Losing Latin America (Grandin)

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Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 09, 2008 11:19 pm

Losing Latin America

What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?

By Greg Grandin


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 crème de la CEO crème, 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.

Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War.
Last edited by American Dream on Wed Oct 28, 2009 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 28, 2009 10:52 pm

Why Stop at Two?

Greg Grandin
London Review of Books

October 22, 2009


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/print/gran01_.html

Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left edited by
Jorge Castañeda and Marco Morale
s

`The people of South America are the most ignorant, the
most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman
Catholics in Christendom,' John Adams, the second
American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they
could form a `confederation of free governments', as
the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had
proposed, was as `absurd as similar plans would be to
establish democracies among the birds, beasts and
fishes'. Until recently, scholars pretty much agreed.
The region had plenty of liberals, but a category that
includes both Miranda - who corresponded with Thomas
Paine, participated in the American and French
Revolutions and led Venezuela's break from Spain - and
Porfirio Díaz, Mexico's strongman for around 30 years
at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as the
politics that the term `liberalism' seeks to explain.
Historians tended to think that liberalism, which had
no roots in the continent, masked a colonial legacy of
patrimonial royalism and Catholic monism which produced
authoritarians like Díaz and utopians like Miranda, a
knight errant, Adams wrote, `as delirious as his
immortal countryman, the ancient hero of La Mancha'.

After the 1959 Cuban revolution, figuring out how to
stop the swing between authoritarianism and utopianism
- and how to prevent the spread of Communism - became a
central preoccupation of social scientists in the US.
Latin America served as a testing ground for
modernisation theory, a project aimed at shepherding
developing countries to democracy. In the early 1960s,
the goal was to set up functioning welfare states. The
purpose of society, Walt Rostow wrote in Stages of
Economic Growth, published in 1960, is not `compound
interest for ever'; human beings were not `maximising
units' but `pluralist' beings who deserved to live in
dignity. `The future of the hemisphere did seem bright
with hope,' Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote after JFK
announced the Alliance for Progress, which promised
`homes, work and land, health and schools - techo,
trabajo y tierra, salud y escuelas'. JFK `pronounced
the Spanish manfully', Schlesinger said, `but with a
distinct New England intonation'.

By the mid-1970s, however, nearly all of South America
was ruled by juntas and Central America was convulsed
by civil wars. Union members, peasant activists,
reformist politicians, priests and teachers were
persecuted; hundreds of thousands were killed by the
security forces; more than a million people in Central
America alone were driven from their homes.
Keynesianism had given way to neoliberalism, and Latin
America was now the laboratory for a more stringent
form of modernisation. Samuel Huntington was frank:
`democracy,' he wrote in 1989, `is clearly compatible
with inequality in both wealth and income, and, in some
measure, it may be dependent on such inequality.' By
the time the Berlin Wall came down that November,
almost every Latin American country had returned to
some form of constitutional rule. Manuel Noriega held
out in Panama, but he was dispatched a month later by
US troops in Washington's first post-Cold War invasion.
There was still Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated,
having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June
1990, Bush père could claim that a `rising tide of
democracy, never before witnessed in this beloved
hemisphere' would soon make possible a `free trade zone
stretching from the port of Anchorage to Tierra del
Fuego'.

Latin America's conversion to free trade was short-
lived, however. In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected
president of Venezuela, and Latin America began another
turn to the left. In one country after another, self-
described socialists, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in
Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Evo Morales in
Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, came to power. In
April 2008, Fernando Lugo, a priest, became president
of Paraguay, ending more than six decades of one-party
rule, 35 of them under the dictatorship of General
Stroessner. Morales broke through Bolivia's political
deadlock in August 2008 by submitting to a recall
referendum, which he won with nearly 70 per cent of the
vote; he then presided over the ratification of a new
social-democratic constitution. A year earlier, more
than 65 per cent of Ecuadorians had voted for a new
charter. In February this year, Venezuela's
constitution was amended, allowing Chávez to run for
re-election when his term ends in 2012. And in March,
Mauricio Funes, of the Farabundo Martí National
Liberation Front, was elected president of El Salvador.

Surveying the resurgent Latin American left, policy
makers and commentators tend to divide it into social
democrats whom Washington can work with, and demagogues
who must be contained. As Michael Reid, an editor at
the Economist, puts it, it is `hard to overstate what
is at stake in this ideological rivalry, this battle
for Latin America's soul' between liberal democrats and
a new generation of knights errant who have learned to
manipulate the rites of democracy - that is, elections
- while hollowing out its substance. The Mexican
political scientist and former foreign minister Jorge
Castañeda also divides the left into two camps:
pragmatists, forward-looking reformers such as Lula and
Bachelet, who have made their peace with a globalised
world and the reality of US power; and irreconcilables
such as Chávez and Morales, nostalgists more than
populists who cling to `introverted and archaic'
notions of sovereignty and anti-imperialism. `The
revolution, the assault on the Winter Palace,' he
writes, `is still ever gently on their mind.'

But why stop at two lefts? Latin America's presidents
embody distinct traditions: trade-unionism, indigenous
peasant organisation and progressive military
nationalism, in the cases of Lula, Morales and Chávez;
left developmentalism with Correa, who has a PhD in
economics, in Ecuador; middle-class social democracy
with Bachelet and Tabaré Vázquez, both doctors, in
Chile and Uruguay; liberation theology with Lugo in
Paraguay; and Peronism in Argentina with Cristina Ferná
ndez, who along with her predecessor and husband,
Néstor Kirchner, has returned her party to its populist
roots after a disastrous embrace of neoliberalism. The
insurgent New Left has its standard-bearers in Raúl
Castro and the still lingering Fidel in Cuba as well as
the tarnished Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The only
current not represented is old left Communism, though
Communist Parties are part of the governing coalitions
in Bolivia, El Salvador and Uruguay.

Latin America's new leftists, led by Lula and Chávez,
have brought about a significant realignment of
hemispheric relations, drawing even American allies
such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico into their orbit and
coming close to achieving Miranda's wished for
`confederation of free governments'. Latin American
governments met twice last year, without Washington:
they condemned Colombia's US-supported raid into
Ecuador to attack a Farc camp and supported Morales in
the face of separatist attacks that left scores of
government supporters dead. On a range of issues -
opposition to the war in Iraq, normalisation of
relations with Cuba and ratification of the
International Criminal Court - they have shown a degree
of unanimity and an independence from the US that would
have been unthinkable just a decade ago.

In Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia and
Bolivia, indigenous movements have upheld social
democratic traditions. In Peru, an indigenous protest
recently forced the revocation of laws aimed at opening
up large swathes of the Amazon to foreign logging,
mining and oil corporations. There have been advances
in gay and women's rights, including access to
abortion: Uruguay, for example, this year made it legal
for gay couples to adopt. Rights, it seems, have been
expanding in Latin America at a moment when they seem
to be contracting elsewhere. Despite this, much of the
literature on Latin America continues to emphasise the
fragility of democracy in the region. This may
sometimes be true of government institutions, but it's
not true of social movements and political culture,
where the idea of democracy has proved remarkably
resilient.

#

Over the last two decades, social and intellectual
historians have revised their interpretation of
Hispanic liberalism. The revitalisation in Europe of
Thomist rational natural law - one of the foundations
of the notion of inalienable rights - has been traced
back to debates among the Dominicans about the
brutality of Spanish conquest and colonialism. Stuart
Schwartz found an unexpected degree of religious
toleration in Iberian colonial society,* while legal
theorists have come to appreciate the blend of moderate
French Girondism with an Anglo-American concentration
on rights that defined the first generation of
independence leaders such as Miranda. Early 19th-
century republican constitutions and civil codes in
Mexico, Argentina, Nueva Granada, Alto Perú and Chile
balanced the liberal imperatives of separate powers and
limiting the role of government with the ideal of
promoting a virtuous society.

Yet liberalism did not generate stable and enduring
governments. By the middle of the 20th century, Latin
American countries had approved a total of 186
constitutions, an average of just under ten per
country. Venezuela alone had 24. `Treaties are scraps
of paper,' Simón Bolívar said, `constitutions, printed
matter; elections, battles; freedom, anarchy; and life
a torment.' One reason for this volatility was that, in
the decades before independence, profoundly illiberal
societies had developed in South America in tandem with
export-based economies. Rather than spread power and
wealth, Latin American capitalism, which was based on
seignorial estates and forced labour, concentrated
privilege. While demands for pure Spanish blood were
relaxed, new forms of cultural racism took their place.
The United States is often the standard by which Latin
America is judged, but it's important to remember that
Latin America didn't have a `north', a region with a
free labour system in which liberalism could develop.
In Latin America, every liberalisation was the result
of violent social conflict, from the Túpac Amaru
rebellion in the Andes in the 1780s, the 1794 Haitian
revolution and the insurgencies led by the priests
Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos in Mexico in the
1810s, to the Cuban independence wars of the second
half of the 19th century and the Mexican revolution of
1910. These and dozens of lesser-known peasant and
slave revolts not only weakened the system of forced
labour but infused liberalism's abstract promises of
equality with examples of collectivism in action.

Generations of conflict over labour and land rights
made Latin America famous for its revolutionaries, but
less well known is its contribution to social
democracy. In 1917 Mexico produced the world's most
elaborate social democratic constitution, prohibiting
child labour, affirming the right to form unions and
hold strikes, enacting land reform, abolishing debt
peonage, and mandating healthcare, pensions,
unemployment and accident insurance for workers. Every
Latin American country followed suit, ratifying ever
longer constitutions with chapter-length sections on
social rights and duties, labour, education, family and
economic order. Between 1944 and 1946, Latin America
experienced its first, forgotten `transition to
democracy': nearly every country in South America and
most of those in Central America, along with the
Dominican Republic and Cuba, became a democratic state;
those that were already democracies extended the vote,
strengthened labour rights and implemented social
security programmes. Social democracy became synonymous
with modernity. `We are socialists,' Guatemala's first
truly democratically elected president, Juan José
Arévalo, said in 1945, `because we live in the 20th
century.'

Latin Americans also pushed for reform abroad: 21 Latin
American representatives - the largest regional caucus
- joined 29 others from around the world in San
Francisco in 1945 to found the UN, pressing it to
confront the problem of colonial racism and to adopt a
human rights policy. Chile and Panama supplied the
draft charters on which the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights was based, and the Chilean academic Hernán
Santa Cruz served on the committee, chaired by Eleanor
Roosevelt, which wrote the final text. A well-heeled,
Jesuit-educated socialist, and a friend of Salvador
Allende, Santa Cruz was the committee's most forceful
advocate of social rights: the right to welfare, to
work, to unionise, to rest and leisure time, to food,
clothing, housing, healthcare and free education. Cuba
inserted into the charter the right to an adequate
standard of living, the Dominican Republic included a
provision on sexual equality, and Mexico had the phrase
`without any limitation due to race, nationality or
religion' added to the clause guaranteeing freely
contracted marriages.

Latin American lawyers, notably the Chilean diplomat
Alejandro Alvarez, also challenged the assumptions of
Great Power diplomacy. Alvarez argued that the `liberal
and democratic spirit of all the nations which compose
the New World' provided an opportunity to establish a
new co-operative diplomacy. Washington had long
insisted on its right to intervene in its `backyard'.
But Franklin Roosevelt, hamstrung by the Great
Depression and forced to extricate the US from a series
of marine occupations in the Caribbean basin, dropped
this when he recognised the sovereignty of Latin
American nations late in 1933, his first significant
foreign policy achievement. Legal theorists in Brazil,
Argentina, Chile and Colombia supported his Atlantic
Charter, hoping that it would lay the foundation for an
international social democratic order. By 1943,
Roosevelt was holding up the `illustration of the
republics of this continent' as a model for postwar
liberal multilateralism. Though he took credit for
overcoming `many times 21 different kinds of hate' to
`sell the idea of peace and security among the American
republics', the inspiration could just as well be
traced to Bolívar's call in 1826 for the creation of a
confederation of American nations.

From 1947, though, the landed class, along with their
defenders in the clergy and military, took advantage of
the Cold War to stage a counter-offensive. Within a few
years, a majority of Latin American countries were once
again under military rule. The US State Department
supported this turn, believing that the region's
`excessively rapid trend towards the adjustment of
social rights' had resulted in unacceptable levels of
`political instability' that threatened access to
resources and paved the way for Communist penetration.
George Kennan, the theorist of containment, argued that
it was `better to have a strong regime in power' in
Latin America `than a liberal government if it is
indulgent' to Communists. And Washington helped make
sure things stayed that way, funding and training
security forces to disastrous ends in one country after
another. Kennan wrote in a long memo to Dean Acheson
that the US should accept that `harsh governmental
measures of repression may be the only answer.' `South
America,' he added, `is the reverse of our own North
American continent,' its geography tropical, its
mongrel people `unhappy and hopeless', and its history
`unfortunate and tragic almost beyond anything ever
known'.

#

In the debate over what is and isn't different about US
hegemony, little attention has been paid to the most
important factor in the rise of the US: Latin America.
`South America will be to North America,' an essayist
wrote in the North American Review in 1821, `what Asia
and Africa are to Europe.' Not quite. Modern capitalist
empires - France, Holland and Great Britain in Africa,
Asia and the Middle East - ruled over culturally and
religiously distinct peoples. Anglo-American settlers,
by contrast, looked to Iberian America not as an
epistemic `other' but as a rival in a fight to define a
set of nominally shared values. John Winthrop urged the
first generation of Puritan settlers to build a `City
upon a Hill', yet as they struggled to survive one
freezing winter after another, their thoughts turned to
the rumoured `magnificence' of an already existing New
World metropolis - Americana Mexicana - so advanced it
boasted `1500 coaches drawn with mules', as Samuel
Sewall wrote in his diary in 1702. While Cotton Mather
taught himself Spanish, Sewall elaborated what may be
the earliest version of the shock doctrine. Spotting a
blaze in the night sky, he hoped the comet would strike
Mexico City and spark a `revolution' that would lead to
a mass conversion. `I have long prayed for Mexico,' he
said, `that god would open the Mexican fountain.'
Within a generation of its independence from Britain,
the US would begin to measure its progress against the
`deathlike sleep of Spanish dominion', aristocratic in
its pretensions, indolent in its industry and
superstitious in its beliefs. `I hate the dons,' the
future American president Andrew Jackson wrote in 1806,
while he was involved in machinations to separate
Florida and Louisiana from Spain; `I would delight to
see Mexico reduced.'

Pan-American relations developed into an ideological
contest over who best represented common principles,
which helps explain why Latin America remained social
democratic while US liberalism became missionary and
evangelical. The very idea of `Latin' America took
shape after Washington's annexation of more than a
third of Mexico's territory in 1848. `They would
concentrate the universe in themselves,' the Chilean
liberal Francisco Bilbao complained after William
Walker's 1856 invasion of Nicaragua, where he brought
back slavery years after it had been abolished: `The
Yankee replaces the American; Roman patriotism,
philosophy; wealth, morality; and self-interest,
justice.' When Washington attempted, at the 1889 pan-
American conference, to strengthen the Monroe
Doctrine's `America for the Americans' clause - which
Latin Americans tended to interpret as `America for the
US' - Argentina countered by proclaiming `America for
humanity'. As efforts to overcome the region's feudal
past coincided with the US's rise to global hegemony, a
diffuse cultural anti-imperialism developed first into
social democratic non-interventionism, then into New
Left militancy.

Washington's first experiences with foreign nation-
building - a few decades after Reconstruction in the
South - were in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Nicaragua and Panama. But the `New Latin America' was
as hard to build as the New South. While it was easy to
disparage the defeated Confederacy's manorialism and
belief in white supremacy, throughout the 20th century
US diplomats found themselves in competition with Latin
American nationalists honed in struggle against their
own agrarian lords over who best represented
progressive democracy. During the Cold War, this
contest forced Washington to respond to Communism and
nationalism with social democracy, promoted by
modernisation programmes such as the Alliance for
Progress. It was a tough sell, since the US was
simultaneously arming the region's landed class and its
constabulary. Reagan shifted emphasis, enlisting
Bolívar, Augusto Sandino, José Martí and even the
`Bolívarian teachings' of Miranda in the new right
crusade for `political liberty': code, in part, for
unregulated capitalism.

It is in this context that the Washington Consensus - a
term coined by the economist John Williamson to
describe the application of the neoclassical economic
model adopted by Chile to the rest of Latin America -
needs to be placed, as the latest attempt to `open the
Mexican fountain'. The two-year-long, tight-money
programme - run in the early 1980s by Paul Volcker, the
chair of the US Federal Reserve - greatly inflated the
value of dollar-denominated Latin American debt,
leading the IMF to step in and order a structural
adjustment programme. In exchange for refinancing their
loans, the IMF forced a majority of Latin American
governments to privatise industries and services, cut
tariffs and subsidies, deregulate finance and weaken
labour law. Governments adopted ruthless anti-
inflationary regimes, slashing budgets, forsaking
deficit-financed efforts to spur industrial growth, and
handing central banks over to technocrats who paid more
attention to the US Treasury than to their own people.

The success of this model depended on the creation of a
new urban class of consumers with access to cheap
credit, who could make up for the decline in real
wages. But this worked only in a few urban areas in
Mexico, Colombia and the southern cone. Between 1980
and 2000, a 9 per cent per capita GDP growth rate - not
9 per cent a year, but 9 per cent over the whole two
decades - badly affected the middle class and
manufacturers. Cheap agricultural imports destroyed
peasant communities, reducing neoliberalism's support
base to a small transnational class. Deregulation led
to financial meltdowns, while the privatisation of
everything from nurseries to pensions fostered an orgy
of corruption. A recent study by the Brazilian
economist Carlos Medeiros reports that more than $100
billion of Latin American state assets were sold off in
the 1990s, resulting in a vast transfer of wealth to
foreign corporations and a new class of domestic super-
billionaires, such as Mexico's Carlos Slim Helú, whose
worth is equivalent to that of the poorest 17 million
Mexicans. The retreat of the Mexican state under Nafta
led to a rapid expansion of the drug trade. It's often
said that narco cartels - which were responsible for
more than 6000 drug-related murders last year - have
made Mexico ungovernable; even a potential `failed
state'. But in many places the cartels serve as an
effective parallel government, taxing legitimate
businesses, providing employment, and funding such
basic infrastructure projects as phone lines,
electricity and road-building. And drug revenue ($23
billion a year) helps keep the country's deregulated
banking system solvent.

#

The problems with neoliberalism encouraged the turn to
the left among voters in Latin American countries, and
the record of populist and pragmatist leftwingers alike
has been impressive. Poverty and inequality have fallen
in nearly all left-led countries, according to a recent
UN report, with Venezuela narrowing the gap most, by
increasing the wealth of the poorest by 36 per cent.
Chile and Brazil's GDP has grown by 5 per cent annually
over the last couple of years, Argentina's by 7 per
cent; even desperately poor Bolivia has seen more than
4 per cent growth under Morales. Critics attribute
Venezuela's pace-setting 8 per cent yearly increase to
high oil prices, which makes one wonder why petroleum-
exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico
grew at only 3 per cent. The answer is that Chávez's
massive spending on public works, education,
healthcare, housing, co-operatives and small businesses
has worked as a scattershot stimulus package. Much of
this expenditure may be wasteful, chaotic or corrupt,
but the country's unemployment rate has fallen from
nearly 20 per cent in 2004 to 9 per cent, the fastest
drop in Latin America. As Keynes himself pointed out,
the waste involved in public works projects is
infinitely less of a vice than the waste of intractable
unemployment. `Two pyramids', he said, are `twice as
good as one'.

There is variation in style and policy among Latin
America's new leftists, but it has more to do with
regional history than ideology. In the southern cone,
civilian and military dirigisme from the 1930s to the
1970s created complex, relatively diverse societies.
The neoliberalism introduced in the 1980s deepened
inequality and generated new social organisations -
such as Brazil's landless workers movement - but there
wasn't a complete collapse of the old political order.
In Chile, Bachelet is the fourth civilian president
since Pinochet left power in 1990, and has continued
her predecessors' efforts to rebuild a social safety
net. Lula also rose within an established political
system, and now presides over Latin America's largest
economy, with successful financial, agricultural,
energy and financial sectors. In the Andes, especially
in Bolivia and Ecuador, where racism is more
entrenched, class power more extreme and foreign
control more barefaced, privatisation and deregulation
stripped the economy to its core and destroyed the
existing order. The region's new leaders have
established unapologetically fortified executive
branches held accountable by elections and a mobilised,
socially diverse rank-and-file. They are more willing
to challenge the rules of the global political economy,
to nationalise industries, push land reform and
negotiate higher royalties from petroleum and gas
exports.

Critics such as Castañeda argue that populism is
unsustainable, but Morales in Bolivia and Correa in
Ecuador are managing so far. From 1998 until Correa's
election in 2006, no president in Ecuador had completed
a full term, as one after another was driven out of
office on corruption charges or by popular protests.
Bolivia before Morales was rocked by a series of
`resources wars' over gas and water privatisation which
led to the ousting of two presidents. In Venezuela,
after a raucous decade in power, Chávez's popularity
hovers around 60 per cent, and in regional elections
last year his newly formed United Socialist Party won
about 54 per cent of the vote. It is true that
plummeting oil prices might threaten Venezuela's social
gains, but Chile and Brazil are equally vulnerable to
this. Declining export revenue could, however, make it
difficult for Chávez to broker the demands of his
different supporters. Chavismo is both a governing
coalition and a social movement: this diversity
accounts for its vitality, but also limits it. The
global downturn might force a showdown between the new
Bolivarian bourgeoisie, or `boligarchy', and the
activists who believe they are building `21st-century
socialism'.

#

Along with Venezuela, Brazil has played a key role in
establishing Latin America's growing independence from
Washington. When Brazil announced last September, after
Morales's right-wing opponents in Bolivia tried to
destabilise his government, that it would not accept a
coup in South America, it was an act of solidarity as
well as an assertion of its own regional doctrine;
Washington's silence was taken as a show of support for
the plotters but also an indication of the inattention
of a declining superpower. If Obama normalises
relations with Cuba, as Lula has been pushing him to
do, Brazilian and not US agro-industry is set to become
the major developer of the island's sugar economy, and
will gain access to US markets. Lula has advanced his
country's economic interests in Bolivia, Ecuador,
Paraguay and Uruguay - `Brazil's backyard', according
to the Uruguayan analyst Raúl Zibechi - while at the
same time defending Morales, Correa and Chávez, not
just from Washington but from Brazilian investors
threatened by resource nationalism, land reform and
higher taxes. The Brazilian president is as popular
abroad as he is at home, becoming the Third World's
proxy at international financial summits like the G20,
a prominence just ratified by the International Olympic
Committee's decision to pick Rio over Chicago and
Madrid for the 2016 games. Washington will be paying
close attention to Brazil's 2010 presidential election,
hoping that whoever wins will share Lula's moderation
but not his charisma.

Castañeda writes that any viable Latin American left
will have to come to terms `with a basic fact of life:
the United States will not go away'. But, over the
years, its refusal to come to terms, its insistence on
not just the rhetoric but the substance of sovereignty,
has served as a check and balance on US power. In the
years since the Bush administration supported the
failed coup against Chávez in 2002, the Venezuelan
president has represented this historical stubbornness
with antics that many think befitting a `clown or a
madman,' as the Argentinian novelist Luisa Valenzuela
wrote in 2007. But `it's worth keeping in mind',
Valenzuela went on, that a `very heady dose of
megalomania is a prerequisite for even dreaming of
confronting a rival as overwhelmingly powerful as the
United States.' In addition to Brazil, a number of
South American countries are scheduled for elections
that could scramble the political landscape. At the end
of October, it seems likely that Uruguayans will elect
as their president José Mujica, a 74-year-old former
leader of the insurgent Tupamaros who spent most of the
1970s and 1980s in jail as a political prisoner. In
early December, Bolivians will, it appears from current
polls, overwhelmingly elect Evo Morales to a second
term. But later that month, the right might regain
power in Chile. The Christian Democrat former president
Eduardo Frei is locked in a close election with the
conservative Sebastián Piñera; a third-party dissident
socialist, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, is poised to act as
a potential spoiler.

Whatever direction Latin America's new left takes, the
global economic meltdown might just bring about the
long-sought convergence between Latin America and the
United States, though not in the way that might have
been imagined: `On bad mornings,' Paul Krugman recently
remarked, `I wake up and think we are turning into a
Latin American country.' As to the election of the
first African American to the US presidency, Lula
called it an `extraordinary gesture', and hoped that
Obama would transform it from one exclusively for the
`US people into a gesture for Latin America . . .
respecting our sovereignty and an equitable
coexistence'.

[*] All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation
in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale, 352 pp., £30, July
2008, 978 0 300 12580 1).

Greg Grandin is the author of The Last Colonial
Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War and, most
recently, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's
Forgotten Jungle City
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Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 27, 2009 9:50 am

Latin America: The United States is Sticking with the Monroe Doctrine
by Karine Walsh
Global Research, November 26, 2009
- 2009-11-25


Image

Interview with Arnold August at Le monde cette semaine (The World this Week), a francophone radio program hosted by André Pesant, aired on CIBL Radio-Montréal on November 22, 2009


While the U.S. government is amplifying its hostile interventions in the south, André Pesant recalled the ideological origins of U.S. foreign policy in a radio episode entitled Honduras, Colombia, Cuba - the United States is Pursuing the Monroe Doctrine: All of America to the North-Americans. It is during a speech to Europeans delivered on December 2, 1823, that the Republican U.S. President James Monroe would set guidelines to be adopted by United States diplomacy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

In the same vein, Pesant evoked the concept of an African proverb used by Roosevelt in 1901: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Roosevelt used this expression for the first time at the Minnesota State Fair, on September 2, 1901, twelve days before the assassination of President William McKinley which propelled him into the presidency of United States. This "big stick" policy led the United States to assume a role of international police, protecting its interests in Latin America, mainly in the Caribbean region, through the use of military reprisals if deemed necessary.

The radio host considered that a century after this statement, the same " big stick " policy still seems to be enforced, a week away from the presidential election boycotted by the vast majority in Honduras: "While U.S. imperialism was suggesting an excessively publicised no-win deal to President Zelaya, it also took military control of Colombia." Contrasting with the complicit silence of the mainstream media linked to the so-called international community, Pesant mentioned "the very lively voice of Fidel Castro", referring to his recent reflections on the matter, published in several websites: "The Annexation of Colombia to the United States" on November 6 and "The Bolivarian Revolution and Peace "on November 18.

Pesant's guest on this radio show was Arnold August, a journalist, lecturer, author of several articles on the coup in Honduras published in some prestigious alternative websites, and specialist in participatory democracy in Cuba. In his view, it is still the same aggressive U.S. policy towards Latin America that has prevailed for two centuries: "This policy of domination over Latin America began immediately after the United States war of Independence in 1787. Even before the speech by James Monroe in 1823, which would define the principles of the country's foreign policy towards Latin America, in 1807 Thomas Jefferson declared that he saw in Cuba the most interesting acquisition for the United States. This policy of control applies to all of Latin America; the outward appearances and political parties taking power in the White House change from time to time, but the policy has remained the same."

Pesant reminded listeners about the harsh reality of American history, the historical inheritance of the US ruling class; a slave-owning class that acquired its wealth through the shameless importation and exploitation of African slaves. "The history of the United States consists of the looting of natural resources both outside and inside the US, including the extermination of the aboriginal peoples," he pointed out. Concerning Honduras, Pesant placed the issue in the context of the aggressive U.S. policy of domination over the continent enforced during two centuries and also in the light of current events, with on one hand, the negotiation of a bad deal imposed on Zelaya, and on the other hand the installation of 7 U.S. military bases in Colombia.

August recalled that one of the factors leading to the military coup on June 28 was Zelaya's decision, with the support of the Honduran people, to join the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA, its Spanish acronym). According to August, this important decision is directly linked to the coup in Honduras and to the recent public announcement of the installation of military bases in Colombia, even though the latter was decided upon a long time ago. "ALBA was established 5 years ago, first by Venezuela and Cuba. This has resulted in the movement's wave effect, other countries becoming members: Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Honduras, and soon possibly Paraguay, which will bring the current membership to 10 countries, something that is not negligible. The fact that Honduras has taken the decision to join ALBA, whose members reject the political, economic and military domination of the United States, was an affront to the United States which they have not accepted. The coup against Zelaya was not only an assault against Honduras, but upon all countries of ALBA and even against all the countries of South America."

Pesant asked his guest about the term military which government officials and the press in general have carefully refrained to associate with the June 28 coup. August, who has written several articles on this particular issue, namely one entitled "Honduras: Consistent Positions by both Sides Elevate the Constituent Assembly as the Solution", explains the important significance in avoiding the term military:

"There is a law in the United States, specifically Section 7008 of the 2009 Appropriations Act, clearly entitled military coups, which states that none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree. By refraining to officially classify the coup as a military one, Washington keeps the door open for the November 29 elections, even if Zelaya had not been returned to power. The White House also gives itself the luxury of cultivating doubts hovering over Zelaya's head regarding the legal framework of his activities that led to the coup. Nevertheless, the electoral process is bound to be a disaster for both the coup perpetrators and the U.S. government."

Referring to an article published recently by August, Pesant mentioned a press release dated November 17, issued by Harris Corporation, which confirms that Washington is far from reducing its efforts of control and repression against the Honduran resistance. August said that in fact this international communications and information technology company was awarded the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) Command, Control, Communications and Computer Systems operations and maintenance program for Joint Task Force (JTF) Bravo at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras.

August concluded the interview by stressing the correlation between recent events in Latin America, including the establishment of Yankee military bases in Colombia: "We must firstly take note of the fact that Colombia shares its border with Venezuela and Ecuador, two countries that are building an alternative social system and that are strongly rejecting neo-liberalism. Rafael Correa, as promised prior to his election, has recently announced the closure of the only U.S. military base on the territory of Ecuador, an initiative that Zelaya also intended for the base in Honduras. Not far away, in Bolivia, Evo Morales is also the advocate of well thought-out and strong views against American domination over the continent. We cannot separate these events: the military coup in Honduras and the establishment of 7 U.S. military bases in Colombia. I learned this morning that yesterday Micheletti clearly said that anyone calling for a boycott of elections in Honduras is likely to end up in jail; the Honduran people are undergoing increasing repression." On the balance sheet of the full account of aggressive acts against other nations, August recalled the upholding of the U.S. blockade against Cuba, which has resulted in over 50 years of suffering for the Cuban people, in spite of its UN condemnation by an overwhelming majority of member-states. The naval base on the island's territory of Guantanamo has been occupied by U.S. forces in complete illegality for over a century at a time when Cuba was on top of the list on US annexation policy.



Karine Walsh is a social justice activist. She hosts a francophone radio program called Dimension Cubaine (hosted by the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba) at a Montreal Community channel, Radio Centre-Ville.




The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16291
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Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 30, 2009 9:57 am

From Conquistadores, Dictators and Multinationals to the Bolivarian Revolution
November 30, 2009
By Maria Paez Victor

Keynote speech at the Conference on Land and Freedom, of The Caribbean Studies Program, University of Toronto
October 31, 2009


"Es importante no olvidar que uno ha olvidado."
("It is important not to forget that one has forgotten")
F. Baez, 31


I come to talk about some horrific things that have befallen Latin American and Caribbean people, but I also will talk about some extraordinary things that are making our America the most hope-filled region, a beacon for the planet's future.

Today is the last day of the month of October - the month in which many countries celebrate "Columbus Day", the day supposedly Europeans "discovered" the misnamed continent of America, and tonight is Halloween when tradition says that spirits of the dead may roam.
What would the spirits of our America say if we indeed could see and hear them?

I dare to answer for them: that Columbus was a mass murderer, an unrelenting racist, who carried out one of the most complete and extensive genocides in history upon the original peoples of our America. Their spirits would tell us all the cruelties that these barbaric Europeans perpetuated upon them.


During the II World War, the German Nazi government carried out a deliberate and organized genocide against Jewish people in Europe and it included eliminating all sorts of "misfits" such as mentally ill people, homosexuals and indeed, any dissenter to their empire. It is good that even now, 64 years afterwards, the memory of that holocaust is kept alive so the world may not forget that state terrorism, that horrific genocide. An estimate of six million has been calculated died in the Nazi concentration camps. We must never forget.

However, an even greater genocide against the indigenous peoples of this continent is "controversial" or denied, instead of outwardly repudiated. It was that "civilized" European massacred other "civilized" Europeans that was found so shocking about the Nazi atrocities. Not so when those massacred are dark people from beyond. Centuries before the Nazi, there was this other genocide, one that has been largely forgotten, hidden behind a masquerade called "progress" or "civilization".
The period of Conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean - roughly between 1492-1570- was an organized, deliberate, physical elimination of entire peoples through brutal torture and death. It included their enslavement "for their own good" , the suppression of their culture, history, and languages. They systematically destroyed their original records, the learning, the music, the theatre, and dance of the original peoples throughout the vast region. In other words, it was also a cultural genocide. As the brilliant Latin American scholar Fernando Baezi
ii
demonstrates, it is this destruction of our history that lies at the heart of the contradictions, the dependency and the exploitations that continues today in Latin America and the Caribbean: a continent that has been robbed of much more than just its rich resources, its peoples have been denied its collective memory and true identity.


Let us remember some of that history because, in fact, it continues to impact us to this day: the pillaging of our America, the racism with which our peoples have been and are regarded, the misery under which many are still living, has persisted through Conquest, Colonialism and post-colonialism to this, the era of global capitalism.

That same Columbus, whose name is celebrated in streets, schools, monuments, even an entire country, personally led the massacre against the Taina (Arawak) people of Haiti with a few cavalry, 200 foot soldiers and trained dogs. iii It is well documented in the historical record that in the Caribbean and in Mexico thousands of indigenous women were raped then thrown to trained dogs that tore them to pieces. iv In Haiti, the repression and murder of the Taina people was so complete that by mid 16th century, its culture had been eradicated completely.v

A very small number of Europeans during the Conquest were able to exterminate an indigenous population of between 70 to 100 million people. None of the genocide of the 20th century can compare to this carnage, not Hitler, not Stalin, indeed, one cannot think of any historical genocide of this magnitude. vi

Their cultures have been lost.


At the beginning of the 16th Century, the indigenous people represented 99% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean, today they represent only 30%. In the countries that have the greatest percentage of indigenous peoples (Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and Ecuador) they count no higher than 27%. There are 770 distinct indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean but not one group has more than 5, 000 members. They are among the poorest of the poor, excluded, marginalized, suffering misery, and hounded by landowners, miners, and multinational companies that covet their lands and resources. The history of our America is the history of land and freedom - the struggle to defend one and to exert the other.

Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, today México City, was a marvel of urban design - much more sophisticated, better planned, healthier and as beautiful as any in Europe. Its destruction and pillage at the hands of Hernán Cortéz was monumental; it was the first great looting in our America. The genocide of the Mexican people was unbelievable, unprecedented: the 25 million inhabitants that Techochtitlán had in 1500 was reduced to one million between 1519 and 1605: that is a 96% decrease of the indigenous population. Tenochtitlán was not destroyed as an "unintended" consequence of war - as the historian Hugh Thomas asserts: " its destruction was a deliberate tactic, deliberately and carefully, methodically carried out, with all the energy of a European war without thinking that they were ruining a work of art..."vii

Fernando Báez points out that today one cannot imagine building a Christian church on top of the pyramids of Egypt or Stonhenge - yet that is what happened in Tenochtitlán: today one can see México's cathedral that was deliberately built on the ruins of the great Aztec temples. This is a key example of the cultural looting, the destruction of a culture and all its artifacts, symbols and history. México of course, in the 19th century went on to lose half of its land to another empire, the USA.viii

The destruction of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire, the largest in South America that extended from Colombia to Chile and Argentina, followed the same pattern as Tenochtitlán's. Francisco Pizarro, carried out the conquest of the Incas through butchery and treachery. It is documented that he invited the best Inca warriors and their wise men to visit him and callously poisoned their drinks with arsenic.ix


Lope de Aguirre, another sanguinary conqueror, one of the great destroyers of indigenous cultures, went thorough eastern Venezuela leaving such a wake of murder and destruction that his name is still synonymous with all that is vile about the Conquest. He was obviously insane, as in the end he killed his own companions and his only daughter. One can speculate that perhaps the blood lust of all these barbaric men of conquest was a sign of their madness. The great nation of the Caribes in Venezuela, who ferociously defended its land and freedom, was laid waste by men such as these.

As for the Mayas, in southern México and Central America, they like the Aztec and Incas, were great builders and had records of their knowledge and an accurate solar calendar. Fray Diego de Landa (1524-79) wrote what the conquerors did to the Mayas :" They carried out unbelievable cruelties, they cut off their noses, arms and legs, they cut off women's breasts , tied pumpkins full of rocks on their feet and threw them into deep lagoons; they beat the children with sticks when they did not walk fast enough and if they got sick they cut off their heads...The Spaniards excused themselves by saying that they could not subjugate so many people unless they filled them with fear of terrible punishments. " However, religious fanatism led this same Landa, in 1562 to authorize the killing of 4,000 Mayans from Mérida, because they refused to stop adoring their idols.x

The ancient Spanish sought gold in our lands. One historian of the time said they "were like hungry swine lusting after gold". Seventy years after Columbus landed, the Spanish Monarchs - Isabel and Ferdinand -had obtained more than 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver. This fortune was the fruit of the slave work of indigenous peoples and African people. It is estimated that 15 million Africans were kidnapped and transported to the Latin America and the Caribbean - with 5 or 6 million dying on the way at sea.

The Spanish Monarchy was overjoyed with Columbus' exploits that came at the most opportune moment to save the aristocracy from the ruin of their racist wars that had driven the Arabs and the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. This they carried out so efficiently, killing or expelling many thousands of them, and destroying as much of their cultural books and artifacts as possible, that they spent their royal treasure, ruined their agriculture and economy and were facing a dire decline of their fortunes, when Columbus offered them the wealth of a new continent and new peoples to oppress.

Spain had the upper hand in the colonization of our America but, it was not the only country. Guilt is shared by half of Europe. The Portuguese, English, French, Swedish and Danish ran slave trades and took over many of the Caribbean islands to turn into sugar plantations. Ironically, the immense fortune that Spain obtained from the Americas was spent -not on industry or investment in the development of Spain itself- but by the idle aristocracy on conspicuous consumption, and huge estates. Soon Spain owed millions to Europe's bankers and traders - German, Genoese, Flemish, Dutch. They all had a stake in Spain's looting of our America.

In Venezuela, for example, to pay off debts to the Fugger German bankers, huge tracts of land and authority were given to them (1528) and in 1520 to the German Welsers, both who proceeded to wage a bloody war against the original peoples of Venezuela in search for gold. Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote a chronicle in 1552 of the cruelties of the Conquest, described these Germans as "rabid wolves and lions", as "devils" that obliterated entire, peaceful ethnic groups in their thirst for gold. xi One has to have a strong stomach to read his descriptions of the cruelties of that time of conquest.

Spain, its productive capacity stunted, had to import most of the manufactured goods it needed, and so the manufactured goods Spain sent to its colonies were not made in Iberia, but in other European countries. xii Indeed, it was Latin American gold and silver, and African gold, ivory and slave labor, which paid the way for European capitalist development. As the famous economist John Maynard Keynes stated: "The modern age opened ...with the accumulation of capital which began in the 16th century...which resulted from the treasure of gold and silver which Spain brought from the New World into the Old...I trace the beginnings of British foreign investment to the treasure which Drake stole from Spain in 1580."xiii

The period of Colonization - from the late-16th to the mid-19th centuries- was a time in which Spain carried out a methodical process of substituting cultures of our America for a European one. The racist mentality predominated, but they would not have recognized it as such, but just as the natural, logical way of things.

The colonial elites that emerged took their cue from the Spanish aristocracy. They had little interest in developing agriculture or industry except in as much as it allowed them to live in opulence. Its racism, of course, dampened any interest in the human development of the indigenous populations, except that which would serve to subjugate it, by eliminating their language, denying worth to their, traditions, art, history, all to be substituted by European values and an instrumental Christianity.

Venezuelan elites today have a profoundly racist complex that has even led intellectuals to refer to the Colonization as a positive event ( "the golden legend"). They have considered the system of "encomiendas" -enslavement of Indigenous peoples to work for particular landowners- simply as a way of "taking care of " them, and, many have glossed over the role that African slaves had on our economies and culture. To this day, many deny that inequality has roots in racism. For example, in Venezuela it has only been now, under President Chávez's government that recognition is given to African-Venezuelans. This the elite denounces as Chávez CREATING racism where none existed before.

Yet Colonial society was based on a rigid racial system that pervaded all its workings. There was a legal classification according to racial mix: the white people were of course the dominating elite, but even they had to have documents to prove the "purity" of their Spanish blood if they wanted to attain certain positions of power or join the professions; lower class whites were thus limited to lesser occupations and positions. All the rest, mixed people, were called "inferior peoples", or pardos and legally classified by their racial mix; mulattos were white and black, Tercerones were mulatto and white; Cuarterones were Terceron and white; Quinteron were white and Cuarteron; and Zambo were Indian with mulato or black. The colonial rules micro-managed all social life and any education or cultural expression were those approved by the elites. But even the elites suffered Spanish censorship which was ubiquitous in literature, history and the arts.

Throughout Colonial times indigenous and Black people were considered lazy, unreliable, and even wicked and Spain justified their subjugation to itself and the world, as part of the evangelization of otherwise savage peoples. Two objectives were foremost: the destruction of any traditional religion that was not their version of Christianity, and the eradication of indigenous languages. More than 1,000 indigenous languages disappeared in 500 years - that is two per year.xiv

There were many rebellions and conflicts but I would like to tell you about two instances against Colonial rules carried out by Venezuelan women. By law, only white women were allowed to wear mantillas or mantos (shawls), hence they were called Mantuanas. In the 1770's Maria Francisca Peña, a Venezuelan pardo, started to use a manto - and took her case to the Real Audiencia - the maximum Spanish Law Court- and won that right. From then on mulatas took en masse, to the use of shawls. She was considered a woman of scandal for this. A few years later, the mulata women of Coro - in the eastern part of Venezuela- openly rebelled against the white women's exclusive right to the use of rugs and carpets in the churches. (There were no pews). This was considered "abominable dissolution" and "detestable abuse" and was not successful, but they made their point. One official stated: "Their mulatismo is of an arrogant, insolent and shameless kind".
xv

They eventually prevailed.


The mix of the races has been held up historically as something positive, as proof that the Spanish were not racist since they procreated with Indigenous and Black people. This covers up the horrible historical truth of the rape and sexual abuse of millions indigenous and African slave women, by their oppressors. It was not white women who married or procreated with indigenous men or Black men; it was the white dominant male who took women, mostly as concubines, from among the indigenous and slave population. I myself am a direct descendant of a mulato slave, my 3X great grandmother, named Felipa Lucena. After giving birth to a lighter coloured son, she won her freedom from my landowning ancestor, who- to his credit made him- his heir. This son, Capitán Hipólito Casiano Lucena, (my great great grandfather) became captain in the patriot army of Simón Bolívar and an abolitionist who helped Bolívar in his campaign to free slaves. For his efforts, he was savagely murdered by the local aristocracy of Carora.

In the 19th Century, during the wars of independence, it is not surprising that the "pardos" and indigenous peoples flocked to the revolutionary armies. Not all, but significant numbers. One historian of the time said that the Venezuelan indigenous peoples did not forget the indignities and cruelties with which their ancestors had been treated by the ancient Spaniards and were an integral part of the army of Simón Bolívar.

One consequence of the cultural destruction was that the Latin American and Caribbean societies that emerged, elites and all, believed themselves to be a mere copy of European societies, and- as the famous Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos postulated : our societies were a perennial struggle of "the civilized " against "the barbarous". So our studies centred on European parameters - literature started with Cervantes, not with the Aztec Códices, the study of government started the Magna Carta , not with the Popl Vuh, the study of history started with Columbus, not with the history of Machu Pichu, the study of art, music, poetry started with its Europeans manifestations not our indigenous traditions. Therefore, the upper classes persisted in their emulation of all that was European and later from the USA, and all that was "Indian" or "Black" was necessarily, inferior.

However, the sad reality is that after Independence, the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean fell under the heel of another empire, the USA. Our America obtained a freedom FROM (a Colonial power) but did not attain a freedom TO (to exercise that freedom according to their sovereign will).


The three main instruments of US hegemony are:


Economic: through the lure and inroads of capitalist investments and business ventures with US corporations.


Military: The first decades after Independence from Spain, was via gunboat diplomacy, then by co-opting the region's armed forces thorough the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia, USA, that trained the Latin American and Caribbean military in torture and to wage war against their own people, all under the justification of fighting communism.

Cultural: this perhaps is the most ubiquitous, most sophisticated, and most insidious. Its instruments are a plethora of USA scholarships, internships and jobs in corporations, cultural associations, and NGO's.
Nowhere was the cultural domination of the USA more intense and more successful than in oil-rich Venezuela. US Oil companies and corporations and associations, acted as a socializing agent to produce leaders for Venezuela in business, politics, the armed forces, and the police. Venezuela's elites lost the capacity to operate as instruments of national affirmation the more they became partners with US foreign capital and multinationals. One sociologist described this elite as having a perspective that was totally devoid of a role for the mass of the people; that had little or no sustained contact with them and in no sense felt pressured to meet the needs of the population.
xvi

We clearly see this today as this elite battles the nation affirming government of President Chávez.

US hegemony was not easy and did not come without a price for Latin America and the Caribbean. Since the end of the 19th Century, the USA invaded, overthrown, and destablized governments in the region about 90 times. Every one of the 20th century dictatorial governments in Latin America and the Caribbean has been backed by the USA. Indeed, in order to successfully grab power, it has been the sine qua non that the putative dictator must have the okay of the local USA embassy.

When Fidel Castro had the audacity to overthrow the US backed dictator Batista, and after the failure of the US invasion of Bay of Pigs, then Operation Mongoose (1961) authorized by President Kennedy, befell Cuba with all manner of covert operations to overthrow the government. It was a prelude of greater crimes to come.

The peoples of our America then suffered another wave of genocide, an ideological one. In 1975, a diabolical plot emerged with the direction of the CIA, to unite the dictatorships of Latin American in a "War on Communism". It was the infamous Operation Condor that murdered, tortured or disappeared thousands of social reformers, socialists, and communists, from the various countries, noticeably Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru. The inhuman men who carried out this Operation, invented "rendition" whereby people were snatched off the streets in one country and then transported to a second country where they would be tortured and disposed of without leaving a trace.

The examples of Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende were too great a risk for the USA.

Venezuela, then supposedly a model of democracy, had a secret police trained and led by CIA agents (such as the criminal Luis Posada Carriles who blew up a Cuban airliner and is today living freely in Miami.) This secret police invented a novel way of disposing of troublesome reformers after torturing them they would drop them into the sea from helicopters, hoping that way their bodies would never be found. But bodies were found -washed up on the shore.

Throughout the region, 60,000 progressive reformers, socialists or communists were victims of this genocide.

In the 1990's, a new phase of economic domination emerged: a more virulent model of Capitalism. Not content with the "normal" extraction of resources, the multinational companies, with their partners, the IMF and the World Bank came up with the package of policies that would extend markets further into areas previously run by governments. This was called the Washington Consensus. Its premise was that multinational private enterprises could do a better job of safeguarding the public interest than the inept governments of the region. Therefore it prescribed privatization of public services, wide spread deregulation, lifting of tariffs, unrestricted investment flows and free access of large corporations to public contracts and domestic markets. These corporations even wanted to own the water that fell from the skies and ran in our streams.
These neo-liberal capitalist measures were foisted onto Latin American and Caribbean governments as conditions for obtaining international loans and even by threats. They have been a spectacular failure by almost any indicator: in one decade, they stunted the growth of income per person in the region (it fell from 82% to 9% to 1%), they increased the number of poor by 14 million, yet US banks and corporations obtained $1 trillion in profits from Latin America.xvii

The country that was most affected by these measures was the country that most thoroughly applied them: Venezuela. It was the country where the first popular rebellion against these measures occurred in February 27th of 1989 -the Caracazo- wherein about 3000 were killed by armed troops.
By 1998, this oil-rich country's economy was in ruins, schools and hospitals were almost derelict, and almost 80% of the population was impoverished.
But now we come to the good news.

In 1998, against all odds, Hugo Chávez, won the presidential elections in Venezuela by an astounding landslide, literally eliminating the two parties that had hitherto mis-governed the country for 40 years. Immediately the elites and middle classes opposed him as an upstart, an Indiana who does not know his place, a Black who is a disgrace to the position. Hugo Chávez established a new Constitution that re-set the rules of a government that had been putty in the hands of the elites. Ratified in overwhelming numbers, the Constitution gave indigenous peoples, for the first time, the constitutional right to their language, religion, culture and lands. It established Human Rights, civil and social, like the right to food, a clean environment, education, jobs, and health care , binding the government to provide them. It declared the country a participatory democracy with direct input of people into political decision making through their communal councils and it asserted government control of oil revenues: Oil belongs to the people.


The wealthy elite and its satellites, with backing of the USA, failed to overthrow President Chávez in 2002, and failed to paralyze the state oil company and the economy in 2003 with sabotage and lock out. These desperate acts of a profoundly anti-democratic opposition served only to consolidate the Bolivarian Revolution. However, the opposition continue to this day, its covert operations, and international campaign to discredit President Chávez, financing paramilitary and opposition groups.

It has been ten years since Hugo Chávez was first elected president of Venezuela, and in those years, we can now say that a new dawn has come not just over Venezuela, but over the entire sub-continent thanks to his example.

The impact of his Bolivarian Revolution can be seen in how it has used the enormous oil revenues and reserves to meet the real needs of Venezuelans, and this includes, the eradication of illiteracy, dramatic lowering of infant mortality, lowest rate of malnutrition in South America, the lowest ratio of inequality, the lowest unemployment in decadaes and the great majority of the people have direct access to free health care, free schools, a network of daycare, a subsidized food distribution network, and subsidized medicines. The misiones, integrated anti-poverty programs that have dramatically reduced poverty, have been internationally lauded. Only Cuba fares better.

But one of the biggest achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution is existential: a new sense of identity, a new sense of belonging, as one ordinary Venezuela said on national TV: "We are no longer invisible" The great majority of Venezuelans feel they are now in control of their own government and destiny - despite the continuous attacks from the oligarchy and its satellites. Now the Chavistas frame all the political discourse and its name is Socialism of the XXIst century.

For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a country in the world repudiates the barbaric version of capitalism that has prevailed since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and embraces a new socialism, one that has its roots in the indigenous people's socialism, in Liberation Theology which was born in Latin America, in Humanism, in the inspiration of Cuba, as well as the works of Marx, but not exclusively in European socialism. It is not Stalinism, it is not a copy of what has passed for socialism todate, but Venezuela's own brand infused with the idea that the people are the protagonists of democracy, that the economy should serve people not the other way around, and that only their active and direct participation in political decision making will free the country from corruption and inequality.
The Revolutionary government of Venezuela can also claim the resounding achievement of having brokered the beginning of solid, true, integration of the nations of our America.

It started with TELESUR, a TV channel fed by the state TV stations of the nations, so that we can learn from one another and enjoy our news, art, music, directly not through the mediation of CNN.

In a historic moment, ALBA, destroyed the Free Trade of the Americas with which Georoge W. Bush wanted to chain our economies. ALBA is its repudiation- an association of solidarity where economic projects are geared toward social justice and human development.


PETEROSUR is a consorsium of the state oil companies of South America to ensure that the oil and gas is used not just to fuel the growth of richer nations, but to help with the infrastructure needed at home.

PETROCARIBE is an initiative to provide much needed fuel to the smaller Caribbean nations with preferential financial arrangements and a fund for joint projects. It is also an assertion that Venezuela is a Caribbean nation.


The BANCO DEL SUR represents the liberation of our America from the usury and hegemony of the IMF, World Bank and other international banks and organizations whose loans have imposed nefarious neo-liberal capitalist policies on governments.

And UNASUR, defense organization of South America is the jewel in the crown of integration. Its existence is the death of the USA's Monroe Doctrine as South America asserts that it alone assumes the defense of the region. It rejects the USA's "war against terrorism" , stating there is no terrorism in our America, but there is an ideologically defined civil war, in Colombia. As well, UNASUR has an energy council to put in place safeguards for the supply of energy for the region to protect the natural environment.

There is a grave external risk that looms, over Venezuela. The one super-power has not ceased to try to de-stabalize, isolate, balkanize, and even overthrow this democratically elected progressive government. The oil is a tremendous lure - like gold was in the past. The USA funnels millions of dollars to bogus NGO's, and the anti-democratic opposition which accepts payments from a foreign government that is hostile to their nation. And its ally, Uribe's Colombia is a double threat: not only because of its enormous armed forces, but also its paramilitary forces that constantly raid and invade Venezuela's borders. These Colombian paramilitary are also hired killers for the Venezuelan rich landowners opposed to Land Reform and up to now have murdered 160 rural leaders.

It is important to point out that:

· The Colombian Army (500,000) is twice the size of combined armies of Venezuela and Ecuador

· Military expenditures 10 times those of Venezuela

· After Israel and Egypt, receives the largest amount of US military aid in the world


The USA has responded to the achievements of Venezuela and the election of 11 progressive, left wing government in our America, with increased militarization.

Barak Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has installed seven USA military bases in Colombia, with a capacity to accommodate huge C 17 planes that can cross the sub continent without re-fuelling. These planes are useless against narco-traffic, the supposed reason for the bases, but they are a direct menace to Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia and to the whole region. Not a single one of the presidents of South America approved of these bases. Colombia is now a springboard for preemptive strikes, a prelude to a Middle East type of conflict in the region.

There is also indignation in the region that, after 50 years, the USA has re-activated the IV Naval fleet with the capacity to invade even the rivers of our America.

Furthermore, the affairs of the USA in the region have largely been taken out of the State Dept and placed under the Southern Command. This means that the issues and social problems in Latin America and the Caribbean are now defined as security problems, as risks that merit a military response. One of these risks they refer to is "radical populism", meaning the leaders and movements that US politician and corporations do not like: such as Chávez, Morales, Correa. In other words, the USA has militarized its interactions with the region. Ominous signs indeed.

The international media conglomerates misrepresent and purposefully distort the events in Venezuela and the region, and it does not properly convey the sufferings of our Honduran people today. In Canada, it is noticeable that not one major media outlet has a permanent reporter in Latin America, hence Canadians mostly receive news and opinions filtered through the USA perspective.

Although the calamities of yesteryear that befell our America are past, the old greed is present today in the exclusion, assaults by mining companies, multinational agri-businesses, large estate owners, drug traffickers and the ever present threats of the USA and its lackeys. Imperialism and resource devouring unbridled capitalism is not to be underestimated.

But, in the name of the 100 million people who lost their lives and cultures in Latin America and the Caribbean, let us not talk about the "discovery' of America but its invasion. President Hugo Chávez has been the first president to rename Oct 12, calling it "The Day of Indigenous Resistance", and this year President Evo Morales has renamed Columbus Day, "The Day of Mourning". Let us not forget that we have forgotten what has happened in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, so that ethnic, ideological or cultural genocide may never be repeated on this Earth


However, there is a new dawn, a new cadre of leaders who follow the steps of Guaicaipuro, Tupac Amaru II, Tupac Catari, Simón Bolívar, José Martí, Bernardo O'Higgins. Today, Latin America is the most exciting, the most hope -filled area of our globe today. It has key leaders, not ashamed of their indigenous and African roots, who have made their people the true participants and protagonists of government. They are truly exercising their freedom to defend the land, to challenge the imperialism and unbridled global capitalism that is destroying our planet with ecocide.


We will prevail. Venceremos.



i
ii Fernando Baez, El saqueo cultural de América Latina, Random House, 2008
iii Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America, Monthly Review Press, 1973
iv F. Baez, El saqueo, 37; Bartolome de Las Casas, Brevisima Relacion de la Destruccion de Las Indias, 1552, Ediciones Presidencia de la Republica, Caracas, 2003, 45-6
v Memorias, La Revolucion Haitiana, Julio-Agosto, 2008, #4, 17
vi F. Baez, El saqueo, 39
vii Hugh Thomas, La conquista de Mexico, Barcelona, Planeta, 677
viii F. Baez, El saqueo, 25,26
ix F. Baez, El saqueo, 82
x F. Baez, El saqueo, 75
xi Bartolome de Las Casas, Brevisima Relacion de la Destruccion de Las Indias, 1552, Ediciones Presidencia de la Republica, Caracas, 2003, 91
xii E. Galeano, Open Veins, 22-27
xiii John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, W.W. Norton, 1963, 361-362
xiv F. Baez, El saqueo, 103
xv Memorias, Alborotos del Mulatismo, Julio-Agosto, 2008, #4, 28
xvi Frank Bonilla, The Failure of the Elites,
xvii M. Páez Victor, Mr. Danger and the Socialism for the New Millennium, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/4133, 29 March 2006




From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Thu Jan 28, 2010 12:24 am

Muscling Latin America

By Greg Grandin
The Nation
February 8, 2010


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100208/grandin


In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote "universal disarmament" and oppose the "imposition" of military bases of "some states in the territory of others." It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. "We'll renew the lease," he quipped, "if the US lets us set up a base in Miami."

Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we'll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified "facilities and locations." They add to Washington's already considerable military presence in Colombia, as well as in Central America and the Caribbean.

Responding to criticism from South America on the Colombian deal, the White House insists it merely formalizes existing military cooperation between the two countries under Plan Colombia and will not increase the offensive capabilities of the US Southern Command (Southcom). The Pentagon says otherwise, writing in its 2009 budget request that it needed funds to upgrade one of the bases to conduct "full spectrum operations throughout South America" to counter, among other threats, "anti-U.S. governments" and to "expand expeditionary warfare capability." That ominous language, since scrubbed from the budget document, might be a case of hyping the threat to justify spending during austere times. But the Obama administration's decision to go forward with the bases does accelerate a dangerous trend in US hemispheric policy.

In recent years, Washington has experienced a fast erosion of its influence in South America, driven by the rise of Brazil, the region's left turn, the growing influence of China and Venezuela's use of oil revenue to promote a multipolar diplomacy. Broad social movements have challenged efforts by US- and Canadian-based companies to expand extractive industries like mining, biofuels, petroleum and logging. Last year in Peru, massive indigenous protests forced the repeal of laws aimed at opening large swaths of the Amazon to foreign timber, mining and oil corporations, and throughout the region similar activism continues to place Latin America in the vanguard of the anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement.

Image

Such challenges to US authority have led the Council on Foreign Relations to pronounce the Monroe Doctrine "obsolete." But that doctrine, which for nearly two centuries has been used to justify intervention from Patagonia to the Rio Grande, has not expired so much as slimmed down, with Barack Obama's administration disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.

The anchor of this condensed Monroe Doctrine is Plan Colombia. Heading into the eleventh year of what was planned to phase out after five, Washington's multibillion-dollar military aid package has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States. More Andean coca was synthesized into cocaine in 2008 than in 1998, and the drug's retail price is significantly lower today, adjusted for inflation, than it was a decade ago.

But Plan Colombia is not really about drugs; it is the Latin American edition of GCOIN, or Global Counterinsurgency, the current term used by strategists to downplay the religious and ideological associations of George W. Bush's bungled "global war on terror" and focus on a more modest program of extending state rule over "lawless" or "ungoverned spaces," in GCOIN parlance.

Starting around 2006, with the occupation of Iraq going badly, Plan Colombia became the counterinsurgent marquee, celebrated by strategists as a successful application of the "clear, hold and build" sequence favored by theorists like Gen. David Petraeus. Its lessons have been incorporated into the curriculums of many US military colleges and cited by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a model for Afghanistan. Not only did the Colombian military, with support from Washington, weaken the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), Latin America's oldest and strongest insurgency, but according to the Council on Foreign Relations, it secured a state presence in "many regions previously controlled by illegal armed groups, reestablishing elected governments, building and rebuilding public infrastructure, and affirming the rule of law." Plan Colombia, in other words, offered not just a road map to success but success itself. "Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like," wrote Atlantic contributor Robert Kaplan, "in our best dreams."

Traditionally in most counterinsurgencies, the "clear" stage entails a plausibly deniable reliance on death-squad terror--think Operation Phoenix in Vietnam or the Mano Blanca in El Salvador. The Bush administration was in office by the time Plan Colombia became fully operational, and according to the Washington Post's Scott Wilson, it condoned the activities of right-wing paramilitaries, loosely organized as the United Self-Defense Forces, or AUC in Spanish. "The argument at the time, always made privately," Wilson writes, "was that the paramilitaries"--responsible for most of Colombia's political murders--"provided the force that the army did not yet have." This was followed by the "hold" phase, a massive paramilitary land grab. Fraud and force--"sell, or your widow will," goes many an opening bid--combined with indiscriminate fumigation, which poisoned farmlands, to turn millions of peasants into refugees. Paramilitaries, along with their narcotraficante allies, now control about 10 million acres, roughly half of the country's most fertile land.

After parts of the countryside had been pacified, it was time to "build" the state. Technically, the United States considers the AUC to be a terrorist organization, part of the narcoterrorist triptych, along with FARC and the narcos, that Southcom is pledged to fight. But Plan Colombia did not so much entail an assault on the paras--aside from the most recalcitrant and expendable--as create a venue through which, by defining public policy as perpetual war, they could become the state itself. Under the smokescreen of a government-brokered amnesty, condemned by national and international human rights groups for institutionalizing impunity, paras have taken control of hundreds of municipal governments, establishing what Colombian social scientist León Valencia calls "true local dictatorships," consolidating their property seizures and deepening their ties to narcos, landed elites and politicians. The country's sprawling intelligence apparatus is infiltrated by this death squad/narco combine, as is its judiciary and Congress, where more than forty deputies from the governing party are under investigation for ties to the AUC.

Plan Colombia, in other words, has financed the opposite of what is taking place in neighboring Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, where progressive movements are fitfully trying to "refound" their societies along more inclusive lines. In place of the left's "participatory democracy," Colombian President Álvaro Uribe offers "democratic security," a social compact whereby those who submit to the new order are promised safe, even yuppified cities and secure highways, while oppositional civil society suffers intimidation and murder. Colombia remains the hands-down worst repressor in Latin America. More than 500 trade unionists have been executed since Uribe took office. In recent years 195 teachers have been assassinated, and not one arrest has been made for the killings. And the military stands accused of murdering more than 2,000 civilians and then dressing their bodies in guerrilla uniforms in order to prove progress against the FARC.

It also seems that many right-wing warriors are not cut out for the quiet life offered by the Paz Uribista. The Bogotá-based think tank Nuevo Arco Iris reports mini civil wars breaking out among "heirs of the AUC" for control of local spoils. Yet Plan Colombia continues to be hailed. Flying home from a recent Bogotá-hosted GCOIN conference, the former head of Southcom wrote on his blog that Colombia is a "must see" tourist spot, having "come a long, long way in controlling a deep-seated insurgency just over two hours flight from Miami--and we could learn a great deal from their success."

Seen in light of his escalation in Afghanistan, Obama's support for the Colombian base deal endorses the kind of elastic threat assessment that has turned the "long war" against radical Islam into a wide war where ultimate victory will be a world absent of crime--"counterinsurgen-
cies without end," as Andrew Bacevich recently put it.

Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, Washington tried to conscript all of Latin America in the fight. In October 2003 it pushed the Organization of American States to include corruption, undocumented migration, money laundering, natural and man-made disasters, AIDS, environmental degradation, poverty and computer hacking alongside terrorism and drugs as security threats. In 2004 an Army War College strategist proposed "exporting Plan Colombia" to all of Latin America, which Donald Rumsfeld tried to do later that year at a regional defense ministers meeting in Ecuador. He was rebuffed; countries like Chile and Brazil refuse to subordinate their militaries, as they did during the cold war, to US command.

So the United States retrenched, setting about to fight the wide war in a narrower place, creating a security corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region's military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems. This is best thought of as an effort to enlarge the radius of Plan Colombia to create a unified, supra-national counterinsurgent infrastructure. Since there is "fusion" among Latin American terrorists and criminals, goes a typical argument in a recent issue of the Pentagon's Joint Force Quarterly, "countering the threat will require fusion on our part."

At the same time, schemes like the Mesoamerican Integration and Development Project are using World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank financing to synchronize the highway, communication and energy networks of Mexico, Central America and Colombia, blending the North American and Central American free-trade treaties and, eventually, the pending Colombian Free Trade Agreement into a seamless whole. Thomas Shannon, Bush's top envoy to Latin America and Obama's ambassador to Brazil, called these initiatives "armoring NAFTA."

"Fusion" is a good word for this integration, since the melding of neoliberal economics and counterinsurgent diplomacy is explosive. One effect of Plan Colombia has been to diversify the violence and corruption endemic to the cocaine trade, with Central American and Mexican cartels and military factions taking over export of the drug to the United States. This cycle of violence is reinforced by the rapid spread of mining, hydroelectric, biofuel and petroleum operations, which wreak havoc on local ecosystems, poisoning land and water, and by the opening of national markets to US agroindustry, which destroys local economies. The ensuing displacement either creates the assorted criminal threats the wide war is waged to counter or provokes protest, which is dealt with by the avengers the wide war empowers.

Throughout Latin America, a new generation of community activists continues to advance the global democracy movement that was largely derailed in the United States by 9/11. They provide important leadership to US environmental, indigenous, religious and human rights organizations, working to develop a comprehensive and sustainable social-justice agenda. But in the Mexico-Colombia corridor, activists are confronting what might be called bio-paramilitarism, a revival of the old anticommunist death-squad/planter alliance, energized by the current intensification of extractive and agricultural industries. In Colombia, Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities fighting paras who have seized land to cultivate African palm for ethanol production have been evicted by mercenaries and the military [see Teo Ballvé, "The Dark Side of Plan Colombia," June 15, 2009]. From Panama to Mexico, rural protesters are likewise targeted. In the Salvadoran department of Cabañas, for instance, death squads have executed four leaders--three in December--who opposed the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining Company's efforts to dig a gold mine in their community.

And in Honduras, human rights organizations say palm planters have recruited forty members of Colombia's AUC as private security following the June overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya. That coup was at least partly driven by Zelaya's alliance with liberation-theologian priests and other environmental activists protesting mining and biofuel-induced deforestation. Just a month before his overthrow, Zelaya--in response to an investigation that charged Goldcorp, another Vancouver-based company, with contaminating Honduras's Siria Valley--introduced a law that would have required community approval before new mining concessions were granted; it also banned open-pit mines and the use of cyanide and mercury. That legislation died with his ouster. Zelaya also tried to break the dependent relationship whereby the region exports oil to US refineries only to buy back gasoline and diesel at monopolistic prices; he joined Petrocaribe--the alliance that provides cheap Venezuelan oil to member countries--and signed a competitive contract with Conoco Phillips. This move earned him the ire of Exxon and Chevron, which dominate Central America's fuel market. Since the controversial November 29 presidential elections, Honduras has largely fallen off the media's radar, even as the pace of repression has accelerated. Since the State Department's recognition of that vote, about ten opposition leaders have been executed--roughly half of the number killed in the previous five months.

It didn't have to be this way. Latin America does not present a serious military danger. No country is trying to acquire a nuclear weapon or cut off access to vital resources. Venezuela continues to sell oil to the United States. Obama is popular in Latin America, and most governments, including those on the left, would have welcomed a demilitarized diplomacy that downplays terrorism and prioritizes reducing poverty and inequality--exactly the kind of "new multilateralism" Obama called for in his presidential campaign.

Yet because Latin America presents no real threat, there is no incentive to confront entrenched interests that oppose a modernization of hemispheric relations. "Obama," said a top-level Argentine diplomat despairingly, "has decided that Latin America isn't worth it. He gave it to the right."

The White House could have worked with the Organization of American States to restore democracy in Honduras. Instead, after months of mixed signals, Obama capitulated to Senate Republicans and endorsed a murderous regime. Washington could try to advance a new hemispheric economic policy, balancing Latin American calls for equity and development with corporate profits. But the Democratic Party remains Wall Street's party, and shortly after taking office Obama abandoned his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA. With Washington's blessing the IMF continues to push Latin American countries to liberalize their economies. In December Arturo Valenzuela, Obama's assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, caused a scandal in Argentina when he urged the country to return to the investment climate of 1996--which would be something like Buenos Aires calling on the United States to reinflate the recent Greenspan bubble.

The Obama administration could reconsider Plan Colombia and the Pentagon's base agreement. But that would mean rethinking a longer, multi-decade, bipartisan, trillion-dollars-and-counting "war on drugs," and Obama has other wars to extricate himself from--or not, as the case may be.

Unable or unwilling to make concessions on these and other issues important to Latin America--normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, or advancing immigration reform--the White House is adopting an increasingly antagonistic posture. Hillary Clinton, following a visit to Brazil by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, warned Latin Americans to "think twice" about "the consequences" of engagement with Iran. Bolivia denounced the comments as a threat, Brazil canceled a scheduled meeting between its foreign minister and Valenzuela, and even Argentina, no friend of Iran, grew irritated. As the Argentine diplomat quoted above told me, "The Obama administration would never talk to European countries like that."

Insiders report that high-level State Department officials are furious at Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who in recent months has been as steadfast as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez in opposing Washington's ongoing militarism, particularly the White House's attempt to legitimize the Honduran coup. Having successfully thwarted a similar destabilization campaign against Bolivian president Evo Morales in 2008, Brazil, according to Lula's top foreign-policy adviser, Marco Aurélio Garcia, is worried that Obama's Honduras policy is "introducing the 'theory of the preventive coup' in Latin America"--by which Garcia means an extension of Bush's preventive war doctrine.

In a region that has not seen a major interstate war for more than seventy years, Brazil is concerned that the Pentagon's Colombian base deal is escalating tensions between Colombia and Venezuela. The US media have focused on Chávez's warning that the "winds of war" were blowing through the region, but Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, places blame for the crisis squarely on Washington. Chávez, Amorim said, "had backed away from that statement. To talk about war--a word which should never be uttered--is one thing. Another is the practical and objective issues of the Colombian bases.... If Iran or Russia were to establish a base in Venezuela, that would also worry us."

There are also indications that the White House is hoping an upcoming round of presidential elections in South America will restore pliable governments. On a recent trip to Buenos Aires, for instance, Valenzuela met with a number of extreme right-wing politicians but not with moderate opposition leaders, drawing criticism from center-left President Cristina Fernández's government. In January a right-wing billionaire, Sebastián Piñera, was elected president of Chile. And if Lula's Workers Party loses Brazil's October presidential vote, as polls indicate is a possibility, the Andean left will be increasingly isolated, caught between the Colombia-Mexico security corridor to the north and administrations more willing to accommodate Washington's interests to the south. Twenty-first-century containment for twenty-first-century socialism. Fidel Castro, normally an optimist, has recently speculated that before Obama finishes his presidency, "there will be six to eight rightist governments in Latin America."

Until that happens, the United States is left with a rump Monroe Doctrine and an increasingly threatening stance toward a region it used to call its own.



About Greg Grandin
Greg Grandin teaches at New York University and is the author of Empire's Workshop and, most recently, of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, a 2009 National Book Award finalist.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby StarmanSkye » Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:07 pm

GREAT set of articles AD; Thanks!

The historical review of latin America's struggles for human and civil rights provides a crucial perspective to begin understanding the roots which make its homegrown socialism distinct from that of the European and Stalinist form. A reasonable person could be excused from thinking that now American 'free market' capitalism has shown it is a seriously flawed system that there would be a great public debate examining its flawed assumptions and reappraising the tenets of neoliberalism in light of how it has failed to produce its claimed social gains -- especially in light of how better-served Latin American nations have been under socialist models. But of course, it was never the intent or purpose of neoliberal capitalism to really benefit anyone besides Wall Street and City of London financial interests -- that seems to be a major elephant in the room western governments and media still stubbornly refuse to acknowledge.
Although I thought I was relatively well-informed about the circumstances and issues driving the oligarchy's coup against Zelaya. I didn't know, hadn't read (or don't remember) re: the significance of his alignment w/ liberation Theology, the environmental protests and pollution lawsuits and the Exxon/Chevron angle; Since the so-called election in November, I haven't really had the emotional fortitude to seek-out information about it or how the regime is forcing its will on the civil society that dared protest against the entrenched elites who had the favor of corporate special interests promoting their stake in the bounty of regional loot and booty up for grabs which as per the Washington Concensus it seems Obama is prepared to officially cede as STILL Standard Op Policy.

So taking their cue of what they know and believe from mainstream media and political/economic pundits, most of the US public cling to the dogma that ours is the very best of all systems, and as 'proof' that socialism has never worked. Despite facts to the contrary and the example of Yugoslavia which was sabotaged and dismantled precisely because it DID work very, very well -- and that the west has spent untold $ trillions destroying socialist governments and social justice movements lest they develop their own forms of democratic socialism, which could seriously discredit and embarrass the west.

--quote--
"That coup was at least partly driven by Zelaya's alliance with liberation-theologian priests and other environmental activists protesting mining and biofuel-induced deforestation. Just a month before his overthrow, Zelaya--in response to an investigation that charged Goldcorp, another Vancouver-based company, with contaminating Honduras's Siria Valley--introduced a law that would have required community approval before new mining concessions were granted; it also banned open-pit mines and the use of cyanide and mercury. That legislation died with his ouster. Zelaya also tried to break the dependent relationship whereby the region exports oil to US refineries only to buy back gasoline and diesel at monopolistic prices; he joined Petrocaribe--the alliance that provides cheap Venezuelan oil to member countries--and signed a competitive contract with Conoco Phillips. This move earned him the ire of Exxon and Chevron, which dominate Central America's fuel market."
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 01, 2010 9:17 am

The US game in Latin America

US interference in the politics of Haiti and Honduras is only the latest example of its long-term manipulations in Latin America

February 01, 2010

By Mark Weisbrot
Source: The Guardian




When I write about US foreign policy in places such as Haiti or Honduras, I often get responses from people who find it difficult to believe that the US government would care enough about these countries to try and control or topple their governments. These are small, poor countries with little in the way of resources or markets. Why should Washington policymakers care who runs them?

Unfortunately they do care. A lot. They care enough about Haiti to have overthrown the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide not once, but twice. The first time, in 1991, it was done covertly. We only found out after the fact that the people who led the coup were paid by the US Central Intelligence Agency. And then Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the most notorious death squad there - which killed thousands of Aristide's supporters after the coup - told CBS News that he, too, was funded by the CIA.

In 2004, the US involvement in the coup was much more open. Washington led a cut-off of almost all international aid for four years, making the government's collapse inevitable. As the New York Times reported, while the US state department was telling Aristide that he had to reach an agreement with the political opposition (funded with millions of US taxpayers' dollars), the International Republican Institute was telling the opposition not to settle.

In Honduras last summer and autumn, the US government did everything it could to prevent the rest of the hemisphere from mounting an effective political opposition to the coup government in Honduras. For example, they blocked the Organization of American States from taking the position that it would not recognize elections that took place under the dictatorship. At the same time, the Obama administration publicly pretended that it was against the coup.

This was only partly successful, from a public relations point of view. Most of the US public thinks that the Obama administration was against the Honduran coup, although by November of last year there were numerous press reports and even editorial criticisms that Obama had caved to Republican pressure and not done enough. But this was a misreading of what actually happened: the Republican pressure in support of the Honduran coup changed the administration's public relations strategy, but not its political strategy. Those who followed events closely from the beginning could see that the political strategy was to blunt and delay any efforts to restore the elected president, while pretending that a return to democracy was actually the goal.

Among those who understood this were the governments of Latin America, including such heavyweights as Brazil. This is important because it shows that the State Department was willing to pay a significant political cost in order to help the right in Honduras. It convinced the vast majority of Latin American governments that it was no different from the Bush administration in its goals for the hemisphere, which is not a pleasant outcome from a diplomatic point of view.

Why do they care so much about who runs these poor countries? As any good chess player knows, pawns matter. The loss of a couple of pawns at the beginning of the game can often make a difference between a win or a loss. They are looking at these countries mostly in straight power terms. Governments that are in agreement with maximising US power in the world, they like. Those who have other goals - not necessarily antagonistic to the United States - they don't like.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration's closest allies in the hemisphere are rightwing governments such as those of Colombia or Panama, even though Obama himself is not a rightwing politician. This highlights the continuity of the politics of control. The victory of the right in Chile, the first time that it has won an election in half a century, was a significant victory for the US government. If Lula de Silva's Workers' party were to lose the presidential election in Brazil this autumn, that would be another win for the state department. While US officials under both Bush and Obama have maintained a friendly posture toward Brazil, it is obvious that they deeply resent the changes in Brazilian foreign policy that have allied it with other social democratic governments in the hemisphere, and its independent foreign policy stances with regard to the Middle East, Iran, and elsewhere.

The US actually intervened in Brazilian politics as recently as 2005, organising a conference to promote a legal change that would make it more difficult for legislators to switch parties. This would have strengthened the opposition to Lula's Workers' party (PT) government, since the PT has party discipline but many opposition politicians do not. This intervention by the US government was only discovered last year through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in Washington. There are many other interventions taking place throughout the hemisphere that we do not know about. The United States has been heavily involved in Chilean politics since the 1960s, long before they organised the overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973.

In October 1970, President Richard Nixon was cursing in the Oval Office about the Social Democratic president of Chile, Salvador Allende. "That son of a bitch!" said Richard Nixon on 15 October. "That son of a bitch Allende - we're going to smash him." A few weeks later he explained why:

The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success ... If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble.


That is another reason that pawns matter, and Nixon's nightmare did in fact come true a quarter-century later, as one country after another elected independent left governments that Washington did not want. The United States ended up "losing" most of the region. But they are trying to get it back, one country at a time. The smaller, poorer countries that are closer to the United States are the most at risk. Honduras and Haiti will have democratic elections some day, but only when Washington's influence over their politics is further reduced.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23794
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 08, 2010 11:57 am

The US game in Latin America

US interference in the politics of Haiti and Honduras is only the latest example of its long-term manipulations in Latin America

Mark Weisbrot
guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 January 2010



When I write about US foreign policy in places such as Haiti or Honduras, I often get responses from people who find it difficult to believe that the US government would care enough about these countries to try and control or topple their governments. These are small, poor countries with little in the way of resources or markets. Why should Washington policymakers care who runs them?

Unfortunately they do care. A lot. They care enough about Haiti to have overthrown the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide not once, but twice. The first time, in 1991, it was done covertly. We only found out after the fact that the people who led the coup were paid by the US Central Intelligence Agency. And then Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the most notorious death squad there – which killed thousands of Aristide's supporters after the coup – told CBS News that he, too, was funded by the CIA.

In 2004, the US involvement in the coup was much more open. Washington led a cut-off of almost all international aid for four years, making the government's collapse inevitable. As the New York Times reported, while the US state department was telling Aristide that he had to reach an agreement with the political opposition (funded with millions of US taxpayers' dollars), the International Republican Institute was telling the opposition not to settle.

In Honduras last summer and autumn, the US government did everything it could to prevent the rest of the hemisphere from mounting an effective political opposition to the coup government in Honduras. For example, they blocked the Organisation of American States from taking the position that it would not recognise elections that took place under the dictatorship. At the same time, the Obama administration publicly pretended that it was against the coup.

This was only partly successful, from a public relations point of view. Most of the US public thinks that the Obama administration was against the Honduran coup, although by November of last year there were numerous press reports and even editorial criticisms that Obama had caved to Republican pressure and not done enough. But this was a misreading of what actually happened: the Republican pressure in support of the Honduran coup changed the administration's public relations strategy, but not its political strategy. Those who followed events closely from the beginning could see that the political strategy was to blunt and delay any efforts to restore the elected president, while pretending that a return to democracy was actually the goal.

Among those who understood this were the governments of Latin America, including such heavyweights as Brazil. This is important because it shows that the State Department was willing to pay a significant political cost in order to help the right in Honduras. It convinced the vast majority of Latin American governments that it was no different from the Bush administration in its goals for the hemisphere, which is not a pleasant outcome from a diplomatic point of view.

Why do they care so much about who runs these poor countries? As any good chess player knows, pawns matter. The loss of a couple of pawns at the beginning of the game can often make a difference between a win or a loss. They are looking at these countries mostly in straight power terms. Governments that are in agreement with maximising US power in the world, they like. Those who have other goals – not necessarily antagonistic to the United States – they don't like.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration's closest allies in the hemisphere are rightwing governments such as those of Colombia or Panama, even though Obama himself is not a rightwing politician. This highlights the continuity of the politics of control. The victory of the right in Chile, the first time that it has won an election in half a century, was a significant victory for the US government. If Lula de Silva's Workers' party were to lose the presidential election in Brazil this autumn, that would be another win for the state department. While US officials under both Bush and Obama have maintained a friendly posture toward Brazil, it is obvious that they deeply resent the changes in Brazilian foreign policy that have allied it with other social democratic governments in the hemisphere, and its independent foreign policy stances with regard to the Middle East, Iran, and elsewhere.

The US actually intervened in Brazilian politics as recently as 2005, organising a conference to promote a legal change that would make it more difficult for legislators to switch parties. This would have strengthened the opposition to Lula's Workers' party (PT) government, since the PT has party discipline but many opposition politicians do not. This intervention by the US government was only discovered last year through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in Washington. There are many other interventions taking place throughout the hemisphere that we do not know about. The United States has been heavily involved in Chilean politics since the 1960s, long before they organised the overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973.

In October 1970, President Richard Nixon was cursing in the Oval Office about the Social Democratic president of Chile, Salvador Allende. "That son of a bitch!" said Richard Nixon on 15 October. "That son of a bitch Allende – we're going to smash him." A few weeks later he explained why:

The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success ... If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble.
That is another reason that pawns matter, and Nixon's nightmare did in fact come true a quarter-century later, as one country after another elected independent left governments that Washington did not want. The United States ended up "losing" most of the region. But they are trying to get it back, one country at a time. The smaller, poorer countries that are closer to the United States are the most at risk. Honduras and Haiti will have democratic elections some day, but only when Washington's influence over their politics is further reduced.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby norton ash » Mon Feb 08, 2010 4:42 pm

Bump, to line-up the hemispheres on the spirit level. Great work, AD.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 14, 2010 3:12 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books ... din-t.html

February 14, 2010
Empire of Savagery in the Amazon

By GREG GRANDIN

THE DEVIL AND MR. CASEMENT
One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness
By Jordan Goodman
Illustrated. 322 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30



The 19th-century doctrine of progress held slavery and capitalism to be incompatible. Coercion, liberals believed, violated the ideals of natural rights and free labor. Wage work, Marxists thought, was more profitable than forced work, and that alone would doom slavery. Then in 1904, nearly four decades after Appomattox, Roger Casement, an Irish-born career diplomat in the British Foreign Office, wrote his Congo report, revealing that King Leopold of Belgium had enriched himself by presiding over a rubber trade founded on pure cruelty. “What has civilization itself been to them?” Casement asked of Leopold’s Congolese victims, 10 million of whom, by some estimates, had perished in but two decades. He himself had the answer: “A thing of horror.”

“The Devil and Mr. Casement,” by Jordan Goodman, the author of several works of history, reconstructs the Casement investigation in the Putumayo region of the Amazon rain forest that followed the Congo report. There, the Peruvian Julio César Arana ruled over a rubber empire of 10,000 square miles, and from 1910 to 1913, Casement exhausted himself trying to force the British government to take action against Arana and his London-incorporated Peruvian Amazon Company. He twice traveled to the Amazon, collecting evi dence of whipping, torture, mass rape, mutilation, executions and the hunting of the region’s Indians, whose population Casement calculated had fallen to 8,000 in 1911 from 50,000 in 1906.

Goodman’s book adds to Casement’s reputation as a pioneer of the human rights movement’s tactics, including the on-the-spot investigation, the gathering of victims’ testimony and the leveraging of public outrage to spur reform. Casement was one of the first to use the phrase “crime against humanity,” and he judged Arana to be guilty of “not merely slavery but extermination” — what later would be called genocide.

But Casement’s moral trajectory ran opposite to that of many modern human rights activists. France’s current foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, for example, dropped his youthful support for national liberation movements to embrace what some have criticized as “humanitarian imperialism.” Casement tried at first to use the services of a foreign office to ease suffering. Yet he veered off what he called the “high road to being a regular Imperialist jingo.” His time in Congo and the Amazon deepened his sense of anti colonial solidarity. “I was looking at this tragedy,” he said of Congolese slavery, “with the eyes of another race” — the Irish — “a people once hunted themselves.” Knighted in 1911 for his humanitarian work, he was hanged by the British five years later for conspiring with the Germans on behalf of Irish independence.

Casement’s execution is not the climax of Goodman’s story, because this book doesn’t have a climax. It tapers off without resolution. The British directors of Arana’s company are interrogated by members of Parliament. Reports are issued, sermons are preached, politicians are outraged. Arana appears before Parliament’s committee on the Putumayo, after which he boards a steamer back to Peru untouched. The reader is left to ponder the fate of his indigenous victims.

This is an apt ending to a fine and meticulous book, for a kind of slavery still remains in force in the Amazon. Thousands of workers, for instance, trapped in conditions nearly as dismal as those documented a century ago in the Putumayo, make the charcoal used to forge pig iron, which is then purchased by international corporations to produce the steel used in everyday products, including popular makes of cars.

Arana ultimately lost his company and died broke. Yet the devil continues to get the better of Mr. Casement.



Greg Grandin is the author, most recently, of “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.”
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Sat Mar 06, 2010 10:40 am

http://www.counterpunch.org/weisbrot03052010.html

March 5 - 7, 2010

A Damage Control Mission

Hillary in Latin America

By MARK WEISBROT



Hillary Clinton’s Latin America tour is turning out to be about as successful as George W. Bush’s visit in 2005, when he ended up leaving Argentina a day ahead of schedule just to get the hell out of town. The main difference is that she is not being greeted with protests and riots. For that she can thank the positive media image that her boss, President Obama, has managed to maintain in the region, despite his continuation of his predecessor’s policies.

But she has been even more diplomatically clumsy that Bush, who at least recognized that there were serious problems and knew what not to say. "The Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion," Clinton said in Buenos Aires, adding that “it was done without violence.”

This is rubbing salt into her hosts’ wounds, as they see the military overthrow of President Mel Zelaya last June, and the United States’ subsequent efforts to legitimize the dictatorship there, as not only a failure but a threat to democracy throughout the region.

It is also an outrageous thing to say, given the political killings, beatings, mass arrests and torture that the coup government used in order to maintain power and repress the pro-democracy movement. The worst part is that they are still committing these crimes.

Today nine members of the U.S. Congress – including some Democrats in Congressional leadership positions - wrote to Secretary Clinton and to the White House about this violence. They wrote:

“Since President Lobo's inauguration, several prominent opponents of the coup have been attacked. On February 3rd, Vanessa Zepeda, a nurse and union organizer who had previously received death threats linked to her activism in the resistance movement, was strangled and her body dumped from a vehicle in Tegucigalpa. On February 15th, Julio Funes Benitez, a member of the SITRASANAA trade union and an active member of the national resistance movement, was shot and killed by unknown gunmen on a motorcycle outside his home. Most recently, Claudia Brizuela, an opposition activist, was murdered in her home on February 24th. Unfortunately these are only three of the numerous attacks against activists and their families ...”

Secretary Clinton will meet Friday with “Pepe” Lobo of Honduras, who was elected president after a campaign marked by media shutdowns and police repression of dissent. The Organization of American States and European Union refused to send official observers to the election.

The Members of Congress also asked that Clinton, in her meeting with Lobo, “send a strong unambiguous message that the human rights situation in Honduras will be a critical component of upcoming decisions regarding the further normalizations of relations, as well as the resumption of financial assistance.”

This was the third letter that Clinton received from Congress on human rights in Honduras. On Aug. 7 and Sept. 25, Members of Congress from Hillary Clinton’s own Democratic Party wrote to her to complain of the ongoing human rights abuses in Honduras and impossibility of holding free elections under these conditions. They did not even get a perfunctory reply until Jan. 28, more than four months after the second letter was sent. This is an unusual level of disrespect for the elected representatives of one’s own political party.

For these New Cold Warriors, it seems that all that has mattered is that they got rid of one social democratic president of one small, poor country.

In Brazil, Clinton continued her Cold War strategy by throwing in some gratuitous insults toward Venezuela. This is a bit like going to a party and telling the host how much you don’t like his friends. After ritual denunciations of Venezuela, Clinton said, "We wish Venezuela were looking more to its south and looking at Brazil and looking at Chile and other models of a successful country."

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim responded with diplomacy, but there was no mistaking his strong rebuff to her insults: He said that he agreed with “one point” that Clinton made, “that Venezuela should look southwards more ... that is why we have invited Venezuela to join MERCOSUR as a full member country." Ms. Clinton’s right wing allies in Paraguay’s legislature – the remnants of that country’s dictatorship and 60 years of one-party rule – are currently holding up Venezuela’s membership in the South American trade block. This is not what she wanted to hear from Brazil.

The Brazilians also rejected Clinton’s rather undiplomatic efforts to pressure them to join Washington in calling for new sanctions against Iran. "It is not prudent to push Iran against a wall," said Brazilian president Lula da Silva. "The prudent thing is to establish negotiations."

"We will not simply bow down to an evolving consensus if we do not agree," Amorim said at a press conference with Clinton.

Secretary Clinton made one concession to Argentina, calling for the U.K. to sit down with the Argentine government and discuss their dispute over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands. But it seems unlikely that Washington will do anything to make this happen.

For now, the next crucial test will be Honduras: Will Clinton continue Washington’s efforts to whitewash the Honduran government’s repression? Or will she listen to the rest of the hemisphere as well as her own Democratic Members of Congress and insist on some concessions regarding human rights, including the return of Mel Zelaya to his country (as the Brazilians also emphasized)? This story may not get much U.S. media attention, but Latin America will be watching.


Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This article was originally published by The Guardian.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 06, 2010 10:34 am

http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach04062010.html

April 6, 2010

Bolivia's Path to Socialism

Evo's Way

By ROGER BURBACH



When Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, was sworn in to a second term in January, he proclaimed Bolivia a plurinational state that would construct “communitarian socialism.” In an accompanying address, Vice President Álvaro Garcia Linare, envisioned a “socialist horizon” for Bolivia, characterized by “well-being, making the wealth communal, drawing on our heritage . . .” The process “will not be easy, it could take decades, even centuries, but it is clear that the social movements cannot achieve true power without implanting a socialist and communitarian horizon.”[1]

During the past decade Latin America has become a scene of hope and expectations as its leaders and social movements have raised the banner of 21st century socialism in a world ravished by imperial adventures and economic disasters. Proponents of the new socialism assert that it will break with the state-centered socialism of the last century, and will be driven by grassroots social movements that construct an alternative order from the bottom up. There is also widespread concurrence that the process will take a unique path in each country, that there is no singular model or grand strategy to pursue.

The new socialism has been characterized by a much slower and transitory process than the revolutionary socialism of the past century, which was based on the overthrow of the old regime, with a vanguard party seizing control of the state and moving quickly to transform the economy. A different scenario is occurring in Latin America where new governments take control politically, with the previous economic system largely intact. In Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where the socialist discourse is the most advanced, constituent assemblies were convened to draft new constitutions that restructured the political system and established broad social rights. The process and pace of transforming their economies has become the task of the political and social forces acting through the new legislative assemblies and the “refounded states.”

In Bolivia, the struggle for a constitutional assembly and a new constitution was particularly strife-ridden with the oligarchy, centered in the resource-rich lowland departments, engaging in an outright rebellion with the tactical backing of the US embassy. Little was heard of socialism in this period, in spite of the name of Morales’ political party, Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).

Now, with the consolidation of the new political system and the plurinational state, socialism has been placed on the agenda. In a number of public addresses and interviews, Vice President Garcia Linare and Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca have articulated what they envision as the Bolivian road to socialism.

The vice-president--a member of an armed guerilla movement in the early 1990’s who was captured and imprisoned for four years--now asserts that “in Bolivia we are working and betting on the democratic path to socialism. It is possible …because socialism is fundamentally a radical democracy.” He goes on to add: “The constitution provides the architecture for a state constructed by society and it defines a long path in which we participate in a process of constructing a new society, pacifically and democratically.”[2]

Noting the uniqueness of the Bolivian process, the vice president states: “Bolivia is inserted in planetary capitalism, but it is different from other societies…community structures have survived, in the countryside, in the high lands, the low lands, and in some parts of the cities and the barrios that have resisted capitalist subjugation.” He adds, “This is different from American and European capitalism, and it gives us an advantage.”[3]

David Choquehuanca in an interview elaborated on the communal roots that facilitate the construction of socialism: “We have always governed ourselves in our communities. This is why we maintain our customs, perform our own music, speak our own Aymaran language, in spite of a 500-year effort to erase these things – our music, our language and our culture. In a state of clandestinity, we have upheld our values, economic forms, our own types of communitarian organization, which are all being reappraised now. This is why we are incorporating into socialism something that has resisted for 500 years - the communitarian element. We want to build our own socialism.” He added: “In the communities, we always had our ulacas (assemblies), where debates took place. Those political spaces are being recovered. I don’t know if this can be called ‘the seeds of a people’s government’. What existed, what exists, is being reappraised, is beginning to be valued and developed. These are the times we’re in.”

Choquehuanca also described the contemporary communities and the unions that exist both in and outside of them: “We organize ourselves in the communities. In Bolivia there must be around ten thousand communities, and in each community there is a union of campesino workers. Each union has a base which is associated first on a provincial level, and then on a departmental and national level. The national level is the Confederacion Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB). They’re not naturally existing organizations, but organizations that helped allow us to table our demands and participate in elections. There are various organized sectors with similar structures, such as the teachers, the miners, the indigenous groups, women, factory workers. And we have a mother organization which is the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). These are the people’s organizations. President Evo Morales has called for strengthening them, since they are the agents driving this process of change.”[4]

Some are skeptical of Morales’ commitment to socialism. Jim Petras, a Marxist scholar who has written on Latin American politics for half a century, asserts that Morales gives a “high priority…to orthodox capitalist growth over and above any concern with developing an alternative development pole built around peasants and landless rural workers.” This he says has led to “the increased size and scope of foreign owned multinational corporate extractive capital investments.”[5]

Others from an ecological perspective like Marco Ribera Arismendi proclaim: "We´ve changed the discourse, but not the model.” A member of the Environment Defense League, one of Bolivia´s largest environment organizations, Ribera adds, "We had great hopes in this government to solve or make a change on these issues," but it has instead followed an extractive industry model that is driven by transnational capital.[6]

While it is true that Morales has not launched a full assault on capital, his government along with the other New Left governments in Latin America have ended the neo-liberal era in which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed free market policies, severely curtailing social spending, and enabling transnational corporations to gain unprecedented control of the region’s nonrenewable resources. Now many of these governments are using the state to exert greater control of the economy and are renegotiating the terms of investment in order to capture a greater portion of the revenue for social programs and to facilitate internal development and industrialization.

Morales, soon after taking office in 2006, moved against the foreign-owned natural gas and petroleum companies to take 50% of the revenues, and to make the state-owned petroleum company the administrator and, in some cases, a co-investor. Similar deals have been made with transnational capital in the iron-mining sector, and the government is in the process of negotiating state-dominated agreements for the exploitation of Bolivia’s huge lithium deposits.

Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, who previously served as the representative on trade and economic integration issues, summed up the government’s policy: “We need foreign investment. The issue is the rules under which we are going to allow this foreign investment—how much they are going to leave for the country, how much they are going to have as profit, who is going to own it, the transfer of technology, the transformation of raw materials inside the country. Those are the key issues that Bolivia has synthesized into the words ‘When it comes to foreign investment, we don’t want bosses; we want partners.’ If they can accept that rule, they are welcome. We will no longer accept the relations that we had before.”[7]

The process of transforming Bolivia’s social and economic institutions will be the task of the legislative branch, which will be drafting over 100 bills to implement the provisions of the country’s new plurinational constitution. Of central importance is the empowerment of the indigenous communities and granting them the economic resources to construct communitarian socialism.

The existing agrarian reform law will be revisited. According to Victor Camacho, the Vice-Minister of Land Issues, “we are going to re-territorialize the indigenous communities,” recognizing that the ancestral communal lands have been seized from the indigenous peoples since the conquest.[8]While advancing at a rhythm that reflects the country’s particular correlation of social and political forces, the Bolivian experiment is contributing to the advance of socialism on a global level. As Vice President Garcia Linares declares: “The society we have today in the world is a society with too many injustices, too much inequality…We have the seeds of communitarian socialism, badly treated, partially dried up, but if we nourish this seed in Bolivia a powerful trunk will grow with fruit for our country and the world.”

For Evo Morales, the necessity for socialism is global and urgent, given the state of the planet. “If capitalism produces crises in the financial system, in energy, in food, in the environment, in climatic change, then what good is this capitalism that brings us so many crises? … What is the solution? I am convinced that it is socialism, for some socialism of the 21st century, for others communitarian socialism.”[9]



Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Pinochet Affair.

Notes

[1] Garcia Linare: Bolivia deja el Estado aparente e impulsa el Estado Socialista, Arzobispado de La Paz, 22 de Enero, 2010, http://www.arzobispadolapaz.org/noticias/Nacional

[2] Garcia Linare Plantea Socialismo Comunitario Contra el Capitalismo, Jornadanet.com, 8 de Febrero, 2010, http://www.jornadanet.com/n.php?a=43340-1

[3] Bolivia Vira al Socialismo Comunitario y Comienza a Sepultar el Capitalismo, Cambio, Periodico del Estado Plurinacional Boliviano, 8 de Febrero, 2010, http://www.cambio.bo/noticia.php?fecha= ... &idn=14526

[4] Bolivian Foreign Minister: Communitarian Socialism Will Refound Bolivia, Bolivia Rising, http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2009/ ... arian.html

[5] James Petras, Latin America’s Twenty First Century Socialism in Historical Perspective, The James Petras Website, http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php? ... more=1&c=1

[6] Juan Nicastro, Environment Continues to Suffer, Latinamerica Press, Febr. 11, 2010, http://lapress.org/articles.asp?art=6061

[7] Jason Tockman, Bolivia’s New Political Space: An Interview with Ambassador Pablo Solon, NACLA News, Views and Analysis, March 15, 2010, https://nacla.org/node/6473

[8] Victor Camacho, Vamos a Reterritorializar las Comunidades Indigenas, La Prensa, 16 de Febrero, 2010, http://www.laprensa.com.bo/noticias/16- ... _nego2.php

[9] Evo Morales Defiende al Socialismo como la Solucion al Capitalismo y sus Crisis, EcoDiario, http://ecodiario.eleconomista.es/politi ... risis.html
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 13, 2011 2:13 pm

Building a Perfect Machine of Perpetual War

The Mexico-to-Colombia Security Corridor Advances

February 13, 2011

By Greg Grandin
Source: The Nation


Last January, I wrote an essay for The Nation on Washington’s integration of Mexico, Central America and Colombia into a “security corridor.” I called it a “rump Monroe Doctrine,” an explosive mix of militarism and neoliberal economics. Militarily, assorted bilateral and regional treaties are fusing the region’s military, intelligence and judicial systems into a unified, supra-national counterinsurgent infrastructure. Economically, there’s been an intensification of socially and environmentally disruptive resource extraction—mines, biofuels plantations, hydroelectric dams; tying it all together are loans and other funding from the World Bank, the IMF, the UN and the Inter-American Development Bank, capitalizing projects aimed to synchronize the region’s highway, communication and energy networks, blending the North American and Central American free-trade treaties and, eventually, the pending Colombian Free Trade Agreement into a seamless whole.

In other words, as the rest of South America pulls out of the US orbit (which I would argue ranks as a world historical event as consequential as the fall of the Berlin Wall, though less noticed since it has taken place over a decade rather than all on one night), Washington is retrenching in what's left of its backyard. Today in the New York Times, Geoffrey Wheatcroft has an interesting opinion piece that reads events in Egypt as part of a broader recession of US power in the world. Certainly another sign of this recession is this retrenchment running from Mexico through Colombia: unable to secure its interests and project its power in all of Latin America through a mix of hard and soft power, Washington has, by default if not conscious design, returned to some premodern “secure the flank” conception of security. Washington is building a moat around a besieged fortress America.

In the year since I wrote that essay, a number of events have taken place that has advanced the construction of this security corridor. These include: a new proposal for a “Plan Central America,” that would bolt together Plan Mexico and Plan Colombia, creating “synergies,” as a US official called it; a program by which Colombia trains Mexican policy to fight gangs, instruction that may soon be extended to Central American countries; a deepening commitment to the El Salvador–based and Washington-funded International Law Enforcement Academy, which critics have described as a new School of the Americas; the use of airbases in Panama and (post-coup) Honduras to launch US drones; and the construction of even more US military bases. To get a graphic image of this “security corridor,” check out thismap created by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where Central America seems to have been turned into one big landing strip.

Josh Frens-String’s excellent blog, Hemispheric Brief, which daily gathers and crisply analyzes news concerning Latin America, has a number of posts on the topic. Another great source of news and analysis is the North American Congress on Latin America, along with the Americas Program, particularly Laura Carlsen’s essays and blog posts.

The origin of this security corridor is Plan Colombia—Bill Clinton’s multibillion-dollar aid program to one of the worst human-rights violators in the world. The main effect of Plan Colombia has been to diversify the violence and corruption endemic to the cocaine trade, with Central American and Mexican cartels and military factions taking over export of the drug to the United States. This, along with the economic disruptions caused by NAFTA and the CAFTA, kicked off the cycle of criminal and gang violence that today engulfs the region. This violence, in turn, has been accelerated by the rapid spread of mining, hydroelectric, biofuel and petroleum operations, which wreak havoc on local ecosystems, poisoning land and water, and by the opening of national markets to US agroindustry, which destroys local economies. The ensuing displacement either creates assorted criminal threats that justify harsher counterinsurgent measures, or provokes protest, which is dealt with by new-style death squads.

As during the cold war, the uniting of regional security and intelligence forces under the banner of a broader, international crusade creates the “hostile environment” in which death squads florish. But in a way, today's death squads have gone legit: they are now called “private security companies,” some of them staffed with ex-Colombian paramilitaries. The Canadian group Rights Action has documented a clear pattern of increased repression throughout the region, much of it linked to biofuels production and mining, which includes a rise in death-squad killing of peasants in Honduras.

It’s best to think of the Mexico-to-Colombia “security corridor” as less a defense initiative than a blueprint of how to build a perfect machine of perpetual war.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/building ... eg-grandin
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Tue Mar 22, 2011 9:37 am

http://www.counterpunch.org/early03182011.html

March 18 - 20, 2011

Resistance and Repression

Why I Won't be Hailing the Chief in El Salvador

By ALEXANDRA EARLY

San Salvador.


President Obama’s visit to El Salvador this week has become a focal point for protest organizing by Central American social movement organizations and their North American allies, who are equally outraged about U.S. trade policy and military meddling in the region.Local environmental and community organizations have joined together with allies like U.S. - El Salvador Sister Cities and CISPES to help mobilize students and workers for rallies in the U.S. and El Salvador on Tuesday, March 22, when Obama arrives for a meeting with Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, whose election two years ago ended decades of right-wing rule.

Despite the initial jubilation at both Obama’s and Funes’s electoral victories, both the Salvadoran left and members of the international solidarity community are deeply disappointed and frustrated with Obama’s stance toward Central America. The purpose of Obama´s visit is supposedly to support the eradication of poverty, violence and government corruption. Yet, the president’s own administration is perpetuating these problems (and their natural result, immigration) by following in the footprints of Bill Clinton, both George Bushes, and even Ronald Reagan, who spent billions of dollars wreaking human rights havoc in El Salvador and its neighbors.

Current U.S. policy on Central America reflects more continuity than change, particularly with regard to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the 2009 military coup in Honduras that forced then-president Manual (“Mel”) Zelaya out of office and into exile.

It has been six years since the passage of CAFTA. As predicted by its critics, free trade has not reduced economic inequality or created many new jobs. Exports from El Salvador and foreign investment in the country have both decreased; meanwhile, the price of goods has dramatically increased while the number of small businesses able to sell products to the U.S. has not.

Thanks to CAFTA, which supersedes national law, North American mining companies are now suing El Salvador for $100 million because the government has thwarted an environmentally dangerous resource extraction scheme approved by previous governments.

Next door in Honduras, President Obama initially opposed the army’s overthrow of Zelaya as a threat to democracy throughout the region. But now his administration has become the leading ally and cheerleader for Zelaya’s conservative successor, de-facto President Porfirio Lobo. Hillary Clinton’s State Department is campaigning for re-admission of Honduras to the Organization of American States, which strongly condemned the ouster of Zelaya.

Since the military coup 21 months ago, and Lobo’s tainted election in November, 2009, the U.S. has built two new military bases in Honduras and increased its training of local police. Meanwhile, nearly all sectors of Honduran society—union organizers, farmers and teachers, women and young people, gays, journalists, political activists,—have faced violent repression under Lobo’s corrupt regime. With its worsening record of murders, disappearances and rabid resistance to land reform, Honduras is beginning to look more and more like El Salvador before it slipped into full-scale civil warfare three decades ago, with the U.S. backing the wrong side then and now.

In January, I witnessed first-hand what life is like under the “golpistas” of Honduras as part of a fact-finding delegation led by the Honduras Accompaniment Project. We spent a week in the Honduran capitol and countryside interviewing multiple victims of recent political threats, beatings, jailings, and kidnappings. Human rights groups estimate that more than 4,000 serious human rights violations and sixty-four political assassinations have occurred in Honduras since the coup. Many organizers have been forced to leave the country as the threats against themselves and their families increase.

Young people are now a frequent target of death threats and actual violence, often from police or resurgent of death squads seemingly bent on “social cleansing.” Like El Salvador, Honduras has very strong “anti-gang” legislation that enables cops to arrest youth who gather in groups or on the basis of their appearance. Since the coup, it’s not just suspicious tattoos that draw police attention. Police drag-nets now target anyone wearing t-shirts or hats with anti-government messages, not to mention the threatening visages of Che or Chavez. As youth organizer Victor Alejandro explained, “many Honduran youth woke up politically when the coup began, when they were beaten up or arrested by the police at a march or just for walking down the street. And now they are one of the driving forces behind the resistance, and as a result they are one of the main targets of state repression.”

As always in Central America, organized campesinos are a target of repression. During our stay, we visited Zacate Grande, a sparsely populated peninsula in the Gulf of Fonseca where small tenant farmers and fisherman are fighting eviction by rich businessmen who want to build luxury hotels and summer homes on their land. One source of hope and optimism for Hondurans like these was Decree 18-2008, the land reform measure enacted under President Zelaya. It created a mechanism for the expropriation of unused private lands for subsistence farming and a way for the poor to gain title to land they had worked for years. Not surprisingly, in January, the Supreme Court of Honduras ruled that Zelaya’s land reform decree was unconstitutional.

This, combined with the rampant corruption of local authorities since the coup, means that campesinos in places like Zacate Grande and the embattled Bajo Aguan region in Northern Honduras are in a constant fight for their lives and land.

Because they are part of the opposition to Lobo’s regime, public school teachers have come under similar attack. We saw an example of their repression during our stay in Honduras. On January 25, four teachers were arrested after a peaceful protest march in the capital. During their detention, our delegation got a call from a teachers’ union leader requesting that we check on the safety of his members. When three of us neared the jail where they were being held we encountered a line of riot police with night sticks blocking the street. After cell phone negotiations with the police commander in charge, we were finally admitted to the police station and allowed to talk to the detainees in a waiting area. Although none of the teachers had been beaten or otherwise badly treated, they were all clearly frightened. They were released later that same afternoon, but only on the condition that they refrain from participating in further protests.

Two days later, we joined another peaceful and massively attended demonstration in Tegucigalpa held on the first anniversary of Lobo’s inauguration. The turn-out reflected a resistance movement that draws from diverse sectors of society and whose goals go far beyond ending the exile of Manual Zelaya. There were young people spray-painting the walls with slogans against U.S. military intervention, teachers shielding themselves from the sun under multi-colored umbrellas, and embattled gay activists waiving rainbow flags. Some people were holding banners and signs with the message “Urge Mel!” (“We need Mel!”), but they were no more prominent in the crowd than those demanding democracy and human rights.

This is not reflected in mainstream media coverage in the U.S., which makes Honduras seem like just another case of caudillo politics, with the population blindly following one populist leader after another. In typical fashion, the Washington Post described the January 27 marches in the capital and two other cities simply as “protests by supporters of ousted former leader Manuel Zelaya.” As one gay activist explained, however, “Zelaya is part of the movement, but the movement transcends Zelaya. He gave people hope and started a process, but it is our goal to continue and finish that process, the process of re-founding Honduras.”

That’s why we’re greeting Obama on Tuesday with the message that his regional track record so far includes little change that Central Americans can believe in. Salvadorans still labor under the burden of CAFTA and its costly barrage of big business litigation aimed at punishing even the smallest exercises of national sovereignty. Meanwhile, Hondurans are experiencing a rapid U.S.-assisted return to the past, in the form of a country that is poor, militarized, and terrorized--the same set of conditions that so many Central Americans have long struggled to escape.



Alexandra Early is a 2007 graduate of Wesleyan University. A former union staffer in California, she now works for U.S.- El Salvador Sister Cities, an organization that promotes cross-border solidarity between communities in North and Central America. She can be reached at earlyave@gmail.com
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Mon May 16, 2011 4:25 pm

http://www.social-ecology.org/2011/05/n ... ce-part-1/

North & South, Ecology and Justice, Part 1

May 16, 2011
by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero (First of 3 parts)


The movements for ecology and justice face a particular set of opportunities and perils at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. Those who seek to transform North-South relations to advance sustainability and the eradication of poverty and hunger would do good to re-examine and take a fresh new look at the ideas and concepts espoused by what we could call Third World militancy during the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s. The goal of this “third world movement”, so to speak, was to engage rich and poor countries in a North-South dialogue that would lead to a new order based on multilateralism and genuine international cooperation. This endeavor must be not only resumed but also modernized and updated to take account of new global realities, like climate change, peak oil, the food crisis, the global economic debacle, and human disasters of untold proportions like the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear emergency.

It is difficult to come up with one single name for this project, since it originated from a constellation of ideas and concepts formulated not by one single person or organization, but by a number of progressive intellectuals from all over the Third World during the post-war years.

In the years following the end of World War Two and the founding of the United Nations, new independent states were carved out of the remains of the European colonial empires in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the non-Hispanic Caribbean. These were joined by already independent former colonies to form what is known as the Third World, the global South, or underdeveloped or developing countries. These terms require clarification.

Leaders like Indonesia’s president Sukarno popularized the idea that their countries were part of neither the capitalist Western world, led by the United States, nor the socialist Eastern block, under the leadership of the USSR, but rather constituted a Third World, with concerns, aspirations and an identity all of its own. The term Third World was therefore used with pride. In the geopolitical vision of this Third World-ism, or “tercermundismo”, the main political and economic divide in the world was not East-West but North-South, thus distinguishing the poor South from the rich, industrialized North- the former colonial subject from the former colonizer.

On the other hand, the terms underdeveloped and developing country originated in the United States foreign policy elite, and can be traced as far back as US president Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural speech. He called attention to conditions in poor countries, referring to them as “underdeveloped”. Truman thus presented a new world view, in which all the nations of the world were moving along the same track, in the same direction. The Northern countries, in particular the United States, were way ahead, while he saw the rest of the world lagging behind. According to German eco-philosopher Wolfgang Sachs, “Development meant nothing less than projecting the American model of society unto the rest of the world… The leaders of the newly founded nations- from Nehru to Nkrumah, Nasser to Sukarno- accepted the image that the North had of the South, and internalized it as their self-image.”

In spite of having obtained political independence, the countries of the South remained mired in poverty and economic backwardness. In response to this challenge, progressive intellectuals from the South, mostly economists, like Argentina’s Raúl Prebisch and Brazil’s Celso Furtado, began to develop a number of theories to explain this situation and to devise strategies to change it. According to their findings, the North employed a variety of economic and trade mechanisms to keep the South in a permanent state of political and economic subordination, among these: external debt, protectionism and deterioration in the terms of trade. These thinkers formulated novel concepts like structuralist economics, developmentalist thinking and dependency theory; they rejected free market doctrines like comparative advantage and the international division of labor, and in their stead presented proposals such as import substitution and an increase in South-South trade and cooperation.

But most importantly, they proposed compelling the countries of the North to engage in a North-South dialogue that would lead to debt reduction, an end to protectionist measures, stabilization of commodity prices, improved terms of trade, and an increase in economic assistance for development, among other goals. Such a dialogue would beget a mutually beneficial New International Economic Order.

These ideas were welcomed and taken up by leading Third World heads of state such as Sukarno, India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Tanzania’s Nyerere, Cuba’s Castro and Chile’s Allende, and would form part of the work program of new international institutions like the Group of 77, the Non-Aligned Movement, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. This vision of solidarity and cooperation reached its highest point in 1974 when the UN General Assembly endorsed the call for a New International Economic Order.

But this vision had its adversaries, and they would eventually gain the upper hand. In her book “The Shock Doctrine”, author Naomi Klein traces a global economic counterrevolution of sorts to the bloody coups that took place in South America’s southern cone in the first half of the 1970′s. The government of Salvador Allende in Chile was very progressive not just in its domestic policies but also internationally, for example spearheading the creation of a UN Center on Transnational Corporations, which investigated the activities of major corporations, especially with regard to corruption. The bloody 1973 coup that overthrew Allende and led to the Pinochet military dictatorship was followed by similar coups in nearby Argentina and Uruguay.

Their repression helped eliminate any potential opposition to the harsh economic measures championed by professor Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago pupils (a feat which earned Mr. Friedman his economics Nobel Prize). The following decade saw the belligerent domestic and foreign policies of Reagan and Thatcher, both leaders being decidedly unfriendly toward concepts of economic justice and international cooperation. The Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund) used their power to put Third World economies in receivership through debt and what was euphemistically called structural adjustment. The 1990′s were the heyday of the ideology of neoliberalism, which espoused values diametrically opposed to those of sustainability and solidarity. Free trade agreements and new global institutions like the World Trade Organization made the tenets of neoliberalism into law, both domestically and internationally.

But at the turn of the century the pendulum began swinging in the opposite direction. Latin Americans rid themselves of neoliberal governments either by elections (Venezuela, Brasil and Uruguay) or revolutions (Bolivia and Ecuador). The clearest indication that neoliberalism was no longer supreme was when activists and social movements from all over the Western hemisphere, together with the governments of Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina, defeated US president George W. Bush’s plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Since then, the new Latin American “progresismo” has made electoral gains in almost all Latin American countries (For example in Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador), and the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA) beckons as an alternative to trade blocks dominated by the US or the European Union. At the global level, the BRIC- Brazil-Russia-India-China-, recently expanded to include South Africa- can potentially tip the balance of power away from its traditional centers in the US and Europe.

With neoliberalism on a down slope and a new era of South-South cooperation dawning, this is the most favorable historical moment in decades to retake the endeavor of Third World militance and solidarity. As said at the beginning of this article, it needs to be upgraded in light of current global realities, especially environmental ones. The world view espoused by the original developmentalist thinkers and Third World leaders was totally devoid of any ecological sensibility.

In fact, their vision of development and prosperity was a total disaster from the environmental standpoint. They wanted- and for the most part got- for their countries mega-hydro dams, nuclear power stations, super highways, petrochemical complexes, oil refineries, pesticide-intensive monoculture-based industrialized “Green Revolution” agriculture, and resource extraction on an unprecedented scale. There was no questioning as to whether this type of development, which held the United States as the unquestionable model to follow, was the right path.

But throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century, a series of unnatural disasters made it clear that environmental destruction was a serious matter that should be taken into account by all those concerned with issues of development and economic justice, to name only a few: Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, and the increasingly evident harms from “Green Revolution” agriculture.

A key event in the gradually growing awareness of the concept of sustainability was the publication in 1987 of the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Also known as the Brundtland Commission, this group was created by the United Nations to assess global environmental problems and formulate a working definition of sustainable development. The Commission’s report, titled “Our Common Future”, called for a United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) which would bring heads of state together to develop an action plan to implement sustainable development worldwide.

UNCED, known also as the Earth Summit or Rio 92, took place in Brazil in 1992. It was the largest meeting of heads of state in history, and quite possibly the most important event in the history of the UN. In spite of the important international treaties that were signed there to address issues like climate change and biodiversity loss, a number of observers question whether anything at all was achieved at the conference. According to Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger: “Neither Northern consumption, nor global economic reform, nor the role of transnational corporations, nor nuclear energy, nor the dangers of biotechnology were addressed in Rio, not to mention the fact that the military was totally left off the agenda. Instead, free trade and its promoters came to be seen as the solution to the global ecological crisis.”

If the Earth Summit achieved only one thing it was the ending of innocence. After the conference, no head of state, political figure or public personality in the world would ever be able to allege ignorance about the environment or sustainable development.
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