Dubious Presidential Advice on Latin America from the Council on Foreign Relations

[magbana]

Dubious Presidential Advice on Latin America
From the Council on Foreign Relations

Turning Back the Clock on Cuba
By ROBERT SANDELS

http://www.counterpunch.org/sandels05302008.html

The Council on Foreign Relations issued a report in May on what the next
president should do to improve US Latin America policy. The report
(U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality) was
written by a task co-chaired by Charlene Barshefsky, former US trade
representative, and Gen. James T. Hill, former head of the US Southern
Command. It has received considerable enthusiastic approval. How could it
not when it contains the line, "If there was an era of U.S. hegemony in
Latin America, it is over" <1>

What do they mean "if"? Anyone capable of doubting that there was an era of
US hegemony is a fool, and anyone who thinks it is over is misinformed.

Starting off smartly on the wrong foot, the authors assert that the
problems facing US diplomacy in Latin America are not our fault.

"Recent strains in the US - Latin America relationship," argues the report,
"although real, are less a result of alleged U.S. policy failings than a
product of deeper changes...."

It is not so much that the recommendations flowing from this deeply flawed
assertion are uniformly bad - many are admirable - but rather that the
report is poisoned at the outset by its unquestioning acceptance of the
hegemonic premises whose damage to the region the report purports to repair.

Adopting orphaned premises

The report could only have been written in the form it is in by adopting
the hoary mythology that US policy has been benign, though possibly
bumbling at times. Where is the evidence to support the assertion that the
United States has had a "long-standing focus" on democracy; or the claim
that US objectives have been the promotion of "prosperity, and democracy
throughout the hemisphere"? Democracy promotion has never been a US policy,
in Latin America except as a cover for hegemonic ambitions, as the long
history of interventions, invasions and subversions amply demonstrates.

Without the democracy-promotion fallacy as a cover, many of the report's
assertions are revealed as justifications for continuing US
interventionism, albeit on a more sophisticated level than we have seen
under recent administrations. Praising by way of faint damnation, the
report offers this zinger of understatement: The US focus on "free and fair
elections," has been "insufficient" in dealing with "fundamental concerns."

When it looks at individual countries, the report offers little in the way
of historical context to explain current tensions. It fails to ask, for
example, the reasons for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's hostility toward
the policies of the US government, contenting itself with repeating Bush
administration talking points about the "authoritarian" Chavez.

"Since being elected in 1998," says the report, "he has used oil profits to
fund high-profile public projects and welfare programs while ruling by
decree and systematically eradicating checks on his own power. More
worrying in the regional context, he has also embarked on a campaign to
alienate Latin America from the United States and promoted foreign policies
that could destabilize the region (such as pushing for recognition of the
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia as a political rather
than terrorist organization)."

There is no mention here that Chavez has repeatedly renewed his authority
through democratic elections and referendums; no mention that his limited
power of decree was legislatively approved; no mention of Washington's
support for the coup attempt against him in 2002, which might help explain
his antipathy toward the current United States government; no mention that
his regional policies, far from destabilizing the region, have been in
support of democratic elections that have challenged US-backed ruling elites
in places like Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua; and no mention that Latin
America's alienation from the United States might be a good thing in a
region working toward unity and independence.

On other important issues, the report is silent or given to mumbling.

There is no discussion of the long history of US attacks on sovereign states
up to and including the endless war against Cuba. For the Council on
Foreign Relations, history begins only after a Fidel Castro or a Hugo Chavez
reacts against US aggression.

How they can help us

The report talks a great deal about how the United States might help Latin
America, but it is essentially a report on how Latin America can help the
United States. The region is more important to the US than ever, the
forward begins. " is the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United
States."

US energy security is one of the four critical issues identified in the
report. The others are poverty, public security and human mobility
(migration). All four are interpreted to one degree or another as to how
they threaten or otherwise affect the United States.

The report complains that the rise of resource nationalism presents "a
difficult challenge for both the United States and Latin American
countries." Resource nationalism refers to the trend toward taking control
of oil and other resources out of the hands of foreign corporations and,
through nationalization or other means, putting them to national use.

"Since 2001," the report says, "President Chavez has sought to use his
nation's vast energy wealth for public programs and for his own ambitions by
strengthening government control over the state-owned oil company Petroleos
de Venezuela (PDVSA), limiting foreign ownership of joint ventures, and
demanding higher royalty payments from foreign oil companies."

Because of Venezuela's use of Venezuelan oil for Venezuelan purposes, the
report suggests, the impact on future supplies could "have problematic
implications for the United States." The sentiment here seems to be that
Venezuelans are using up our oil.

Perhaps that could be offset, though. Brazil could increase its oil
exports, which could "substantially benefit...the United States."

Then, there is natural gas: "Latin America's natural gas resources also
have the potential to play an important part in U.S. energy security in the
coming years."

Maybe Peru could export liquid natural gas to the United States. But, once
again, resource nationalism gets in the way: "Potential Bolivian exports
to Chile and the United States have been held up by anti-Chilean sentiment
and resource nationalism."

IMF to the rescue

To repair the damage done by the disaster economics of the Washington
Consensus, the report recommends, well, the Washington Consensus. The report
advises Washington to help Latin American nations work with the multilateral
organizations that implement the Washington Consensus, such as the World
Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). But, these are instruments of US policy not of Latin
American integration and independence.

The report does not discuss the history of how the Washington Consensus
exacerbated poverty and dependence or the reality that the multilateral
financial institutions are no longer welcomed in most of Latin America and
have little money left to affect changes anywhere. Yet, the council wants
Latin America to embrace these discredited institutions.

Citing economic policies (structural adjustment, debt repayment,
privatization) thrust on the region through the Washington Consensus, the
report ignores the wholesale ransacking of national assets and the squeezing
of taxpayers to repay loans contracted by corrupt regimes coerced by US
agents, and concludes with masterly obliviousness, "these measures have had
less of an effect on job creation and poverty alleviation than was initially
indicated."

Besides papering over the failures of the Washington Consensus, the report
downplays the failures of Plan Colombia, of which it can only say,
"important progress has been made." Still, the report offers Plan Colombia
as a model for Mexico, perhaps taking as fact Gen. Hill's ludicrous claim
that Plan Colombia's success "has been absolutely startling."<2> Nor does
the report reflect on how seriously Colombia's US-approved incursion into
Ecuador in March has damaged relations between Colombia and its neighbors.

This "startlingly" successful program, the report argues, should now be
extended to Mexico under Plan Merida, a US-financed amplification of
President Felipe Calderon's bloody militarization of his war on drug lords
and civil protest.

Unintended irony

The report points out the negative economic effects on the region of
unequal wealth distribution, of race-based economic and social exclusion and
of race- and class-based exclusion from health care. All of these are
characteristic of contemporary US society, but the report does not draw the
same conclusion for the United States as it does for Latin America, namely
that these defects "have potentially problematic implications for democratic
development."

To be sure, many of the recommendations - if read without considering
context - are laudable. Latin American governments, for example, really
ought to reform their tax systems by adopting more distributive schemes that
rely less on regressive value-added taxes (VATs) and more on progressive-
income and corporate-profit levies.

But, to suggest that there is any US "expertise" to support such efforts is
absurd. Just look at the inverted system of progressivity in the US tax
code, the thicket of lobbyist-procured tax breaks for the richest
percentiles, the wealthy-farmer subsidies and the relentless transfer of
wealth from wage earners to rentiers for an idea of how good the United
States is at tax reform. Latin American governments should politely tell the
Council on Foreign Relations, "Please, don't help us!"

In a council meeting releasing the report, American University scholar
Robert Pastor raised the same point. "I think those four issues that you
laid out are not issues that I would say the United States has much to teach
Latin America."<3>

Cuba: turning the clock back

This report is supposed to show how the next president can face Latin
American realities. The section on Cuba, however, wanders off into many of
the same fantasies that have driven Cuban policy for half a century. At
best, these recommendations call for a timid retreat to milder policies that
were in play prior to the passage of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, which,
besides further tightening the blockade (embargo), gives Congress the final
power to judge Cuba's behavior.

The council's task force would like to end, though only partially, the
nearly total ban on US citizens traveling to Cuba. It goes only so far as to
suggest reinstating the less stringent travel rights that existed pre-Bush.
The report does not attempt to justify the original reasoning behind the
travel restrictions and does not ask questions about the trumped-up grounds
of "trading with the enemy."

The report also wants to reduce the severity of the blockade by revoking
the Helms-Burton Act, which in itself would not change Cuba policy but
simply hand it back from Congress to the executive branch. It does not
recommend repealing the entirety of the anti-Cuba legislation, such as the
Cuban Adjustment Act or the Torricelli Act. Since none of the current
presidential candidates favors eliminating the blockade, the report's major
recommendation on Cuba rings hollow.

In sum, the report's timid recommendations outline a return to the somewhat
milder Cuba policy that set in after President John F. Kennedy's failure at
the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and his failed Operation Mongoose terror project.
Richard Nixon, who, as vice president, recommended the invasion to then
President Dwight Eisenhower, established a softer Cuba policy as president
than the one recommended by the task force

Some of the proposals concerning Cuba actually reinforce Bush's hard-line
approach. Both Bush and the Council on Foreign Relations want the next
president to work more effectively with partners in the Western Hemisphere
and Europe to press Cuba on its human rights record and democratic reform,
the two major propaganda points endlessly cited as justifications for the
war on Cuba.

Rather than pledging to leave Cuba's future to Cubans, the report suggests
that the next president promise, "The United States will pursue a
respectful arm's-length relationship with a democratic Cuba."

The catch is that, under current law and policy, it is up to the United
States to determine whether Cuba is democratic. Moreover, since US policy
after the 2001 Summit of the Americas links democracy and capitalism, the
unacknowledged agenda of the council appears to be destruction of Cuba's
socialist revolution. <4>

Robert Sandels is a writer and member of the Cuba-L Direct team. where this
essay originally appeared.

Bibliography

<1> Council on Foreign Relations, U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New
Direction for a New Reality, 05/15/08. All quotations are from the online
uncorrected version.

<2> U.S.-Latin America Relations: Report of an Independent Task, Federal
News Service, 05/14/08.

<3> Ibid.

<4> Summit of the Americas Information Network. The final declaration says
democracy is "fundamental to the advancement of all our objectives," which
include "hemispheric integration and national and collective responsibility
for improving the economic well-being and security of our people." Further,
any "interruption of the democratic order in a state of the Hemisphere
constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the participation of that state's
government in the Summit of the Americas process." Accordingly, it would
seem that the Bush regime, which fought to get this language in the
declaration, could be kicked out of future summits after the 2002 stunt in
Venezuela or the US-engineered expulsion of Haiti's President Aristide in
2004.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Looking forward to reading this material from Robert Sandels. LOVE his work.

Found it just as I have to leave, am coming back to see this. It's been a while since I read something from this EXCELLENT author.

Thank you, magbana!

He's one of the best.

Here's one he wrote which would be useful to many:

October 27 / 28, 2007

Pay the Invaders!
Cuba, Claims and Confiscations
By ROBERT SANDELS
http://www.counterpunch.org/sandels10272007.html