Obama and Latin America: What He Really Promises by Diana Barahona

[magbana]

Obama and Latin America: What He Really Promises
Written by Diana Barahona
Tuesday, 25 November 2008
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1597/68/

U.S. hegemony in Latin America has been maintained historically
through military and paramilitary force, economic coercion, and since
the mid-1980s through the additional strategy of manipulating civil
society through a complex of programs implemented under the banner of
"democracy promotion." Democracy promotion is the topic of William
Robinson’s 1996 book, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US
Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge University Press).

Although the motor behind imperialism is first and foremost capitalist
accumulation, public opinion requires that the government justify such
violent and undemocratic actions as overthrowing and assassinating
presidents and propping up dictatorships with liberal rationales;
since WWII this cover has always been the defense of "freedom" from
communism. However, since the USSR disappeared as an ideological
enemy, the Clinton administration justified its considerable military
support to Colombia as fighting the war on drugs; Clinton also
escalated corporate globalization under the guise of democracy
promotion. When the Bush administration decided to carry out military
coups against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Haitian President
Jean Bertrand Aristide, it needed a more convincing justification, so
it presented the narrative that both presidents had been overthrown by
popular uprisings—a story that was planted in the media by the same
"democracy promotion" networks that were orchestrating the coups on
the ground.

With the 1998 victory of Chavez, however, U.S. hegemony had met its
match, and he is now the region’s uncontested leader. His radical
political, economic and social initiatives set off a powder keg of
discontent over Washington’s neoliberal economic impositions, which
exploded in one leftist electoral victory after another. Bourgeois
democracy, which since independence restricted electoral choice to
ruling class parties, is no longer capable of maintaining the
traditional power structures of exclusion and is being replaced
through constitutional changes in a number of countries with popular
participatory democracy. Other signs of declining U.S. influence are
countries withdrawing from the IMF and forming a South American trade
bloc (MERCOSUR) and a South American union (UNASUR). The traditional
instruments of U.S. hegemony such as the Organization of American
States are becoming irrelevant. But if bourgeois democracy is on the
ropes, it isn’t because the United States has "neglected" the region.
On the contrary, the "democracy promotion" machinery—and intelligence
and military agencies—have never ceased working to defeat authentic
popular forces.

Barack Obama seems to be oblivious to the sea change in Latin America,
portraying the advance of the left as a threat which came about
through the incompetence of the Bush administration, who allowed a
"dangerous demagogue" like Hugo Chavez to rise to power. Here is what
Obama said in his May 23 speech to the Cuban American National
Foundation:

"No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into
this vacuum. His predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American
rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy offers the
same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past. But
the United States is so alienated from the rest of the Americas that
this stale vision has gone unchallenged, and has even made inroads
from Bolivia to Nicaragua.

It should be noted that Obama dismissed socialism as a "tried and
failed ideology" and a "stale vision" to a group of aging thugs and
cutthroats who cling to the dream of restoring Cuba to its
prerevolutionary past of white supremacy and gangster capitalism. The
reference to Chavez stepping into the vacuum presupposes that the
United States is the natural leader of the region and that only an
illegitimate "strongman" would have the impertinence to dare to usurp
this position.

If Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua are the bad guys, the good guys
are represented by the Uribe government in Colombia, easily the
biggest human rights violator in the hemisphere and the most corrupt
(and for some reason embraced by the Clinton administration). Obama
defended Colombia’s illegal March 1 attack on a guerrilla camp in
neighboring Ecuador, where 25 people (including four Mexican students)
were pulverized by aircraft artillery as they slept. His official
statement: "The Colombian people have suffered for more than four
decades at the hands of a brutal terrorist insurgency, and the
Colombian government has every right to defend itself." This is almost
exactly what he said about Israel during its last invasion and bombing
of Lebanon.

But maybe Obama has some sympathy for Haiti, the first independent
nation in the Caribbean, born out of a slave rebellion, and the
poorest. Haiti’s first democratic president, Aristide, was deposed in
a U.S.-Canadian-French coup in 2004 and is still not allowed by the
United States to return to his own country. Yet Obama sided with the
coup plotters, recycling their slander that Aristide had lost the
support of his people and was illegitimately clinging to power: "The
Haitian people have suffered too long under governments that cared
more about their own power than their peoples’ progress and prosperity."

The theme of Obama’s speech before the CANF was "Renewing U.S.
Leadership in the Americas." He said the word, leadership, six times,
in defiance of the strong majority sentiment in Latin America,
expressed in numerous elections and statements by leaders and civil
society, that they don’t want the United States to lead them any more.
How Obama could have missed this message is testimony to how far
inside of Washington he has gone, and how far Washington is from
reality.

On Nov. 13, Andres Oppenheimer wrote in the Miami Herald about Obama’s
Latin America team—a group of centrists from the Clinton
administration. One campaign advisor since February 2008 was Frank
Sanchez, a Tampa corporate lawyer who served under Clinton promoting
democracy and free trade. Not much is known about Sanchez, a
"Hispanic," who announced Obama’s appearance at the CANF luncheon.
Obama’s other top advisor is Dan Restrepo, a lawyer who served on the
staff of the House International Relations Committee from 1993 to
1996. He is currently director of The Americas Project at the Center
for American Progress, a Democratic Party think tank.

Other people mentioned—Robert S. Gelbard, Jeffrey Davidow, Arturo
Valenzuela and Vicki Huddleston—are foreign service functionaries who
promote the policies they are told to promote. None of these
individuals, Sanchez and Restrepo included, appears to offer any fresh
perspectives. They have not expressed support for Latin American
sovereignty, development for human needs, and certainly not for
socialism.

President Obama has a decision to make: either he will be on the side
of the people and ecological sustainability, or on the side of
transnational capital. He cannot steer a neutral course because he
will be in charge of two enormous bureaucracies--the State Department
and the National Security Agency--which have as their mission the
removal of all obstacles to the accumulation of corporate profits. If
he decides to switch sides, it will be in defiance not only of
powerful economic and military interests, but of the team of advisors
he has so far relied on. He will have to let them all go and bring in
an entirely new group of people. The chance of that happening is next-
to-none.

[Peace Patriot]

1. I think that South America is now well positioned to resist any more U.S. "leadership"

--i.e., U.S. global corporate predator 'free trade,' World Bank/IMF loan sharks, USAID-NED political 'training' of violent fascist minorities, and other gross forms of interference, such as the recent Bushwhack sponsorship of the fascist/white separatist rioters and murderers in Bolivia. South America was unanimous in backing the Evo Morales government in Bolivia against this Buswhack plot. But there are still weak spots and dangers. Bolivia is not entirely out of danger from more U.S. stirring up of the white separatists--although you'd think that Barack Obama would find that U.S. scheme particularly abhorrent. According to Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, there is a three-country Bushwhack strategy to do the same thing in Venezuela and Ecuador, as they tried in their test case of Bolivia: Fascist secessionist movements to split off the oil rich provinces from the national leftist governments. Although Chile, and especially Brazil, have been resistant to "divide and conquer" tactics, economic bribes and deals might still succeed in a Washington tactic of picking "good leftists" vs "bad leftists."

Finally, in South America, Colombia and Peru are big weaks spots, as to U.S. military/economic domination. Peru still has enough of a democracy to oust the corrupt 'free trade' malefactors who are currently running things (Alan Garcia and cohorts, who have a 20% approval rating). But Colombia does not. Colombia is a festering narco/fascist tyranny, with rightwing death squads running rampant, murdering over 40 union leaders this year alone, and severely repressing the poor and their leftist and human rights advocates. I doubt that democracy can deal with Colombia's horrendous problems, and I don't know what will. Perhaps there should be a United Nations-run plebiscite in Colombia, where mass graves filled with the bodies of the poor are continually being uncovered, but no perps, and where the government represents about 30% to 40% of the people. UN-run, or UNASUR-run. UNASUR is the new South American "Common Market," which just stepped into the Bolivian situation, and appears to have brought the saner elements of the rightwing leadership to the peace table, where everyone else failed.

In Central America, the huge leftist democracy movement that has swept South America is just getting traction. Nicaragua elected leftist Sandanista Daniel Ortega as president. El Salvador may well elect a leftist government in 2009. Honduras is leaning left. Guatemala just elected its first progressive government, ever. (Guatemala suffered the worst of the Reagan genocides in Latin America in the 1980s: TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers were slaughtered, with Reagan's direct complicity. Guatemala is still recovering from that horror.) The new government of Guatemala is sympathetic to the social justice goals of the Bolivarian revolution. And Mexico came within a hairsbreadth of electing a strong leftist as president a couple of years ago, and may do so in the next election cycle.

The corrupt, murderous, failed US "war on drugs" is greatly complicating Central America's economic/political progress. The US floods countries like Mexico with weapons and a militarized police force, and the result is chaos, including increased drug traffic and violent crime. South America is finally starting to reject this phony "war"--notably the strongest leftist governments (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela). Our war/police-state profiteers are quite worried about this. (It is one of the reasons that the Bushwhacks cut off humanitarian aid to Bolivia--Evo Morales threw the DEA out of his country, for their collusion with the US embassy on fascist rioting; but also, Morales and the big majority that supports him have a fundamentally different approach to the drug problem; they are legalizing coca leaf use--a traditional indigenous medicine--but not cocaine--and are thus getting the small, indigenous, coca leaf growers, who are also important food producers, on the their side, as to controlling cocaine traffic, drug lords and crime.) But Colombia ($6 BILLION in US military aid to prop up the narco-fascist government) and Central America are still suffering greatly from this US policy.

Finally, I believe that the Bushwhacks have designed a strategy to "circle the wagons" in the Caribbean/Central America--as a US-corpo-dominated buffer against the South American left and its "Common Market"--with the centerpiece of this strategy possibly being capture of the oil rich state of Zulia, Venezuela, on the Caribbean, via a fascist secessionist plot. And they may also have plans to rope in Ecuador's oil rich northern province at the same time, and thus gain control of major oil reserves over the "hump" of South America, from Ecuador through Colombia to northern Venezuela, and up the Central American peninsula. The rightwing government of Mexico (which won by only 0.05% of the vote in a probable stolen election) is tasked (by the Bushwhacks) with privatizing Mexico's constitutionally protected oil resource. As in the Middle East, oil is the driver of US policy. The question is, are Barack Obama's intentions in Latin America truly peaceful, or has he bought into the Oil War II-South America plan? At the least, I think he buys into the economic warfare part of it--using what little leverage the US has to create 'free trade' deals--especially the one the Bushwhacks have wanted with Colombia--to punish and destabilize countries like Venezuela, which have gained independence from the US.

Obama apparently sees the sovereignty, independence and democracy of Latin American countries as a threat--just as Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, Monsanto, Chiquita, Bechtel, Dyncorp and other US global corporate predators see it. He may have a different, more deceptive, less violent strategy in trying to regain US corporate control of the region, but this could be Step One toward later, violent policy (much like Clinton policy on Iraq laid the ground work for Bush's oil war). I have paid careful attention to what Obama has said on this matter, and also to his appointments, and I see little sign of a truly progressive, partnership model in his thinking. I also think that Latin America--and especially South America--is way too well along on their own democratic, social justice path, to be turned back. If Obama acts according to what he has said, and according to the drift of his appointments so far, he will fail. And I can only hope that leaders like Lula da Silva in Brazil--center/left leaders who have maintained ties with Washington--can act as a bridge to Obama, and educate him on the essential rightness and inevitability of the more leftist Bolivarian revolution. Lulu has acted as a friend and defender of Hugo Chavez, for instance. Someone needs to open Obama's eyes about Latin America. And it may be that Obama just doesn't want to get whacked (literally, or by the corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies and Bushwhack-controlled voting machines), and that is why he has taken the corpo/fascist line on Latin America (and on other matters). But the corpo/fascists are WRONG. Wrong on Iraq. Wrong on deregulation. Wrong about the necessary socialist functions of government. Wrong about everything. Wrong, destructive, evil. And exceedingly wrong about South America. Be their puppet and FAIL.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Never had heard Obama chose Vicki Huddleston to work with his people.

She was one hellacious U.S. Interests Section chief working for _Bush, getting his aggression against the government from the US Interests Section underway, and going full throttle until she wore out her welcome. She decided to get an Afghan hound, and entered it in the Cuban dog shows. The Cuban Kennel Club raised hell at her entering her new dog, "Havana," in their dog shows, and the members couldn't take her presence among them.

She gave out boatloads of free shortwave radios which were fixed to pick up only the U.S.-taxpayer-programmed, operated, staffed by Florida Cuban exile propaganda blast, "Radio Marti," from which they sent out regular disinformation, like that filthy trick they played by informing the Cuban population the ambassador from Mexico told audiences in Miami that Mexico wanted Cubans to migrate there and would not require any background checks, would accept them without question, just as they do here, and all they had to do to take advantage, was to go to the Mexican Embassy. Some Cuban ex-convicts stole a bus, and rammed it through the locked gate at the embassy, at which time the embassy staff called the Cuban government to come and get them, and after that happened, a HUGE diplomatic row broke out between Cuba and one anti-Cuban official in Mexico, which lasted for a couple of years. Thanks, Vicki Huddleston for all your help.

Now the (swear word) is helping us again working with Obama's Latin America team. Terrific!

Thanks, magbana, for this information. One would hope things can only get better, not worse, knock on wood.

~click for photo~
http://blogs.herald.com.nyud.net:8090/cuban_connection/images/2007/04/25/vickihuddleston_2

Miss Vicki, visiting friends in Miami: bomber/mass murderer Orlando Bosch supporter, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and lunatic right-wing blowhard, Jaimi Suchlicki, both on the left, Huddleston, the other one.