The United States still struggles hard to reassert its former superiority over the Latin American nations. But the economic thrust, political élan, optimism and promise many once saw as the qualities bequeathed to his republic by George Washington are to be found more and more often throughout modern Latin America.
Led by a new generation of politicians, these countries are realising that the cards are beginning to be stacked in their favour for the first time since diamonds from Brazil and precious metals from Mexico and Peru financed European empires at a time when there was hardly a single university in North America. They are acquiring greater international importance by the day.
The International Monetary Fund, no friend of democracy in the region, has said that Latin America should grow at almost 6 per cent this year and that growth must be “very robust” in future.
Brazil, with massive new discoveries of offshore oil, will not take long to join the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries: It is already a more important trade partner for China than the US.
Washington would dearly love to see the back of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela for his bumptious rejection of US hegemony. It failed in the attempt it made to topple him in 2002. Now the Americans realise that to try again could risk losing a vital source of crude oil.
Under Western-backed neo-liberal governments, Bolivia was an economic laughing stock. Today it boasts the fastest growing economy in the whole region. With an expanding state sector aiming to sell gas and electric power to its neighbours, the country should continue to succeed. Such has been the flood of money from outside investors and speculators that various Latin American governments – which were once desperate for foreign funds on any terms – are now pondering ways of limiting it for fear of importing inflation.
The region is buzzing with fresh political thinking as new leaders with biting personal experience of poverty and hard struggle reach positions of power.
In January, Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla leader, takes over Brazil from Lula, the hero of organised labour who, as an eight-year old, sold peanuts on the streets of Santos where his father was a docker.
Another former guerrilla, José Mujica, is President of Uruguay. He languished in jail under Western-supported military dictatorships. As a boy, President Evo Morales of Bolivia used to vary his meagre diet by eating the orange skins dropped by coach passengers at the local bus stop. Álvaro García Linera, the Vice-President, was imprisoned for years under military tyrants without ever facing any tribunal. That never seemed to upset those governments which were loudly proclaiming their unwavering dedication of democracy and human rights in the region.
President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay won elections in 2008, thus overturning a pro-US dictatorship which, by dint of torture, bribery and fraud, had been in power since 1947. Washington gave it the status of an honorary democracy – as is presently the case with Egypt.
The Paraguayan and Bolivian governments have been particularly active in trying to safeguard the indigenous inhabitants of their countries. In La Paz, as a token of the variety of people it embraces, the government has formally adopted the title of “The Plurinational State of Bolivia”.
Latin Americans, notably the Mexicans, have been increasingly unwilling to take orders from the US on drug policy – especially after the state of California failed to relax controls on marijuana. The “war on drugs”, invented by the subsequently disgraced Richard Milhous Nixon, has thoroughly corrupted Mexico as demand rises north of the border and US firearms, sold like sweets in the north, flood down to the south.
Latin Americans are less and less inclined to follow the lead of a country which, while trying to ban narcotics by military means, pushes the sale of its alcohol and tobacco that are far more damaging to human health.
The Latin American republics see that “the war on drugs” is often a smokescreen behind which Washington attempts to bend the region’s police forces to its own objectives and help the US to achieve “full spectrum dominance” – or world domination.
This has brought horrific death and destruction to northern Mexico since December 2006 when, under President George W Bush’s instructions, President Felipe Calderón launched the military against the Mexican narcos. Since that fateful decision by the Mexican leader, more than 24,000 people have been killed in his country and many mutilated horribly.
The case involving Mexico and drugs brings up the wider point that proximity to the United States is no longer of economic benefit to its neighbours to the south. For decades, it was taken for granted that closeness to the big US market was advantageous to the Caribbean and its exports. However, as Nicolás Eyzaguirre of the IMF said recently, the Caribbean’s relationship with the sluggish markets of the US and the rest of the developed world has meant that it has not had the boost to trade that many South American countries with strong links to more buoyant economies have enjoyed. As the history of the 20th century is rewritten, we might recalling the saying of 19th century Mexican President Porfirio Díaz: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States”.
Successive US presidents have struggled to counter the upsurge in Latin American fortunes in economics and politics by making more use of the military might which – at great peril to the US Treasury’s financial position – the US has built up in its search for global military supremacy.
For three years now, for instance, the Fourth Fleet of the US Navy has been patrolling around South America, a living ghost with a fraction of the prestige that it and Britain’s Royal Navy once commanded in those waters long ago. In this context, successive Dutch governments have, in a bizarre decision, given the US naval base facilities in those islands of the Netherlands which are closest to Venezuelan territory. Clearly, these hostile moves by both the countries are directed against President Chávez.
During the presidency of Álvaro Uribe in Colombia, who is now facing serious charges of human rights abuses, the Pentagon was given five new bases for its aircraft. Uribe’s closeness to the US military must have been an encouragement for him to attack Ecuadorean territory from Colombian soil in 2008.
Formally, the 33 states of Latin America and the Caribbean make up a nuclear-free zone in accordance with the Treaty of Tlatelolco, first approved in 1967. It is not clear how US air and naval deployments in the area will sit with this non-nuclear commitment – if they do at all.
All eyes should be on Latin America to watch history being fashioned.
