Latin America: Dubya rides south

In a rebuke of the Bush Administration, Kirchner - who has been described as the most important of the Left-leaning “pink tide” leaders - recently stated, “It cannot be that there are some who are bothered because our peoples are integrating. They should put an end to these paternalistic theories according to which we or [Brazil’s leader] Lula need to contain other presidents.”

Bush and the neo-cons in Washington, however, do hold a few cards up their sleaves. Uruguay, for example, which is governed by a Centre-Left coalition headed by Tabaré Vázquez Rosas, has recently come into conflict with Brazil over trade tariffs, and with Argentina over a proposed pulp mill. And historically, both Brazil and Argentina have been contemptuous of their smaller neighbour. This, in part, explains why Uruguay has knocked on Washington’s door - signing the first stage of a bilateral free-trade agreement.

If Vázquez’s administration decides to fully commit to the FTA with the US, Uruguay could be expelled from Mercosur (or Southern Common Market).

The recent embrace by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva (better known as “Lula”) of Bush, on the other hand, smells of opportunism - as Washington has proposed a joint ethanol project. While this project would reduce the US’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, for Brazil the consequences could be a social and ecological disaster as mono-cropping sugar would, according to some, exacerbate “rural areas of landlessness, hunger, unemployment, environmental degradation, and agrarian conflicts”.

There is a certain sentimentalism surrounding Lula’s Workers Party (PT) - especially because of its historic struggle against Brazil’s military dictatorship and its current, mild support of Chávez. But in a detailed paper published last December in the New Left Review, Francisco de Oliveira - a distinguished Brazilian social scientist - noted that Lula won last year’s elections unconvincingly, amid “the highest measure of electoral indifference in modern Brazilian history” with 23 per cent of voters abstaining and 8 per cent casting null or blank votes.

From Oliveira’s perspective the PT has lost its “ethical patrimony” as Lula “throws himself into fresh activities every day, constantly announcing new programs and social projects that are little more than virtual, but which serve to show that something is being done, to simulate political leadership”. Most alarmingly, Oliveira states that:

In the context of Brazil’s dizzying inequality, subjected to the constant bombardment of neoliberal privatisation, deregulation and attacks on rights, competition has produced not a democratising individualism but an intensification of barbarism, now escalating into political criminality.

When one considers, as Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Mark Engler has pointed out, that Brazil’s GDP over the last four years has averaged 2.6 per cent - the poorest in Latin America, alongside El Salvador and Haiti, and contrasting with Argentina’s 9 per cent per annum growth since 2002 - it is not difficult to see why so much internal discontent surrounds Lula’s Government.

One suspects Lula’s embrace of Bush has done little for his image in Latin America. Meanwhile, the growing alliance between Caracas, Havana, La Paz, Buenos Aires and now Quito continues to work to reduce poverty and forge regional integration.

At the end of his current visit, Bush may leave Latin America with Lula and traditional Right-wing lackeys on-side, however, there are growing demands from people in the region that their leaders act independently of “US interests” while seriously addressing the issues of poverty.

This coming September, Rigoberta Menchú - a human rights activists and recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize - is running for President of Guatemala. If she wins, have no doubts the letter of the first capital she will visit will start with “C,” not “Dubya”.