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Peace Patriot

(24,010 posts)
4. One thing that Chavez and other LatAm leaders have done is...
Thu Nov 14, 2013, 12:28 PM
Nov 2013

...to make economic agreements with the U.S. less important to Latin America than they have been in the past.

They have done this, first of all, by creating a fairer and more level "playing field" as to LatAm resources. For instance, when the Chavez/Maduro government demanded a fairer deal for Venezuela from Exxon Mobil (50% of profits to benefit Venezuela's poor, vs prior 10%), and Exxon Mobile balked and walked out of the talks, this opened the oil contracts to a much wider swath of oil companies around the world (a small company in Italy; Norway's Statoil and others).

Lula da Silva implemented a similar policy in Brazil (re Brazil's new oil find), and this has been the rule, overall, regarding all kinds of investments, particularly in resources, and is most especially notable as to the World Bank portfolio (which sank to almost zero in LatAm over the last decade or so), at no loss (and much gain) to LatAm (because of draconian, society-wrecking World Bank/IMF loan conditions). We've seen it in Chinese and other Asian investments in LatAm (for instance, Japan's investment in lithium development in Bolivia, also with social justice requirements). The leftists have sought a multilateral marketplace--a fair marketplace--in the course of asserting control and sovereignty over their resources and pursuit of social justice.

Correa himself is an economist (educated in the U.S.) and no dummy. He wouldn't be "reviewing" economic agreements if he didn't have other options.

Frankly, I think this is an idle threat by the U.S., which still doesn't seem to have a clue about the sea change that has occurred in Latin America, with the rise of the leftist democracy movement, which is going to add Chile to the list of countries with leftist governments this year (in addition to Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua and El Salvador). The old threats don't work and just make people mad and even more determined to assert sovereignty and autonomy, and to reject U.S. bullying and domination, U.S. corporate looting and Pentagon expansion. Latin Americans want control of their own affairs, and will even endure temporary hardship (such as cutoffs of U.S. aid) to get it (as we've seen in Bolivia, Argentina and Venezuela). This is a freedom movement, though you wouldn't know it from the U.S.-dominated corporate press, which promotes the damned lie that leftists want to be, or are, dictators. None of them are any more dictators than FDR was. They are all champions of true democracy and of fairness, and are supported by majorities in fair elections.

This has its ironies and LOLs: The country that used to champion freedom now only champions freedom for huge, transglobal corporations and billionaires, and to hell with workers, small farmers, small businesses, the poor, the elderly, the sick, the young. U.S. policy is that any money that would go to the latter groups, to make a good society, instead should go into billionaires' pockets. And the countries that used to have vicious, U.S.-installed fascist dictators now demand the freedom that early north Americans fought for and won but which current north Americans can hardly remember: the sovereignty of the people.

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