STWR - Share The World's Resources

8th March 07 - Richard Gott, Guardian (UK)

It's an ill wind ... and the Iraq war has certainly done wonders for Latin America. An area traditionally under the United States' lock and key has been allowed to escape from its customary captor. Bogged down in the Middle East, militarily, intellectually and in almost all spheres of government, the US has had little time to spare for the region so often perceived as its "backyard". Now, only for the second time since he was originally elected in 2000, President Bush is to dedicate a week to travelling through five countries in South America to see what can be done to catch hold of those that still remain in the US camp.

A significant number of governments are now in thrall to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and popular movements elsewhere have been caught up in the chavista enthusiasm. Bush's allies are few and far between. The "Bolivarian Revolution" devised by Chávez enjoys the kind of support throughout the continent that was once accorded to Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba in the 1960s.

In those days, President Kennedy devised a two-pronged attack on the problem. Against Castro he used the CIA to try to destroy the regime, and when that proved unsuccessful at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, he asked the state department to seek its diplomatic isolation from the mainland. Dutifully, and well-bribed, the countries of Latin America, with the honourable exception of Mexico, broke off relations with the leper island. At the same time, Kennedy launched an ambitious project of reform and economic assistance, called the Alliance for Progress, which sought to undermine the Cuban revolution with a comparably revolutionary programme. Conservative governments throughout the continent suddenly found themselves required to embark on extensive tax and land reforms of a kind they had never dreamt off in their worst nightmares, forced upon them by their closest and most respected ally. Most dug their heels in and did what they could to avoid the challenge, but the message that the United States was in favour of change was welcomed by their peoples.

Nearly half a century later, Castro is still alive and his revolution continues to hold sway in Cuba. Yet his early ambition to extend it to the rest of Latin America was thwarted. US military assistance to the armies of the continent, that helped to destroy the Cuban-inspired guerrilla groups, like that of Che Guevara in Bolivia, coupled with timely economic assistance and a fierce ideological offensive against communism, was largely successful in reducing the appeal of the Cuban revolution.

President Bush today is faced with a comparable problem. He is challenged daily by Chávez. When Bush announced that he was worried about poverty in Venezuela, Chávez replied that he was concerned about poverty in the United States. Yet Bush's neoconservative administration has few weapons with which to confront the appeal of Chávez. The US gave a green light to a coup attempt in 2002, but it failed. On the diplomatic front, it has neither the political clout nor the intellectual understanding to create anything as creatively ambitious as the Alliance for Progress. And in any case, it is too late. While Bush's head has been buried in the sands of the Middle East, the heaving shanty towns of Latin America, where the great majority of the population now lives, have been using a brief period of democracy to elect governments far to the left of anything that the US has customarily sanctioned.

The wider significance of Venezuela's "Bolivarian Revolution" is two-fold: it poses a challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has stretched across the world ever since the end of the cold war, and it has mobilised the poorest and most neglected communities in the continent who are largely Indian and black. Chávez and his supporters have no magic formula. They know what they dislike: the economic programmes imposed by Washington that have left the poorest worse off in the past 20 years. But they are only fumbling their way towards a new project, defined as "socialism for the 21st century", whose outlines are still hazy and ill-defined. Yet they have certainly delivered an impressive array of social programmes, funded in their first years, interestingly enough, more from increased taxation than from the current oil bonanza.

This brave attempt to tackle poverty and inequality is without parallel in the continent, and probably in the world, yet Bush's chief strategy in Latin America is to seek to discredit the Chávez achievement rather than to present a programme of its own. A stream of stories have emerged from Washington, mostly echoing the propaganda of the opposition in Venezuela, that casts doubt on the value or durability of the Chávez reforms. Yet Bush will not find much of an echo of these criticisms on his trip through Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. In the first two, progressive presidents have chosen to remain within the neoliberal system promoted by Washington, yet much of their political support comes from popular movements that are ideologically closer to Chávez, and their adherents will be prominent in street demonstrations against Bush.

This, after all, is a long tradition. Nearly half a century ago, in May 1958 (before the Cuban revolution had unleashed a fresh current of anti-American sentiment), Vice-President Nixon visited several countries in Latin America and was greeted by demonstrators opposing US support for military dictators. When his car was attacked in Caracas, President Eisenhower mobilised troops at Guantánamo to be ready to rescue him.

To know what to do in Latin America, President Bush needs to have some historical understanding of the deep roots of US unpopularity in the region, and perhaps even to reiterate the apologies that President Clinton made in Guatemala in 1999, when he sought forgiveness for the prolonged period of US-assisted military repression since 1966 (though he refrained from referring to the CIA coup of 1954 that precipitated that country's downward spiral into the abyss). A similar apology for sending Dan Mitrione a US police torture trainer to Uruguay in 1969 would not go amiss.

Equally important would be for Bush to recognise publicly that the drug scourge that has led to such lawlessness and corruption in much of Latin America, and which his government has spent so much time and effort in trying unsuccessfully to eradicate, has its roots in the consumption patterns that have become so firmly entrenched in his own society.

Yet the most important thing for Bush to learn is that behind Latin America's recurring anti-American mood are genuine and popular demands for equality and justice, and for social inclusion, welling up from below. Desperate people are demanding something different. These issues are now being addressed in Venezuela, for better or for worse, and the Chávez model has captured the imagination of half the continent. Unless President Bush can formulate and can sponsor a comparable project, the United States faces the prospect of a slow defeat in Latin America, as in Iraq.

Link to original source

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Write comment