Obama and Latin America: The First Six Months

Jul 23 2009
Kevin Young

Far from embodying any dramatic changes, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy has thus far tended toward continuity or worse in most major areas. The administration has escalated the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the advice of knowledgeable observers of the region and against the wishes of the vast majority of the Afghan and Pakistani populations. Despite bowing to overwhelming Iraqi pressure by agreeing to withdraw at least some U.S. forces from Iraq, Obama has pushed hard for continued war funding and has sought to consolidate U.S. control over Iraq “without being seen to do so,” as publicly conceded by one high-level official. With regard to Palestine, Obama has refused to endorse the decades-old international consensus and the 2002 Arab League peace proposal calling for a two-state solution on the pre-1967 borders. And he has increased total military spending by four percent over Bush-era levels rather than redirecting those funds to meet human needs.1 As with domestic issues, Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric has sounded more compassionate and far less arrogant than his predecessor’s, like when Obama has insisted on an immediate end to illegal Israeli settlements and talked about reconciliation with the Muslim world. Yet even such small steps have usually been confined to the realm of rhetoric; there is absolutely no indication, for example, that Obama has even considered cutting the $2.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel to force it to comply with international law.

To what extent has this pattern applied to Obama’s approach to Latin America? Acutely conscious of the long U.S. history of imperialist intervention in the region and thoroughly disgusted with the U.S.-promoted neoliberal economic policies of recent decades, most Latin Americans have long been anxious to see a new U.S. policy in the region, one that respects international law and national sovereignty while helping to promote sustainable and egalitarian economic development. Any assessment of the new administration must acknowledge, of course, that Obama himself does not singlehandedly determine policy, and that corporate, financial, military, and other elite interests constitute powerful obstacles to substantial change. Yet the President himself and the people he appoints nonetheless deserve a large portion of the praise or blame for the direction of U.S. policy. With this partial caveat in mind, this essay evaluates the extent to which Obama administration policy in Latin America has thus far adhered to ideals of democracy, human rights, and international law.

Obama and the Leftward Turn

The most significant challenge that Latin America has presented to Washington in the last decade has been its much-discussed leftward turn. With just three major exceptions (Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, with possible 2006 election fraud in the last), nearly every country on the continent has elected a left-of-center president promising to abandon economic neoliberalism and to forge strong regional alliances that will increase Latin American economic and political independence. Although the corporate press usually implicates Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez as the key culprit behind this shift, recent elections and policy changes have in fact reflected the growth of grassroots social movements and the thorough disillusionment of the region’s people with the policies promoted by U.S. leaders and Latin American elites.

Recent Latin American efforts to build intra-regional trade alliances, to institute measures of limited economic protectionism, and to limit the power of foreign capital predictably met with overt hostility from the Bush administration. The Obama administration has at time shown signs of change in this regard: in March, after right-wing members of the U.S. Congress had publicly threatened to cut off remittances to El Salvador and deport Salvadoran immigrants if the left-leaning FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes won the presidential election, the administration yielded to pressure from Salvadoran and U.S. activists by issuing an official statement of neutrality—a welcome change from Washington’s blatant intervention in support of the far-right ARENA party in the 2004 elections. But unfortunately, a more comprehensive review of Obama’s approach to the region suggests that despite this example and despite the often more tolerant, conciliatory tone of administration rhetoric, the basics of U.S. policy and strategy have thus far undergone few substantial modifications. The key test of Obama administration goodwill in Latin America—the extent to which it supports the right of Latin Americans to elect presidents who favor economic policies of redistribution and national control over key resources and to support those presidents once in office—has so far yielded, on the whole, rather discouraging results.

...Background: In 2003, President Bush announced negotiations for something called the Andean Free Trade Agreement, which was supposed to be negotiated with Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. But, new, populist governments in Ecuador and Bolivia ( in November 2006, Ecuadorans elected Rafael Correa as their new president; Evo Morales was chosen to lead Bolivia in December 2005), rejected any further NAFTA/CAFTA-style, so-called "free trade" agreements. So, Colombia and Peru forged ahead on their own. Bush signed the deal with Colombia last November--just two weeks after the elections in which dozens of new Democratic members of Congress were elected, partly on economic platforms that rejected NAFTA-type so-called "free trade."

...
The Colombia Free Trade Agreement. What would it do? The FTA's grant of duty-free U.S. access for flowers and certain other commercial-scale agri-export crops will certainly put pressure on Colombia to expand agribusiness plantations for such exports. These plantations have been a disaster for the regular farmer. Indeed, under pressure in the 1990s from international lending organizations, Colombia implemented a program of "economic openness," which unleashed a tide of traditional cereals, rice and oats pouring into the country. As a result, 1.1 million hectares of cultivated land were lost. Arenas says that 300,000 farmers, then, turned to cultivating coca. "So, now, with FTA, they want to lower every tariff to zero which will devastate every farmer and make them grow coca," says Arenas.

Foreign investor rights--a typical pro-corporate, so-called "free trade," measure--would tighten the grip that large corporations have on the country's natural resources and launch a large-scale plundering of those resources such as timber and minerals. Without a government willing to nationalize such resources or, at the very least, make sure that the benefits of the commercial exploitation are widely spread, you can be sure that huge riches will flow to a handful of people, while most of the population is left with pennies.

The upshot: the so-called "free trade" deal would likely displace hundreds of thousands of poor rural Colombians from their lands, sending them into far deeper economic despair--and forcing many of them to work for the very groups that violently displaced them from their lands. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs conducted a study of the effects of the 1990s economic "liberalization" and concluded that such a move led to a 35 per cent drop in employment. You can be sure that the proposed so-called "free trade" deal will wreak similar havoc.

fascinating contradictions
regarding Bolivia and trade preferences:

"Obama’s hostility toward Bolivia has extended beyond rhetoric into concrete policy actions, with potentially dire effects for tens of thousands of Bolivian workers. On June 30 Obama declared that Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, no longer deserved U.S. trade preferences. President Bush had rescinded those preferences last fall, but Obama had widely been expected to reinstate them; instead, he permanently eliminated them."


yet on the other hand regarding FTA and Colombia:

"On June 29 Obama welcomed Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to Washington, assuring him that “moving forward on a free trade agreement” with Colombia was among the administration’s top priorities and in “the interests of both countries."10 Obama firmly believes in the general desirability of the so-called “free-trade” agreements that have increased poverty and inequality throughout Latin America. His partial hesitance toward a free-trade agreement with Colombia has never derived from the well-known detrimental effects of such agreements on the vulnerable sectors and the environments of underdeveloped countries, but from the constant and undeniable human rights violations of the Uribe government."