A Chill Wind From the North: the US Returns to Latin America [View all]

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By Vijay Prashad
Source: The Hindu
April 15, 2016

Old familiar dangers lurk in the corners of Latin America. More than a decade of hope — enshrined in the experiments in Venezuela — now seems extinguished. The “pink tide” of electoral victories from Venezuela to Bolivia and upwards to Nicaragua appears to have receded. The Old Right has rejected the stentorian tones of the military for the mellifluous language of anti-corruption. Venezuela’s Bolivarians — the current face of its Left — lost the parliamentary elections, while Bolivia’s Evo Morales failed to amend the constitution to give him a fourth presidential term. Argentina’s electorate rejected the Peronist Left in favour of the Banker’s Right, while Brazil’s government of Dilma Rousseff suffers from the outright hostility of the media conglomerates and the conservative establishment.

Bleakness does not define the continent. In Peru, Verónika Mendoza of the Broad Front did credibly in the first round of the presidential contest, while in Colombia the Revolutionary Armed Forces prepare to sign a peace agreement and bring their politics to the ballot box. Institutions set up during the high point of the “pink tide”, such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (a regional trade platform), teleSUR (a regional media network), as well as various energy alliances (such as Petrocaribe and Petrosur), remain alive and reasonably well. New political currents and these institutional alignments suggest that the “pink tide” is not going to be easy to dismiss. It has established itself in the imagination of the people of Latin America and through the institutions set up over a decade ago.

Iraq distracts America

When Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Mr. Morales of Bolivia set in motion the Bolivarian alliance in 2004, the United States had its eyes on Iraq. The Global War on Terror, which now falsely included Iraq as a battlefield, absorbed the administration of President George W. Bush. An attempted coup against Chavez’s government in 2002 had failed as a result of the popular outpouring of support for the Venezuelan government. Latin America’s Left took advantage of this opening — as well as high commodity prices and demand from China — to build an alternative platform, which they called Bolivarianism. Named after Simón Bolívar, the liberator of Latin America from Spanish rule, Bolivarianism produced institutions for regional development. Trade within the region denominated in local currencies allowed the regional states to produce a new ethos.

The U.S., which sees Latin America as its backyard, continued to seek opportunities to undermine Bolivarianism. In 2006, U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield developed a strategy for “dividing chavismo” (the followers of Chavez) and “isolating Chavez internationally”. Plots and schemes appear in the U.S. State Department cables, with the ambassadors offering their own plans to destabilise governments loyal to the Bolivarian process. Nothing much came of it in the Bush years. South America’s economy enjoyed China’s voracious appetite for high-priced commodities whose profits allowed the countries to build up social welfare schemes to improve the livelihood of their populations.

Obama goes South:

Old elites of Latin America maintained their authority throughout the period of the Leftist ascendancy. They are closely linked to the military and to U.S. embassies. U.S. State Department cables — released by WikiLeaks — provide a window into the intrigue inside the embassies. In Bolivia, a U.S. diplomat met with opposition strategist Javier Flores and opposition leader Branko Marinkovic, both of whom talked about blowing up gas lines and engineering violence to destabilise the government of Mr. Morales. To help the Right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, the U.S. embassy hoped to encourage “funds to flow in the right direction”. These conspiracies built up the confidence of the elites and their associates. They waited to strike.

Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/a-chill-wind-from-the-north-the-us-returns-to-latin-america/