opposition of a wide array of civil society groups in the three
countries — Canada, the United States, and Mexico — that denounced its
secret dealings.
This apparent victory of civil society groups
hasn't eliminated the
need for skepticism, however. Wholesale change won't happen without
further struggle. Economic, corporate, and military interests remain
largely the same, and several militaristic and deregulation initiatives
are well underway. First among
them is the Mérida Initiative with which the United States is providing
military hardware to Mexico. This program, while intended to fight drug
traffic, is much more likely to exacerbate violence, since it doesn't
address structural problems like widespread corruption, deficiencies in
Mexico's police and judiciary system,
arms smuggling from the U.S. into Mexico, or money laundering.
And since the Mexican economy is more dependent on
the United States
than is any other Latin American economy, it's going to be the hardest
hit by the economic crisis. In addition, the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) remains in place, privileging major corporate
interests and making
it harder for small and medium business to participate in the export
sector. Therefore, enormous challenges for civil society organizations
remain.
Neoliberal Backlash
Despite the economic crisis of epic
proportions, right-wing ideological supporters of U.S.-led
neoliberalism are exerting enormous pressure on Obama to continue
projecting the United States as the hemisphere's "natural leader," and
maintaining the course of economic deregulation.
For instance, the Inter-American Dialogue, which labels itself as the
"leading U.S. center for policy analysis, exchange, and communication
on issues in the Western Hemisphere," and counts among its members many
of the region's conservative former government officials, says that
Obama must "concentrate on completing
the unfinished agenda left by President George W. Bush," and "honor
trade agreements that it has agreed to." It also warned Obama to "leave
campaign rhetoric aside," such as his promise to open up free trade
agreements so they work for the working people and become fair trade
agreements.
Most Latin Americans however, applaud the fact
that Latin American
countries themselves have already shifted the power balance in the
region. It's not really up to Obama whether Latin America will break
from the U.S. empire. New emerging leaders, coupled with a renewed and
assertive integration
process in South America, have left the United States with little
choice but to become a good neighbor. The recent victory of the FMLN
party in El Salvador's presidential elections is just the latest
addition to the growing throng of countries governed by the left in the
hemisphere.
Although Latin Americans also applaud some first
steps taken by
Obama, such as his order to close the vile Guantánamo prison, a
broad-based, concrete agenda for Latin America is still pending. And
the new administration will need to resist efforts from the right to
thwart an agenda that serves social
rather than corporate interests.
A History of Imperial Interventionism in Latin
America
The
Monroe Doctrine is considered the foundation of U.S. hegemony in Latin
America. In 1823 President James Monroe directed the European powers to
leave the "Americas" for the Americans. What he meant was that
henceforth, the United
States would absorb the hemisphere into its sphere of influence. Since
then, U.S. political dominance and economic expansionism in Latin
America hasn't been based on formal, old-style colonial domination of
its European predecessors, although military invasions and occupations
have been the order of the day. Rather,
the United States has exerted political control in collusion with
oligarchic ruling classes, and U.S. economic interests have been
protected through "open market" regimes.
U.S. intrusions have included military coups
to reverse
social, economic, and political transformations not in accordance with
Washington's interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, both military invasions
and open military support to dictatorships paved the way for U.S.
corporations to dominate
the region, reaping the natural riches, exploiting cheap labor and
inundating local markets, while displacing both internal and external
competition.
U.S. interventionism prevailed in the '70s and
'80s to confront
communist and socialist experimentation throughout the region. Many
atrocities were committed in the name of "democracy and freedom" in
countries such as Haiti, Guatemala and Chile, with the open support of
the U.S. The heyday of
the anticommunist surge might have been the 1973 destruction of the
democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Allende
was murdered by a U.S.-backed military coup
that left dictator Augusto Pinochet in power. According to Noam
Chomsky, Nixon's National Security Council
concluded in 1971 — while considering the paramount importance of
destroying Chilean democracy — that "If the U.S. cannot control Latin
America, it cannot expect 'to achieve a successful order elsewhere in
the world.'" The same rationale applies today to the economic blockade
of Cuba, and other militaristic and
interventionist efforts in the region.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end
of the Cold War in
the late '80s, the threat of socialism and communism spilling into the
United States' backyard receded, and direct military intervention
became less thinkable. Today, though, terrorism and drug trafficking
have become the new raisons
d'ętre for intervention, concretely with the Plan Colombia
and the Mérida Initiative.
During the '90s, the United States began viewing
the hemisphere as
mature enough for "democracy" and "good governance," since most
countries had adopted the principles and "disciplines" of the
Washington Consensus imposed by the international financial
institutions (International Monetary Fund,
World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank) and the international
trade regime, now embodied by the World Trade Organization. These
economic policies have had the effect of guaranteeing to the U.S. and
its economic European allies the continuous payment of debt from Latin
American countries. The creation
of a constant state of financial indebtedness has been the principal
economic mechanism of modern-day imperial domination. From the late
'80s onwards, the U.S. empire felt it could count on Latin American
docility and stability, and looked towards other regions to satiate its
ever growing thirst for oil and engage
its military might in other conflicts.
The empire's use of force was paired with an
ideological victory
that has also represented a major challenge to Latin Americans: the
theory of "inevitable and irreversible globalization." This theory was
promoted through euphemisms like "deregulation," "reform,"
"modernization," "productivity," and
"competiveness," intended to justify economic measures that concentrate
wealth among a few powerful elites in different nations. In the present
financial crisis, this language, with its tints of Orwellian newspeak,
is finally being subjected to serious challenge.
Models of Resistance
Until the second half of this decade,
the United States felt confident that it would achieve the creation of
a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) modeled after NAFTA, which
went into force between Mexico, the United States, and Canada in 1994.
However, NAFTA
is more than simply "free trade"; it's the U.S. model for locking in
"structural adjustment" policies, enhancing investors rights vis-ŕ-vis
the state, and submerging the economic role of the latter under the
fundamentals of "market discipline" (another example of newspeak). In
Latin America, NAFTA has served as a
model for U.S. free trade agreements with Chile, Peru, and (via a
regional pact) the Dominican Republic and Central America. But the
expansion has stopped there. In many other Latin American countries,
people have said "Enough." Hemispheric-wide resistance to U.S. attempts
to force the FTAA on every nation
on this continent led to its eventual defeat at the fourth Summit of
the Americas in Argentina in 2005.
Since 2005, U.S. hegemony in the region has
steeply waned. South
American countries in particular have affirmed their detachment from
U.S. leadership with the creation of the UNASUR. This union of nations,
although still in an incipient phase, sees the European Union as a
model and aims to achieve
gradual economic equalization based on common political and economic
institutions, as an alternative to the subservient NAFTA model. Brazil,
Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela lead this project. Already,
South American countries are trading more among each other than ever
before, and also trading more
with partners outside the hemisphere, like the European Union, South
Africa, and China. Because of their diversification and broader
globalist perspective, including in some cases South-South relations,
those countries haven't succumbed to the economic crisis that
originated in the United States — or at least not as
harshly as Mexico has.
Latin Americans have confronted the collusion of
U.S. hegemony with
local oligarchies in myriad ways: from upheavals of indigenous peoples
in, for example, Chiapas, Mexico and Cochabamba, Bolivia, to massive
street demonstrations in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and finally with
the democratic
election of governments in many countries that represent national
interests and have moved decisively away from control by dictates from
Washington.
Contending Alliances
This emancipation is far from
hemispheric, however. In fact, two distinct but overlapping alliances
are forming. Twelve South American countries and Cuba have signed onto
UNASUR. But at the same time, there's a string of Pacific Rim countries
that have been corralled
by the United States into committing to pro-market deregulation and
security initiatives, via the Bush-led Pathways for Prosperity in the
Americas (PPA). PPA is based on the failed Security and Prosperity
Partnership of North America (SPP), which allowed NAFTA to be extended
into the realms of security, and
Plan Colombia, which has resulted in a military strategic base in that
country that monitors all challenges to empire in South America.
The PPA was launched in 2008 by Bush and 11
compliant governments in
the hemisphere — not surprisingly those with which the United States
already signed a free-trade agreement or has one pending. Unmistakably
it was Bush's Plan B for the failed FTAA, with the added "security"
component.
The PPA bears many of the hallmarks of the SPP: an agenda for further
economic, mercantile and financial deregulation covered by the term
"prosperity," and a "security" agenda of enhancing military and police
powers to combat "terrorism," drug traffic and "illegitimate"
migration. In short, the PPA is an attempt
to push further economic deregulation and to promote an escalation of
militarism in the region. The return of the mothballed U.S. IV fleet to
Latin American waters is an example of this and a threat to any
aspiration of officially putting an end to the archaic Monroe Doctrine.
The PPA is also a highly divisive strategy
designed to defeat
processes of Latin American integration. According to former President
George W. Bush, the PPA "is open to all countries, as participants or
observers, in the Western Hemisphere that share our commitment to
democracy, open markets and
free trade." Equating open markets and free trade to democracy is a
worn out formula the U.S. uses to advance its interests in the region.
Instead of pursuing a U.S.-centered free-trade
model in the region,
with a militaristic approach, the hemisphere urgently needs innovative
approaches to tackle the wealth disparities that make it the most
unequal region in the world. Latin Americans have read with hope
Obama's "New Partnership for
the Americas" document, which rejects "eight years of failed policies"
and "top down reforms," and puts forward instead an "agenda that
advances democracy, security, and opportunity from the bottom up."
To fulfill this promise, Obama should begin by
laying to rest the
divisive Bush legacy embodied in the PPA — as well as the SPP, the
Mérida Initiative and Plan Colombia. This would signal that the United
States is turning from a bullying empire into a good neighbor, from foe
to friend; and that the
Monroe Doctrine is finally repealed. A first test to see whether the
United States is making these changes will be at the forthcoming Summit
of the Americas, where Obama will meet with all of the hemisphere's
other leaders except Cuba. In parallel, civil society organizations
from across the hemisphere will hold
a People's Summit, from which voices for change will be conveyed to the
leaders. When the summit begins, just one day before Obama marks the
end of his first 100 days in office, we'll learn whether he's listening
to voices that demand a more respectful and a more humble attitude
towards Latin America, honoring
his commitment to "bottom-up" approaches to change — or whether he'll
give in to clamors from the right that demand he maintain the course of
U.S. imperialism towards the region. We hope it will be the former.
Hillary Clinton and James Steinberg
"Talk Tough" on Latin America
- April Howard*, Council on
Hemispheric Affairs, February 27, 2009 -
While President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and their
appointees emphasize a return to diplomacy in foreign relations, so far
they show little inclination to be diplomatic toward leftist
governments in Latin America. In fact, comments by Clinton and other
recent appointees show a continuation of
an antiquated analysis and a lack of understanding of recent Latin
American social movements and regional integration.
On a visit to the State Department on January 23,
Clinton promised
"I will do all that I can, working with you, to make it abundantly
clear that robust diplomacy and effective development are the best
long-term tools for securing America's future." Obama made similar
assertions in a speech to diplomats,
and 'diplomacy', symbolizing a return to international peace and
prosperity, was the word of the week.
Most recently, however, newly appointed Deputy
Secretary of State
James Steinberg, boldly stated that "Our friends and partners in Latin
America are looking to the United States to provide strong and
sustained leadership in the region, as a counterweight to governments
like those currently in power
in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the
interests of their people or the region." This begs the question of
exactly who "our friends and partners in Latin America" are, as many
Latin American countries are happily accepting funding for humanitarian
projects from Venezuela, and Bolivia
is hardly in an economic position to pull strings around the continent.
These and other comments by Clinton show that the Obama administration
intends to continue a foreign policy in Latin America based on
corporate benefit and a misplaced fear of Latin American nationalism.
Taking the Field Back From Chavez in Venezuela
According to
Steinberg, the U.S.'s relationship with Venezuela "should be designed
to serve our national interest . . . Those interests include ending
Venezuela's ties to the FARC and cooperating on counter-narcotics. For
too long, we have ceded
the playing field to Chavez. . . We intend to play a more active role
in Latin America with a positive approach that avoids giving undue
prominence to President Chavez' theatrical attempts to dominate the
regional agenda."
Clinton herself, in replying to questions by
Senator Kerry during
her nomination, said that Chavez has tried to take advantage of a lack
of U.S. attention in Latin America "to advance out-moded and
anti-American ideologies." Clinton and Steinberg echoed each other
about the dangers of "ceding the
playing field" to Chavez and leaders "whose actions and visions for the
region do not serve his citizens or people," but Clinton showed less
bravado by adding that "While we should be concerned about Chavez's
actions and posture, we should not exaggerate the threat he poses."
Protecting Fear Mongering Politicians in Bolivia
While
President Evo Morales and members of his administration have
consistently expressed hope about prospects for better relations with
the new U.S. president since last November, during a positive visit to
the U.S. and meetings several senators,
recent comments by Clinton make this possibility obscure, if not
unlikely.
In her first appearance in the senate, Clinton
also defended former
Bolivian Ambassador Philip Goldberg, who was expelled from Bolivia in
September of 2008 by Morales, who accused Goldberg of interfering in
affairs of national sovereignty. In turn, the Bush Administration
expelled Bolivian ambassador,
Gustavo Guzman. Without cause, the Bush Administration then proceeded
to accuse Morales' government of failing to fulfill commitments to
international drug control and withheld Bolivian benefits under the
Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA). Morales
responded by accusing the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of spying and interfering in
national politics in favor of opposition leaders, and expelled the DEA.
Clinton described Goldberg's expulsion as another
"unjustified" act
along with others taken against personnel of the U.S. mission and aid
programs by the Bolivian Government. It begs the question, Clinton
said, "If Bolivia wants a constructive bilateral relationship." Also
included is Mike Hammer,
a political and economic advisor to the U.S. in Bolivia who worked with
Goldberg. Hammer was recruited as White House Spokesperson for matters
of National Security, but will later return to Bolivia.
Last week, Clinton continued the trend of lumping
together the
drastically different countries and governments of Venezuela and
Bolivia and characterizing them both as negative influences on the
continent. She called for the U.S. to fill what she referred to as
"that void" of U.S. attention "with strong
and sustained U.S. leadership in the region, and tough and direct
diplomacy with Venezuela and Bolivia. We should have a positive agenda
for the hemisphere in response to the fear-mongering propagated by
Chavez and Evo Morales."
As Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information
Network writes,
"Although the new Secretary of State's reply received scant attention
in the United States, it was front-page news in Bolivia, and was easily
open to interpretation as a deliberate rebuff of the Bolivian
government's repeated expressions
of readiness to engage the new U.S. administration." Yet, Clinton also
stated that the administration believes that "bilateral cooperation
with Venezuela and Bolivia on a range of issues would be in the mutual
interest of our respective countries — for example, counterterrorism,
counter narcotics, energy, and commerce,"
and Ledebur reports that "Clinton's testimony was also hailed by
Bolivia's Vice Foreign Minister, Hugo Fernandez, as signaling that the
Obama administration shared Bolivia's desire for closer relations."
Other Obama complicated administration ties to
Bolivia include
political adviser Gregory Craig, who, despite a record for defending
human rights in Latin America, has been criticized for his work
defending Latin American leaders accused of human rights abuses.
According to Politico.com blogger
Ben Smith, Craig is a "muscular counsel" whose top deputies and stature
suggest that "office will play a larger role in policy — on an already
muscular White House staff — than in previous administrations."
Currently Craig is representing ousted Bolivian
President Gonzálo
Sánchez de Lozada and former Minister of Defense Carlos Sánchez
Berzaín, a fact which, according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
(COHA), "has raised legitimate doubts regarding his moral commitment to
Latin America."
Both men are indicted in the United States for their participation
ordering soldiers to open-fire on protesters in El Alto, Bolivia, in
2003, and uncontestable fact that caused the death of over 60 citizens.
In June of 2007, both Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín were
granted political asylum in the U.S. while
awaiting trial in Miami under the Alien Tort Claims Act.
Over 20 thousand people marched against the action in Bolivia, and the
Bolivian ambassador Gustavo Guzman prepared a case for extradition of
the politicians before he was expelled.
While COHA Research Associates Michael Katz and
Chris Sweeney defend
Craig as a politician dedicated to human rights, they write that "The
Bush administration's decision to protect these powerful figures has
sent a disconcerting message of American elitism to the Bolivian
citizenry. Human rights
advocates believe that Craig's continued representation of Sánchez de
Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín demonstrates his readiness to defend the
interests of the rich and famous against the poor. Admittedly, such
charges complicate his reputation in Latin America, and for some bring
into question his true commitment
to regional solidarity."
According to Ledebur, "The new Obama
administration and Congress
could help repair some of the damage done to the U.S. reputation in
Latin America in recent years by taking a flexible, respectful approach
toward Bolivia, in cooperation with Bolivia's neighbor democracies and
the international
community. The Obama administration would also do well to recognize
that Bolivia's political dynamics, demands for profound reform, and
jealous defense of national sovereignty and self-determination have
emerged from the country's own history, and have not been somehow
foisted upon it by outside powers against
the democratic wishes of the Bolivian people."
Successful Failures in Plan Colombia
In his questions for
the record prepared for Clinton's nomination as Secretary of State,
John Kerry cited a GOA report from fall 2008 that concluded that Plan
Colombia "has not significantly reduced the amount of illicit drugs
entering the United States." Steinberg
showed a lack of understanding of the accepted failures of Plan
Colombia by referring to "counternarcotics successes in Colombia."
Clinton showed a lack of nuanced understanding of
government
connections to paramilitaries by stating that the administration will
"fully support Colombia's fight against the FARC, and work with the
government to end the reign of terror from the right wing
paramilitaries." She did show recognition
of the need to change Plan Colombia strategies by mentioning the need
to work "here at home to reduce demand."
In terms of trade agreements, Clinton attempted to
remain neutral,
saying that "It is essential that trade spread the benefits of
globalization," but she added that "without adequate labor protections,
trade cannot do that," and that "continued violence and impunity in
Colombia directed at labor and other
civic leaders makes labor protections impossible to guarantee in
Colombia today."
No Timeline for Change in Cuba
Clinton spoke for Obama on
Cuba, reiterating that Obama "believes that it makes both moral and
strategic sense to lift the restrictions on family visits and family
cash remittances to Cuba," but added that the administration does not
have a timeline for this action.
Contrary to the experience of the past 50 years, she also communicated
that Obama "believes that it is not the time to lift the embargo on
Cuba, especially since it provides an important source of leverage for
further change on the island."
Big Business in Brazil
Kerry expressed concern with Brazil's
"leading role" in MERCOSUR, the Rio Group and the Union of South
American Nations "which have at times been at odds with U.S. interests
in the region."
Clinton's reply focused on business opportunities
in the
increasingly destructive agro-export sector. "We look forward to
ensuring that continued U.S.-Brazil energy cooperation is
environmentally sustainable and spreads the benefits of alternative
fuels. The expansion of renewable energy production
throughout the Americas that promotes self-sufficiency and creates more
markets for U.S. green-energy manufacturers and producers is vitally
important," she said.
Consistent with other members of the Obama
administration, Clinton
emphasized the agrofuel industry and did not address top scientist's
continued criticisms that agrofuels are not only unsustainable and do
not create a net reduction in greenhouse gasses, but that the
carcinogenic spread of crops grown
for animal feed and agrofuels is dangerous to farmers and has
contributed to an international food crisis. When later asked about the
international food crisis, Clinton asserted that the U.S. has a "moral
responsibility" and a "practical interest in doing its part to address
a food crisis." She categorized the causes of the
food crisis as "cyclical and structural," citing "poor harvests in
key-grain producing nations, sharply higher oil prices, and a surge in
demand for meat in high-growth Asian countries." Many of the transgenic
and genetically modified grains and crops grown in Latin America are
destined as much for feed for meat
animals in Europe and China as for agrofuels, but Clinton did not make
that link.
Clinton identified "long-term factors include[ing]
inadequate
investment in enhanced agricultural productivity, inappropriate trade
and subsidy programs, and climate change." If 'inadequate investment'
includes "hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. Department of Energy
grants aimed at jump-starting
the evolution to fuels made from such non-corn feedstocks as
switchgrass, wheat straw and wood chips" given to several privately
held firms, then more of the same problems are to be expected.
Similarly, if agrofuel crops are emphasized, as Clinton indicates a
U.S. interest in doing in Brazil, then issues related to
climate change can only be expected to intensify.
While one could hope that Clinton's plans to "work
with partners in
the international community to address immediate humanitarian needs and
make seeds and fertilizers available in critically affected nations, .
. . put more focus on efforts to enhance agricultural productivity . .
. including agricultural
research and development , and investment in improved seeds and
irrigation methods," will not involve multinational pesticide and GM
seed giant Monsanto, or processors Cargill, Bunge and Syngenta. Without
accepting the present dangers of the agrofuel and agro-export situation
in Latin America, change in the
current trajectory under an Obama administration is unlikely.
Spreading Democracy
Though both Candidates ran on campaigns
of change to the Bush Administration, Defense Secretary Robert Gates'
plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and Clinton's recent
comments show little to indicate that the U.S. will change it's now
more than century old
policy of foreign intervention under the vestige of "democracy
promotion." Clinton urged the senate "not [to] allow the war in Iraq to
continue to give democracy promotion a bad name. Supporting democracy,
economic development, and the rule of law is critical for U.S.
interests around the world. Democracies are
our best trading partners, our most valuable allies, and the nations
with which we share our deepest values." Clinton seems to urge a return
to covert actions of regime change and support for opposition parties
in her assertion that "democracy must be nurtured with moderates on the
inside by building democratic institutions;
it cannot be imposed by force from the outside."
Still, "America," she said, "must renew its effort
to bring security
and development to the disconnected corners of our interconnected
world." Like past members of past administrations, Clinton does not
seem to grasp the idea that U.S. involvement is not always necessary or
welcome in all parts of
the globe, and furthermore, involvement that refuses to recognize
peoples' rights to defend access to natural resources, preserve their
human rights, and act out of self determination cannot solve past
problems and will only exacerbate future conflicts.
Losing Latin America:
What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?
- Greg Grandin*,
TomDispatch, June 10, 2008 -
Google "neglect," "Washington," and "Latin
America," and you will be
led to thousands of hand-wringing calls from politicians and pundits
for Washington to "pay more attention" to the region. True, Richard
Nixon once said that "people don't give one shit" about the place. And
his National Security Advisor
Henry Kissinger quipped that Latin America is a "dagger pointed at the
heart of Antarctica." But Kissinger also made that same joke about
Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand -- and, of the three countries, only
the latter didn't suffer widespread political murder as a result of his
policies, a high price to pay for such
a reportedly inconsequential place.
Latin America, in fact, has been indispensable in
the evolution of
U.S. diplomacy. The region is often referred to as America's
"backyard," but a better metaphor might be Washington's "strategic
reserve," the place where ascendant foreign-policy coalitions regroup
and redraw the outlines of U.S. power,
following moments of global crisis.
When the Great Depression had the U.S. on the
ropes, for example, it
was in Latin America that New Deal diplomats worked out the foundations
of liberal multilateralism, a diplomatic framework that Washington
would put into place with much success elsewhere after World War II.
In the 1980s, the first generation of neocons
turned to Latin
America to play out their "rollback" fantasies -- not just against
Communism, but against a tottering multilateralist foreign-policy. It
was largely in a Central America roiled by left-wing insurgencies that
the New Right first worked out the
foundational principles of what, after 9/11, came to be known as the
Bush Doctrine: the right to wage war unilaterally in highly moralistic
terms.
We are once again at a historic crossroads. An
ebbing of U.S. power
-- this time caused, in part, by military overreach -- faces a
mobilized Latin America; and, on the eve of regime change at home, with
George W. Bush's neoconservative coalition in ruins after eight years
of disastrous rule, would-be
foreign policy makers are once again looking south.
Goodbye to All That
"The era of the United States as the
dominant influence in Latin America is over," says the Council on
Foreign Relations, in a new report filled with sober policy suggestions
for ways the U.S. can recoup its waning influence in a region it has
long claimed as its own.
Latin America is now mostly governed by left or
center-left
governments that differ in policy and style -- from the populism of
Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to the reformism of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Yet all share a common goal:
asserting greater autonomy
from the United States.
Latin Americans are now courting investment from
China, opening
markets in Europe, dissenting from Bush's War on Terror, stalling the
Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and sidelining the International
Monetary Fund which, over the last couple of decades, has served as a
stalking horse for
Wall Street and the Treasury Department.
And they are electing presidents like Ecuador's
Rafael Correa, who
recently announced that his government would not renew the
soon-to-expire lease on Manta Air Field, the most prominent U.S.
military base in South America. Correa had previously suggested that,
if Ecuador could set up its own base
in Florida, he would consider extending the lease. When Washington
balked, he offered Manta to a Chinese concession, suggesting that the
airfield be turned into "China's gateway to Latin America."
In the past, such cheek would have been taken as a
clear violation
of the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823 by President James Monroe,
who declared that Washington would not permit Europe to recolonize any
part of the Americas. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt updated the doctrine
to justify a
series of Caribbean invasions and occupations. And Presidents Dwight
Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan invoked it to validate Cold War
CIA-orchestrated coups and other covert
operations.
But things have changed. "Latin America is not
Washington's to
lose," the Council on Foreign Relations report says, "nor is it
Washington's to save." The Monroe Doctrine, it declares, is "obsolete."
Good news for Latin America, one would think. But
the last time
someone from the Council on Foreign Relations, which since its founding
in 1921 has represented mainstream foreign-policy opinion, declared the
Monroe Doctrine defunct, the result was genocide.
Enter the Liberal Establishment
That would be Sol Linowitz
who, in 1975, as chair of the Commission on United States-Latin
American Relations, said that the Monroe Doctrine was "inappropriate
and irrelevant to the changed realities and trends of the future."
The little-remembered Linowitz Commission was made
up of respected
scholars and businessmen from what was then called the "liberal
establishment." It was but one part of a broader attempt by America's
foreign-policy elite to respond to the cascading crises of the 1970s --
defeat in Vietnam, rising
third-world nationalism, Asian and European competition, skyrocketing
energy prices, a falling dollar, the Watergate scandal, and domestic
dissent. Confronted with a precipitous collapse of America's global
legitimacy, the Council on Foreign Relations, along with other mainline
think tanks like the Brookings Institute
and the newly formed Trilateral Commission, offered a series of
proposals that might help the U.S. stabilize its authority, while
allowing for "a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system."
There was widespread consensus among the
intellectuals and corporate
leaders affiliated with these institutions that the kind of
anticommunist zeal that had marched the U.S. into the disaster in
Vietnam needed to be tamped down, and that "new forms of common
management" between Washington,
Europe, and Japan had to be worked out. Advocates for a calmer world
order came from the same corporate bloc that underwrote the Democratic
Party and the Rockefeller-wing of the Republican Party.
They hoped that a normalization of global politics
would halt, if
not reverse, the erosion of the U.S. economic position. Military
de-escalation would free up public revenue for productive investment,
while containing inflationary pressures (which scared the bond managers
of multinational banks). Improved
relations with the Communist bloc would open the USSR, Eastern Europe,
and China to trade and investment. There was also general agreement
that Washington should stop viewing Third World socialism through the
prism of the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union.
At that moment throughout Latin America, leftists
and nationalists
were -- as they are now -- demanding a more equitable distribution of
global wealth. Lest radicalization spread, the Trilateral Commission's
executive director Zbignew Brzezinski, soon to be President Jimmy
Carter's national security
advisor, argued that it would be "wise for the United States to make an
explicit move to abandon the Monroe Doctrine." The Linowitz Commission
agreed and offered a series of recommendations to that effect --
including the return of the Panama Canal to Panama and a decrease in
U.S. military aid to the region --
that would largely define Carter's Latin American policy.
Exit the Liberal Establishment
Of course, it was not
corporate liberalism but rather a resurgent and revanchist militarism
from the Right that turned out to offer the most cohesive and, for a
time, successful solution to the crises of the 1970s.
Uniting a gathering coalition of old-school
law-and-order
anticommunists, first generation neoconservatives, and newly empowered
evangelicals, the New Right organized an ever metastasizing set of
committees, foundations, institutes, and magazines that focused on
specific issues -- the SALT II nuclear
disarmament negotiations, the Panama Canal Treaty, and the proposed MX
missile system, as well as U.S. policy in Cuba, South Africa, Rhodesia,
Israel, Taiwan, Afghanistan, and Central America. All of them were
broadly committed to avenging defeat in Vietnam (and the "stab in the
back" by the liberal media
and the public at home). They were also intent on restoring righteous
purpose to American diplomacy.
As had corporate liberals, so, now,
neoconservative intellectuals
looked to Latin America to hone their ideas. President Ronald Reagan's
ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, focused mainly
on Latin America in laying out the foundational principles of modern
neoconservative thought.
She was particularly hard on Linowitz, who, she said, represented the
"disinterested internationalist spirit" of "appeasement" -- a word back
with us again. His report, she insisted, meant "abandoning the
strategic perspective which has shaped U.S. policy from the Monroe
Doctrine down to the eve of the Carter
administration, at the center of which was a conception of the national
interest and a belief in the moral legitimacy of its defense."
At first, Brookings, the Council on Foreign
Affairs, and the
Trilateral Commission, as well as the Business Roundtable, founded in
1972 by the crčme de la CEO crčme, opposed the push to remilitarize
American society; but, by the late 1970s, it was clear that
"normalization" had failed to solve the
global economic crisis. Europe and Japan were not cooperating in
stabilizing the dollar, and the economies of Eastern Europe, the USSR,
and China were too anemic to absorb sufficient amounts of U.S. capital
or serve as profitable trading partners. Throughout the 1970s,
financial houses like the Rockefellers' Chase
Manhattan Bank had become engorged with petrodollars deposited by Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other oil-exporting nations. They needed
to do something with all that money, yet the U.S. economy remained
sluggish, and much of the Third World off limits.
So, after Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential
victory, mainstream
policymakers and intellectuals, many of them self-described liberals,
increasingly came to back the Reagan Revolution's domestic and foreign
agenda: gutting the welfare state, ramping up defense spending, opening
up the Third World
to U.S. capital, and jumpstarting the Cold War.
A decade after the Linowitz Commission proclaimed
the Monroe
Doctrine no longer viable, Ronald Reagan invoked it to justify his
administration's patronage of murderous anti-communists in Nicaragua,
Guatemala, and El Salvador. A few years after Jimmy Carter announced
that the U.S. had broken
"free of that inordinate fear of communism," Reagan quoted John F.
Kennedy saying, "Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be
negotiated."
Reagan's illegal patronage of the Contras -- those
murderers he
hailed as the "moral equivalent of America's founding fathers" and
deployed to destabilize Nicaragua's Sandinista government -- and his
administration's funding of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala
brought together, for the first
time, the New Right's two main constituencies. Neoconservatives
provided Reagan's revival of the imperial presidency with legal and
intellectual justification, while the religious Right backed up the new
militarism with grassroots energy.
This partnership was first built -- just as it has
more recently
been continued in Iraq -- on a mountain of mutilated corpses: 40,000
Nicaraguans and 70,000 El Salvadorans killed by U.S. allies; 200,000
Guatemalans, many of them Mayan peasants, victimized in a
scorched-earth campaign the UN would
rule to be genocidal.
The End of the Neocon Holiday from History
The recent
Council on Foreign Relations report on Latin America, arriving as it
does in another moment of imperial decline, seems once again to signal
a new emerging consensus, one similar in tone to that of the
post-Vietnam 1970s. In every dimension
other than military, Newsweek editor Fareed
Zacharia argues in his new book, The Post-American World,
"the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American
dominance." (Never mind that, just five years ago, on the eve of the
invasion of Iraq, he was insisting on the exact
opposite -- that we now lived in a "unipolar world" where America's
position was, and would be, "unprecedented.")
To borrow a phrase from their own lexicon, the
neocons' "holiday
from history" is over. The fiasco in Iraq, the fall in the value of the
dollar, the rise of India and China as new industrial and commercial
powerhouses, and of Russia as an energy superpower, the failure to
secure the Middle East, soaring
oil and gas prices (as well as skyrocketing prices for other key raw
materials and basic foodstuffs), and the consolidation of a prosperous
Europe have all brought their dreams of global supremacy crashing down.
Barack Obama is obviously the candidate best
positioned to walk the
U.S. back from the edge of irrelevance. Though no one hoping for a job
in his White House would put it in such defeatist terms, the historic
task of the next president will not be to win this president's Global
War on Terror, but to
negotiate America's reentry into a community of nations.
Parag Khanna, an Obama advisor, recently argued
that, by maximizing
its cultural and technological advantage, the U.S. can, with a little
luck, perhaps secure a position as third partner in a new tripartite
global order in which Europe and Asia would have equal shares, a
distinct echo of the trilateralist
position of the 1970s. (Forget those Munich analogies, if the U.S.
electorate were more historically literate, Republicans would get
better mileage out of branding Obama not Neville Chamberlain, but
Spain's Fernando VII or Britain's Clement Richard Attlee, each of whom
presided over his country's imperial decline.)
So it has to be asked: If Obama wins in November
and tries to
implement a more rational, less ideologically incandescent deployment
of American power -- perhaps using Latin America as a staging ground
for a new policy -- would it once again provoke the kind of nationalist
backlash that purged
Rockefellerism from the Republican Party, swept Jimmy Carter out of the
White House, and armed the death squads in Central America?
Certainly, there are already plenty of feverish
conservative think
tanks, from the Hudson Institute to the Heritage Foundation, that would
double down on Bush's crusades as a way out of the current mess. But in
the 1970s, the New Right was in ascendance; today, it is visibly
decomposing. Then, it
could lay responsibility for the deep and prolonged crisis that gripped
the United States at the feet of the "establishment," while offering
solutions -- an arms build-up, a renewed push into the Third World, and
free-market fundamentalism -- that drew much of that establishment into
its orbit.
Today, the Right wholly owns the current crisis,
along with its most
immediate cause, the Iraq War. Even if John McCain were able to squeak
out a win in November, he would be the functional equivalent not of
Reagan, who embodied a movement on the march, but of Jimmy Carter,
trying desperately
to hold a fraying coalition together.
The Right's decay as an intellectual force is
nowhere more evident
than in the fits it throws in the face of the Left's -- or China's --
advances in Latin America. The self-confidant vitality with which Jeane
Kirkpatrick used Latin America to skewer the Carter administration has
been replaced with the
tinny, desperate shrill of despair. "Who lost Latin America?" asks the
Center for Security Policy's Frank Gaffney -- of pretty much everyone
he meets. The region, he says, is now a "magnet for Islamist terrorists
and a breeding ground for hostile political movements The key leader is
Chávez, the billionaire dictator
of Venezuela who has declared a Latino jihad
against the United States."
Scare-Quote Diplomacy
But just because the Right is unlikely
to unfurl its banner over Latin America again soon doesn't mean that
U.S. hemispheric diplomacy will be demilitarized. After all, it was
Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, who, at the behest of Lockheed Martin
in 1997, reversed a Carter
administration ban (based on Linowitz report recommendations) on the
sale of high-tech weaponry to Latin America. That, in turn, kicked off
a reckless and wasteful Southern Cone arms race. And it was Clinton,
not Bush, who dramatically increased military aid to the murderous
Colombian government and to corporate
mercenaries like Blackwater and Dyncorp, further escalating the
misguided U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin America.
In fact, a quick comparison between the Linowitz
report and the new
Council on Foreign Relations study on Latin America provides a sobering
way of measuring just how far right the "liberal establishment" has
shifted over the last three decades. The Council does admirably advise
Washington to normalize
relations with Cuba and engage with Venezuela, while downplaying the
possibility of "Islamic terrorists" using the area as a staging ground
-- a longstanding fantasy of the neocons. (Douglas Feith, former
Pentagon undersecretary, suggested that, after 9/11, the U.S. hold off
invading Afghanistan and instead bomb
Paraguay, which has a large Shi'ite community, just to "surprise" the
Sunni al-Qaeda.)
Yet, where the Linowitz report provoked the ire of
the likes of
Jeane Kirkpatrick by writing that the U.S. should not try to "define
the limits of ideological diversity for other nations" and that Latin
Americans "can and will assess for themselves the merits and
disadvantages of the Cuban approach,"
the Council is much less open-minded. It insists on presenting
Venezuela as a problem the U.S. needs to address -- even though the
government in Caracas is recognized as legitimate by all and is
considered an ally, even a close one, by most Latin American countries.
Latin Americans may "know what is best for
themselves," as the new report concedes, yet Washington still knows
better, and so should back "social justice" issues as a means to win
Venezuelans and other Latin Americans away from Chávez.
That the Council report regularly places "social
justice" between
scare quotes suggests that the phrase is used more as a marketing ploy
-- kind of like "New Coke" -- than to signal that U.S. banks and
corporations are willing to make substantive concessions to Latin
American nationalists. Seven decades
ago, Franklin Roosevelt supported the right of Latin American countries
to nationalize U.S. interests, including Standard Oil holdings in
Bolivia and Mexico, saying it was time for others in the hemisphere to
get their "fair share." Three decades ago, the Linowitz Commission
recommended the establishment of a
"code of conduct" defining the responsibilities of foreign corporations
in the region and recognizing the right of governments to nationalize
industries and resources.
The Council, in contrast, sneers at Chávez's far
milder efforts to
create joint ventures with oil multinationals, while offering nothing
but pablum in its place. Its centerpiece recommendation -- aimed at
cultivating Brazil as a potential anchor of a post-Bush, post-Chávez
hemispheric order -- urges the
abolition of subsidies and tariffs protecting U.S. agro-industry in
order to advance a "Biofuel Partnership" with Brazil's own behemoth
agricultural sector. This would be an environmental disaster, pushing
large, mechanized plantations ever deeper into the Amazon basin, while
doing nothing to generate decent jobs
or distribute wealth more fairly.
Dominated by representatives from the finance
sector of the U.S.
economy, the Council recommends little beyond continuing the failed
corporate "free trade" policies of the last twenty years -- and, in
this case, those scare quotes are justified because what they're
advocating is about as free as corporate
"social justice" is just.
An Obama Doctrine?
So far, Barack Obama promises little
better. A few weeks ago, he traveled to Miami and gave a major address
on Latin America to the Cuban American National Foundation. It was
hardly an auspicious venue for a speech that promised to "engage the
people of the region with
the respect owed to a partner."
Surely, the priorities for humane engagement would
have been
different had he been addressing not wealthy right-wing Cuban exiles
but an audience, say, of the kinds of Latino migrants in Los Angeles
who have revitalized the U.S. labor movement, or of Central American
families in Postville, Iowa,
where immigration and Justice Department authorities recently staged a
massive raid on a meatpacking plant, arresting as many as 700
undocumented workers. Obama did call for comprehensive immigration
reform and promised to fulfill Franklin Roosevelt's 68 year-old Four
Freedoms agenda, including the
social-democratic "freedom from want." Yet he spent much of his speech
throwing red meat to his Cuban audience.
Ignoring the not-exactly-radical advice of the
Council on Foreign
Relations, the candidate pledged to maintain the embargo on Cuba. And
then he went further. Sounding a bit like Frank Gaffney, he all but
accused the Bush administration of "losing Latin America" and allowing
China, Europe, and
"demagogues like Hugo Chávez" to step "into the vacuum." He even raised
the specter of Iranian influence in the region, pointing out that "just
the other day Tehran and Caracas launched a joint bank with their
windfall oil profits."
Whatever one's opinion on Hugo Chávez, any
diplomacy that claims to
take Latin American opinion seriously has to acknowledge one thing:
Most of the region's leaders not only don't see him as a "problem," but
have joined him on major economic and political initiatives like the
Bank of the South,
an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the Union of
South American Nations, modeled on the European Union, established just
two weeks ago. And any U.S. president who is sincere in wanting to help
Latin Americans liberate themselves from "want" will have to work with
the Latin American left --
in all its varieties.
But more ominous than Obama's posturing on
Venezuela is his position
on Colombia. Critics have long pointed out that the billions of dollars
in military aid provided to the Colombian security forces to defeat the
FARC insurgency and curtail cocaine production would discourage a
negotiated end to
the civil war in that country and potentially provoke its escalation
into neighboring Andean lands. That's exactly what happened last March,
when Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe ordered the bombing of a rebel
camp located in Ecuador (possibly with U.S. logistical support supplied
from Manta Air Force Base,
which gives you an idea of why Correa wants to give it to China). To
justify the raid, Uribe explicitly invoked the Bush Doctrine's right of
preemptive, unilateral action. In response, Ecuador and Venezuela began
to mobilize troops along their border with Colombia, bringing the
region to the precipice of war.
Most interestingly, in that conflict, an
overwhelming majority of
Latin American and Caribbean countries sided with Venezuela and
Ecuador, categorically condemning the Colombian raid and reaffirming
the sovereignty of individual nations recognized by Franklin Roosevelt
long ago. Not Obama, however.
He essentially endorsed the Bush administration's drive to transform
Colombia's relations with its Andean neighbors into the one Israel has
with most of the Middle East. In his Miami speech, he swore that he
would "support Colombia's right to strike terrorists who seek
safe-havens across its borders."
Equally troublesome has been Obama's endorsement
of the
controversial Merida Initiative, which human rights groups like Amnesty
International have condemned as an application of the "Colombian
solution" to Mexico and Central America, providing their militaries and
police with a massive infusion
of money to combat drugs and gangs. Crime is indeed a serious problem
in these countries, and deserves considered attention. It's chilling,
however, to have Colombia -- where death-squads now have infiltrated
every level of government, and where union and other political
activists are executed on a regular basis --
held up as a model for other parts of Latin America.
Obama, however, not only supports the initiative,
but wants to
expand it beyond Mexico and Central America. "We must press further
south as well," he said in Miami.
It seems that once again that, as in the 1970s,
reports of the death of the Monroe Doctrine are greatly exaggerated.
***
See also:
V Summit of the Americas Supplements
•
No. 1: Documents of the
V Summit of the Americas and the IV People's Summit of the Americas
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