Obama Should Make a Clean Break With the Past on Latin America

THURSDAY 4 DECEMBER 2008

Obama Should Make a Clean Break With the Past on Latin America
Tuesday 02 December 2008
by: Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research

President-elect Obama's historic triumph was welcomed in Latin America by left-of-center governments who saw it as a continuation of their own electoral victories. Even before the election, President Lula da Silva of Brazil said, "Just as Brazil elected a metal worker, Bolivia elected an Indian, Venezuela elected Chavez and Paraguay a bishop, I think that it would be an extraordinary thing if, in the largest economy in the world, a black man were elected president of the United States."

Obama has an opportunity to forge a new relationship with the region after his predecessor drove US-Latin American relations into a ditch. But it will require a major change in Washington's attitude toward our southern neighbors.

Most importantly, as the Brookings Institution recently noted, the Obama administration will have to abandon Bush's efforts to divide the left-of-center governments into a "good left" and "bad left," rewarding the former and punishing the latter. Most recently, the Bush administration decided to punish Bolivia by suspending their trade preferences and threatening tens of thousands of jobs there - allegedly for not cooperating in the "war on drugs."

Bolivia's President Evo Morales was in Washington this month and met with Sen. Richard Lugar. Senator Lugar is the most influential Republican on foreign policy issues and is very close to President-elect Obama - who, according to rumors here, offered him the position of secretary of state. Lugar issued a very positive press statement on the meeting with Evo: "The United States regrets any perception that it has been disrespectful, insensitive, or engaged in any improper activities that would disregard the legitimacy of the current Bolivian government or its sovereignty," he said. "We hope to renew our relationship with Bolivia, and to develop a rapport grounded on respect and transparency."

Although Evo Morales handed this statement to the Washington Post, neither the meeting with Lugar nor Lugar's statement made it into the print edition of the Post's article on Evo's visit. This indicates that the Obama administration will have to confront not only the State Department, but also some of the major media if it wants to change relations with Latin America.

More:
http://www.truthout.org/120308R

and as far as the Middle East goes, ignore them.

Does nobody on the progressive Left have any foresight whatsoever?

policies toward Latin America.... I haven't heard anything positive from him.

"The consensus in Washington is that we have the right to do all kinds of things in Latin American countries that we would never permit here. The new governments there do not agree. They also think they have the right to an independent foreign policy. Brazil's foreign minister went to Iran this month, where he publicly defended Iran's right to enrich uranium, and announced that expanding commercial and other ties to Iran were "a foreign policy priority" for Brazil. The State Department and US media ignored these statements because they came from Brazil, but when Venezuela does the same thing, it is considered impermissible." --Mark Weisbrot (later in the article)

Why this screaming hypocrisy and two-facedness in the Bushwhack and corpo/fascist 'news' monopoly treatment of Brazil and Venezuela? Because Venezuela is the target of a Bushwhack war plan to instigate a fascist secessionist civil war in Venezuela's oil rich northern province of Zulia (on the Caribbean, adjacent to Colombia), and Brazil--where US global corporate predators operate more freely than in Venezuela--is not such a target. Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, has said that the Bushwhack reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean is a threat to Brazil's oil reserves on the Atlantic coast as well, but obviously that is a long range goal; Exxon Mobil & brethren will order the demonization of Brazil's leader opportunistically, when the time comes. Right now, it's Chavez, Chavez, Chavez.

They're looking for a "domino" with which to begin the defeat of the leftist democracy movement in Latin America. They tried Bolivia. Bolivia and all of South America fought back on the split up of Bolivia by the white separatists in the gas/oil rich eastern provinces. Evo Morales evicted the US ambassador and the DEA for complicity in that dirty rotten plan, with the full backing of the new South American Common Market--UNASUR. But their main target is, and always has been, Venezuela--and likely Ecuador, both adjacent to Colombia, and vulnerable to death squads, mercenaries and military forces--fattened by $6 BILLION in US taxpayer military aid--crossing their borders in support of secessionist coups, and in coordination with US naval and air forces along their Caribbean and Pacific coasts.

Colombia--where thousands of union leaders and others have been murdered by the Colombian military and its death squads--colluded early this year on a US/Bushwhack effort to pull Ecuador and Venezuela into a hot war with Colombia. Colombia also colluded on a plan to draw Chavez into hostage negotiations with the FARC guerrillas and then hand Chavez a diplomatic disaster, with dead hostages. Chavez, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, largely defeated those schemes, but those events made it crystal clear who the Bushwhacks' main targets are. (I am increasingly of the opinion that land-locked Bolivia was a test case for the fascist secession strategy. Bolivia was the most vulnerable, given its very racist, rich, white separatist minority. But the US war plan there was never very viable, and when Paraguay elected a leftist president this year, cutting off the most likely route for US/Colombian support troops to the Bolivian separatists, the secessionist movement descended into rioting and random murder and lost all credibility. The Bushwhacks could revel in the chaos and death--a side benefit for them--and study the strategic situation, and the South American reaction, for their grander scheme of grabbing Venezuela's and probably Ecuador's oil, using Colombian forces and coastal access.)

Weisbrot writes:

"These are the kinds of double standards that the Obama administration will have to abandon if it wants a new relationship with Latin America. The left governments of Latin America have all reached out to our new president-elect with great hopes and expectations. It will now be up to our new government to break with the past, and respect the sovereignty and dignity of our neighbors to the south. That's all they are asking for."

That is my hope as well. But Obama's appointments do not point that way. Her has Hillary Clinton as SoS. He husband prepared the way for Oil War II-South America with "Plan Colombia" (billions of US tax dollars to support and militarize that narco-fascist government). She had, as her chief political strategist, Mark Penn, a paid agent of the Colombian government. She clearly supports the Colombian "free trade" deal (reward for murdering thousands of union leaders), though she denied it during the campaign. And Obama appointed Chiquita International's death squad attorney, Eric Holder, as chief law enforcement officer of the U.S. These appointments do not bode well for "the sovereignty and dignity of our neighbors to the south," nor even for simple respect for human life. Where oil is concerned, we have learned that our national political establishment is as immune to human suffering and the rule of the law as Hitler was.

I applaud Weisbrot--a very influential writer--for making the effort. But I do not feel optimistic that Obama can--or even wants to--change two hundred years of almost continual U.S. carnage and rapine in Latin America. And, right now, our national political establishment is more desperate than ever, for oil fields to exploit, and for other riches that they can easily steal. The "sovereignty and dignity" asserted by the people of South America--with a vast leftist democracy movement that is moving into Central America as well--stand in their way. The likelihood is that the Obama administration, like every U.S. administration before them--with the exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal--will do everything in its power to crush it, by direct or by devious means.

I don't think that our corpo/fascists will succeed. And that might deter Obama and his corpo/fascist operatives--not morality, but rather reality. The South Americans have achieved unprecedented cooperation among themselves. Every 'divide and conquer' strategy of the Bushwhacks has failed. With the weapon of the Bushwhacks' Financial 9/11, they might gain back some ground for our global corporate predators, but it will be limited ground. The South Americans have tasted self-rule, and they are never going back. And if Obama proceeds with the Oil War II plan, or winks at a Rumsfeld-orchestrated private war, the result will be permanent alienation between the northern and southern halves of our hemisphere, and further curtailment and banning of U.S. corporations and financiers. South America will proceed to develop its trade with the "global south"--a perfect example being Brazil's foreign minister visiting Iran (as Weisbrot points out). Financial interests in Asia, Africa and other regions, and amongst South and Central American countries, will benefit, and our corps and financiers will be further frozen out. We cannot change this situation by outright or devious force--not in Latin America, where democracy has a firm hold. Respect and cooperation are the only option. The war "option" will only make things worse. And that is the most that I think we can hope for--that Obama respects REALITY.

Becerra is a Los Angeles Congressman, born of immigrants, raised in Sacramento, who opposes NAFTA and CAFTA, who voted against the Iraq War, and--HALLELUJAH!--voted against the "Help America Vote (for Bush) Act"--the e-voting boondoggle passed by the Anthrax Congress to destroy election transparency before the 2004 election and forever. He was one of only 48 Congress members who voted against HAVA. To me, this is a vital litmus test of commitment to democracy. Not many of our current political leaders can pass it.

Hillary may be bad news on Latin American policy, but Xavier Becerra is very good news, indeed.

See

(comment on his appointment as US Trade Rep)
http://worldtradelaw.typepad.com/ielpblog/2008/12/xavier-becerra-may-be-the-new-ustr.html

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008124902/nafta-critic-selected-us-trade-representative

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Becerra

(his web site) http://becerra.house.gov/HoR/ca31/home

(The Roll Call on HAVA) http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll462.xml

the planet from capitalism" can only lend force to your point, to a man, such as Obama, who is wise enough to understand it.

ENCOURAGE DEMOCRACY in Central and South America rather than continue to treat them as protectorates in our empire.