Is Washington Losing Latin America to Democracy?

[Clara T]

Is Washington Losing Latin America to Democracy?
By Ed Nelson
Jan 9, 2006, 19:45

Is Washington Losing Latin America? This is the title of an article from the Jan. / Feb. 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, an important journal for policy wonks around the world. But the real title should have been: Is Washington Losing Latin America to Democracy?
 
The basic contradiction which confronts the U.S. in Latin America and the Caribbean is the antagonism between the spread of democracy and the adherence to the pro U.S. neo-liberal policies. As democracy spreads in the region, the democratic regimes, in accordance with the wishes of the people entitled to vote, tend to abandon neo-liberal policy, which often suffer from these policies. The U.S. imperialist who are anxious about this process must choose between real democracy in the region, or its neo-liberal policies. So far, U.S. imperialism has tried to peruse both democracy and neo-liberal policy, but the bottom line for U.S. Imperialism is that neo-liberal policy has always trumped democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean. 
Alarmed at the possibility that democracy, as reflected by recent events in Latin America, is undermining neo-liberal policies in the region, bourgeois neo-liberal policy wonks are pointing their fingers at George W. Bush and wondering how the U.S. capitalist class can put the preverbal Jennie back into the “U.S. hegemonic” bottle; they are not encouraged by the prospects.
 
In order to make Latin America and the Caribbean safe for U.S. capitalist exploitation, U.S. imperialism must confront the fact that democracy in Latin American is contrary to U.S. corporate interest in North America. The Latin American democratic dominos are falling fast, and there is no Soviet Union bug-a-bear to scare the folks at home, so the imperialist apologists must deal with the issue head on. That is what Peter Hakim, the author of the above cited Foreign Affairs article, has tried to do. Hakim is President of the Inter-American Dialogue, a neo-liberal organization and think-tank that promotes free trade (sic) in the Latin America region.
Hakim begins by stating that “…for a time the Americas seemed to be heading in the right direction: between 1989 and 1995, Central Americas brutal wars were largely settled ; the Bradley debt-relief proposal…helped to end Latin America’s decade-long debt–induced recession ; the United States, Canada, and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); and the United States hosted the hemisphere’s first summit meeting in more then a generation ; and in 1995 a bold Washington-led rescue package helped prevent the collapse of Mexico’s economy”.
 
I insert this long quote because I think that Peter Hakim distinctly sums up the magnitude of U.S. imperialist investments to secure U.S. hegemony in Latin America, and why the U.S. bourgeois are so alarmed by the democratic gains by the emergent left in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Hakim blames both Bush and Clinton for allowing these democratic gains, by allowing   “…U.S. policy on Latin America drift without much steam or direction”. Bush, however, gets most of the blame from Hakim for being distracted from Latin America by 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_20593.shtml

[IndianaGreen]

1. Excellent article by Ed Nelson

which may explain Howard Dean's complaint about leftist trends in Latin America.

[Clara T]

2. Maybe you could post that comment by Dean

in GD. I don't remember the exact words but it was essentially imperialism lite if I remember correctly. Same old stuff. Certainly heads would explode from some of the ardent Dean supporters. It's hard to convey just how deep seated this paternalistic sense of dominion is in America, especially when it comes dressed up in a friendlier face.

[IndianaGreen]

3. Here is the transcript

CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER

Interview With Shimon Peres; Interview With Benjamin Netanyahu

Aired January 8, 2006 - 11:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DEAN: Look at what's happening in Latin America. This president, while saying that he wants to further democracy and capitalism, is driving people in the opposite direction.

We need real leadership in this country and we don't have it right now.

BLITZER: Are you blaming the president on the elections in Bolivia or on the elections in Venezuela? Is that what you're saying?

DEAN: We had an enormous opportunity, when this president took office, and he said he was going to reach out to Latin America. Instead, he has turned them off. He's been high-handed with them; he's rejected them.

He's ignored the economic plight of their folks. And so, we're getting something that I think most Americans wish we didn't have, which is left-leading regimes in these places. We need a president who will work constructively and cooperatively with our allies around the world so that we really can move capitalism and democracy further into the world and not turn off people. When you turn people off, as the most powerful nation in the world, they are obviously going to do something that is not in our best interest. And that's exactly what's going on right now.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/08/le.01.html

[Selatius]

9. That's a pretty sad statement coming from Howard Dean

I never figured that Dean was friendly to libertarian socialists or any kind of socialist for that matter, but at least now I know he most certainly is not.

[Larkspur]

11. Actually Dean's quote is pretty accurate of Bush's bumbling and an

accurate description of Bush's inattention to Latin America.

I disagree with Dean about fearing "left-leading regimes" but he's right about Bush being high-handed and rejecting Latin American leaders, and of course Dean is correct about we need a president who will "work constructively and cooperatively with our allies around the world so that we really can move capitalism and democracy further into the world and not turn off people." Hugo Chavez would have no problem with that attitude.

I don't see capitalism itself as an antithesis to democracy. Neither does Hugo Chavez. Chavez also has no problem with the United States, just it's leaders, specifically Bush right now, who want to meddle in internal Latin American affairs to fill the coffers of US robber barons. Chavez is following a similar path that FDR did. FDR didn't try to eliminate capitalism. He was trying to use government resources to get Americans back to work, meaningful work, and his policies helped defuse any threat of a Communist takeover of the US during the Great Depression.

For those who choose to forget, Howard Dean also believed that workers rights and environmental protections need to be globilized along with capitalism. Dean had a wholistic approach to globalization.

[Demeter]

4. Yes! Thank God!

Freedom is like that, always popping up when your back is turned.

[tom_paine]

5. Ironic, isn't it? Even the Latin America we tried so hard to BushPutinize

for 50 years, may well turn out to be free long after Imperial Amerika has finished purging the last vestiges of the Old Republic from our shores.

Good for them. As an Imperial Subject of Amerika, it heartens me to see hope of freedom in faraway lands.

[IndianaGreen]

6. As long as the Imperial Army is bogged down in Iraq

our Emperor lacks the troops to attack the rebellious provinces.

[400Years]

7. That is why I don't really want to see them leave Iraq

sounds bad but we live in the real world

at some point the democratic gains in latin america will be unreversable.

[tom_paine]

8. I don't know. Watching the old USA turn into Imperial Amerika

has shattered my faith in the power of democracy as EVER being irreversible.

Here's what German Psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, who lived throug the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, had to say about it:

Today I do not believe that any nation is proof against giving birth to the same evil, even though in other ways and in a different spirit.

"All over the world I dread the self-deception which we have experienced - that this could not happen here. It can happen anywhere. It is improbable only where the broad masses of the population are aware of the possible menace and thus will not be lulled into security; where they know the type of totalitarianism and will recognize it in its rudimentary stages and in each of its manifestations - this Proteus who keeps appearing in ever new masks, who slips eel-like out of our grasp, who does the opposite of what he says, who distorts the meaning of words, who speaks not in order to communicate or tell the truth, but in order to numb, to distract, to hypnotize, to intimidate, to dupe - who will exploit and evoke every fear, and will promise security and utterly wreck it at the same time."


I agree with him.

[PATRICK]

12. After a brief

period of discussing and studying that very idea after WWII, not only was the issue buried along with ANY accountability by Hitler enablers and worse, but the first steps were taken to shift the bugbear to Communism and liberal democracy, and the very death throes of Nazism were allowed to seed our own naked proclivities. The GOP even imported Nazis and were the loudest to lie and identify as "Fifth Columnists"
only shadowy communist subversives(never of the rich class of course).

Happen here? It started, came back and melded here in many components.

[Judi Lynn]

10. More power to the growing structure of a united Latin America.

They deserve back all the progress which was thrwarted during the reigns of terrof by the American Republican Presidents, who were obsessed with crushing all possible forms of dissent in Latin America and the Caribbean. It's a real pity most Americans have NO IDEA what has happened there yet.

If they took they time to find out, we'd have a whole new national policy, I'm certain. We can't all be as brutal, greedy, cold, and stupid as our history has painted us.