The Cincinnati Beacon
Why Would Latin Americans Protest Bush?
Friday, March 09, 2007
Posted by Justin Jeffre
Brendan of the Spacetropic blog must be living in another world and I think this article exemplifies the arrogance of ignorance that is common place in the United States of Amnesia. Latin Americans may be poor, but they have a much better understanding of US foreign policy than many Americans, like Brendan.
In Brendan’s article “Bush and Latin America” he starts off by saying,
“According to the Associated Press, George W.’s five day trip to Latin America is about reversing the perception of neglect and promoting the spread of democracy. The rise of clownish socialist Hugo Chavez seems to indicate that some nations may be backsliding, thinking perhaps that dictators and colossal governments are somehow the route to prosperity.
Can’t we just leave them alone, and let them (for the umpteenth time) figure out what a losing proposition these “popular” ultra-Left revolutions ultimately become? I know, I know - I’m sure there are plenty of folks in Latin America who would much prefer open markets, equal opportunities, and free speech, and we should completely abandon them to banana-pot socialism, but they really need to get the ball moving first themselves.”
Brendan describes Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a clown and a dictator, but Chavez has an approval rating in the 70% range versus Bush’s 30%. The democratically elected Chavez was briefly overthrown in 2001 in a US backed coup and then restored to power just days later in a popular uprising. The problem isn’t that the US neglects Latin America, it is that the US has strangled and terrorized Latin America for too long.
There is a long list of US backed coups and death squads in Latin America, most recently in Haiti. In 1954 the US overthrew a democratically elected leader to protect the United Fruit company’s (now Chiquita) interest. When they say “national interest” they really mean “corporate interest”. On September 11th 1973 the US backed a coup against the democratically elected Salvador Allende and installed a brutal dictator named General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s freemarket policies were the model for what the neo-conservatives are doing in Iraq today. Many people were tortured, kidnapped and disappeared under the brutal dictator. Now Colombian President Alvaro Uribe—the closest U.S. ally in Latin America—has been mired in scandal for having ties to rightwing paramilitary death squads. This is what is meant when the US is “spreading democracy.”
Historian and NYU professor Greg Grandin recently published a book titled “Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism”. It examines how U.S. foreign policy in Latin America has served as a model for U.S. actions in the Middle East and around the globe. In his book Grandin writes,
“After World War II, in the name of containing Communism, the United States, mostly through the actions of local allies, executed or encouraged coups in, among other places, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina and patronized a brutal mercenary war in Nicaragua.”
Grandin also writes,
“Indeed, Reagan’s Central American wars can best be understood as a dress rehearsal for what is going on now in the Middle East. It was in these wars where the coalition made up of neoconservatives, Christian evangelicals, free marketers, and nationalists that today stands behind George W. Bush’s expansive foreign policy first came together.”
In this interview from http://www.democracynow.org Grandin says that the United States turned Central America into one of the last killing fields of the Cold War. And this is why Central America has such a pull on the imagination of the neo-cons, because this occurred simultaneously with the end of the Cold War. Now, Reagan for the most part acted in moderation everywhere else in the world, in other hotspots of the world. In El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua, he gave that policy, U.S. policy to movement conservatives for them to act—it’s kind of wish fulfillment—the way they wished the U.S. would act towards the Soviet Union and the Middle East and in South Asia.
Grandin says in El Salvador, the U.S. supported an anti-communist regime in order to contain an insurgency that resulted in the deaths of something between 60,000 and 70,000 civilians. “In Nicaragua, we supported an anti-communist insurgency, which resulted in the murder of 30,000 to 40,000 civilians. And in Guatemala, we provided moral justification for a regime that was committing genocide, murdering somewhere around 200,000 civilians, mostly Mayan Indians. And that was throughout the 1980s. So when somebody like Margaret Thatcher says that Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot, there’s a certain kind of historical amnesia with those kind of pronouncements which get circulated in the mainstream press.”
Throughout the ‘80s and the ‘90s, there was a massive sell-off of government-owned industries and resources throughout all of Latin America. In Bolivia, water was privatized causing people to take to the streets. This led to the election of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous leader in well over a century. There is now a strong movement in South America led by Chavez (a modern day Allende) that is moving towards a Bolivarian-leftist revolution that may be spreading into Central America.
Nobel Peace prize winner and indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchu is now running for President in Guatamala. If Menchu wins, she will be the first woman to hold the office, as well as the first Mayan president. Menchu is leading a campaign for Guatemala’s former military rulers to be put on trial. Argentina with the help of Chavez, has turned away from the disasterous IMF imposed policies and there is an enormous popular reaction against this new imperialism and the free market absolutism.
According to Grandin, free market capitalism of the kind advanced by the United States under Reagan and extended by Clinton with all of the free trade agreements, has been an absolute failure. Between 1960 and 1980, which was the kind of heyday of state developmentalism, the economy in Latin America over the course of those two decades grew 89%. During the heyday of neo-liberalism or this kind of free market absolutism, it stagnated at somewhere around 1%. “There’s been ups and downs, but overall—and this is measured in terms of real wages per individual. So, it’s been a complete disaster. There’s been enormous growth of inequality. There’s been a massive gutting of the agricultural sector, which has forced migration from the rural areas to the cities. And then, obviously, this is connected to the rise in migration to the United States. It’s just been an enormous disaster. So there’s been a reaction against that more broadly, and then specifically, there’s a reaction against Bush’s militarism, post-9/11 foreign policy.”
Grandin says if it wasn’t for Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, the US would certainly be less tolerant of what Condoleezza Rice likes to call “differences with friends”. Brazilian President Lula’s opposition to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas or even Chile’s refusal to get behind the war on terror in a significant way certainly would be less tolerated if it were not for a greater threat. Venezuela is now a leader in OPEC.
Brendan writes: “Sure as rain, however, no matter how many vecinos are vaccinated on Uncle Sam’s dime (because we actually do care, even though it’s tedious) - the nightly news will cover the inevitable protestors that will materialize in comparatively small numbers along the president’s travel route. That news story is already being written.”
The news story is being written. I heard on NPR that the lame duck hadn’t even landed in Brazil and already 6,000 protestors were sprayed with tear gas. Over 30,000 people took to the streets of Sao Paulo on Thursday and people across the country demonstrated as well. Demonstrations have already broken out in Colombia and more protests are scheduled in Uruguay, Guatemala and Mexico. I suppose the pundits at Fox news and MSNBC will tell a different story, but this indigenous movement and the real struggle for human rights is on the march.
Unlike our controversial elections in 2000 and 2004, Venezuela has international election observers overseeing their elections. The idea that George W. Bush is spreading democracy is absurd. The US has the lowest voter participation in the western world and our elections are more about money and name recognition than real issues. In contrast, in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela the issues are clear.
The US should stop deterring democracy in Latin America and harboring terrorist in America. Uncle Sam should be paying massive reparations, implementing fair trade policies, ending our failed and racist “War on Drugs” and closing the School of the Americas death squad training camp in Fort Benning, Georgia. Bush can reduce terrorism by not funding and training terrorists. Latin Americans are protesting Bush because he is the face of America’s neo-colonialism and new global empire.
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