Latin America: Dubya rides south

When distinguished Uruguayan journalist Raúl Zibechi recently stated that President George W. Bush’s visit to Latin America this month is “the most ambitious attempt to reposition the United States in the region since the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) died in Mar del Plata in November of 2005”, he could not have been more accurate.

Dubious Bush rhetoric about increasing aid to Latin America aside, the US President’s selective tour of the region has two key objectives: to counter Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s influence throughout Latin America; and, as Zibechi argues, to form a “strategic alliance with Brazil for the production of ethanol”.

The US still has considerable clout in the region, but, unlike previous eras, an alternative vision to the “Washington consensus” not only exists, it has the backing of a state (Venezuela) with one of the largest oil reserves in the Western hemisphere - estimated at 77.8 billion barrels in 2004.

And the Venezuelan President’s latest project is certainly a major concern for Washington - Chávez proposes to create El Banco del Sur (or “Bank of the South”) without the traditional, free market conditions imposed by such organisations as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) or the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

According to Christopher Swann, in an article for Bloomberg.com, Venezuela has already purchased $US2.5 billion in government bonds to help pay off Argentina’s creditors; while $US1.5 billion has been offered to Bolivia; and $US500 million to Ecuador. Swann adds that:

The [IMF’s] worldwide portfolio has shrivelled to $11.8 billion from a peak of $81 billion in 2004, and a single nation, Turkey, now accounts for about 75 per cent ... Prosperity in Latin America means hard times for the IMF, which depends on income from loans.

As if inhabiting some parallel universe, the White House continues to push free market policies which have failed miserably throughout the region - increasing poverty, unemployment and migration to the developed world.

In Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, Bush declared, “We [the United States] care about the human condition”. Such comments often induce a certain ridicule from Latin Americans, considering, for example, Washington’s huge military support for Colombia’s President Álvaro Uribe Vélez - who has long had links with his country’s notorious drug cartels and who presides over a war rife with human rights violations committed by the Colombian armed forces and their paramilitary allies.

Visits by Bush to Guatemala - a country where a huge number of women each year are brutally murdered by ex-paramilitaries turned petty criminals - and Mexico - where an electoral fraud last year robbed Centre-Left candidate López Obrador of the presidency - do nothing but confirm the view that Washington has always preferred to befriend governments who put US interests first, and those of the general population last.

In contrast, Chávez’s huge popularity in Latin America is based on more than just denunciations of Bush’s policies. For example, Venezuela has promoted programs for the poor such as Misión Milagro (Miracle Mission) which fly Latin Americans free of charge to Havana for eye surgery. In Bolivia, Venezuelan aid and hundreds of Cuban doctors and teachers are providing basic services which millions of Bolivians have never known before.

Although many in Washington hope to restrict the Caracas-Havana alliance, the recent election of Centre-Left governments in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua has meant that all these countries have signed, or are in various stages of signing, what is called the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) - the Cuban-Venezuelan counter-proposal to the FTAA.

In the past few weeks, Argentina’s President Néstor Kirchner has also consolidated his country’s commercial and political commitments with Venezuela - signing accords which cover “finance, agriculture, food supply, farm equipment manufacturing, new housing and energy,” with the result that trade between the two countries will rise from the $US100 million a year (of 2003) to an expected $US1 billion this year.

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”.