[R-G] Obama and Latin America: What He Really Promises

[Anthony Fenton]

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.