“Obama is coming to the region to promote the Trans Pacific Partnership”
By: Manuel Barrientos and Walter Isaía / Source: Agencia Paco Urondo / The Dawn News / March 8, 2016. Leandro Morgenfeld, Doctor in History, Buenos Aires University and CONICET researcher, argues that the agenda that the US president will raise during his visit to Argentina should be analysed with concern.
“Very few times before has an American President in exercise visited Argentina. This is significant, because the five previous visits, meant changes in the relationship with our country. So, this is not just another trip, it’s not a merely diplomatic or symbolic gesture”, says Leandro Morgenfeld, who is a historian and author of the books “Neighbors in conflict. Argentina and the United States in the Pan American Conferences” and “Dangerous Relations: Argentina and the United States”. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to make an official visit to the country, in 1936. Then came Dwight Eisenhower (1960), George H. Bush (1990) and Bill Clinton (1997). George W. Bush was the last American President to visit Argentina, but this was not a bilateral meeting, because he came within the framework of the Summit of the Americas held in Mar del Plata in 2005.
In this interview with the “Paco Urondo” News Agency (APU) interview, Morgenfeld said that Barack Obama is coming to the region to promote the Trans Pacific Partnership (known as TPP), in a context that is now favorable to them now that Mauricio Macri is president. He also asks the people to carefully scrutinize the agreements that may be signed on Security issues, with the pretext of the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism.
APU: How should we read the implications of Obama’s visit?
L.M.: Firstly, he comes to close the alliance with Mauricio Macri. He comes here to “empower” Macri and transform him -given Macri’s lack of personal attributes- into the new leader of the Latin American Right. SInce “Let’s change” won the elections last year, the US has been trying to promote the conservative restoration in the whole continent. The US used Macri to attack Venezuela in the last Summit of the Mercosur in December and this, in addition to the result in Venezuela’s elections, changed the climate of the international context. At the same time, the Brazilian right is attacking the government of Dilma Rousseff because it feels free to do so in this new, favorable context. And Evo Morales failed, by a narrow margin, to be enabled its own re-election. That is, the United States is aimed at repositioning and Macri is very useful, because historically, Argentina was always a very reluctant country to align with the US. But the government has already given ample signs that it wants to go back to what we all know as “carnal relations” with the US (a term that was born with Menem’s administration, in reference to the fact that, when it came in foreign relations, the US was figuratively fucking us).
APU: Why did Obama decide to include Argentina in the route of what originally was only a trip to Cuba?
L.M.: Although it may seem unbelievable for people here (who see Obama as the incarnation of the right), Obama is permanently criticized by right-wing sectors in his country, for being “too soft”. There are violently anti-Castro sectors that question Obama’s policy of “defrosting” relations with Cuba and the fact that he will visit Havana while it’s still governed in the regime of the Castro brothers, as they call the revolution. Therefore, to achieve some internal balance, as he usually does, Obama decided to visit Argentina, the new ally, immediately after That compensates, in the internal agenda, for the unrest generated by his visit to Cuba. The tour also aims to capture the Latino vote, which will be key for Democrats to twist the arm of Donald Trump in the presidential elections in November this year. There is also another motivation to which we must pay close attention, because it was already mentioned by officials of the Argentine Chancellery: Obama comes to the region (and he will also visit to Peru later this year) to promote the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).
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http://www.thedawn-news.org/2016/03/14/argentina-obama-is-coming-to-the-region-to-promote-the-trans-pacific-partnership/
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