U.S. Policy on Latin America Changing for Better

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

It may sound grandiose, but I think it’s true. Right now we are seeing the biggest political shift in the Western Hemisphere since the genocidal thief Christopher Columbus thought he had arrived in the Indian subcontinent, but had actually “discovered” the (already discovered) Americas.

The idea came to me most powerfully when I was watching the latest presidential debate and the topic turned to the last remaining outpost of the U.S. Empire in Latin America, Colombia. McCain did his usual bluster: “So Sen. Obama, who has never traveled south of our border, opposes the Colombia Free Trade Agreement,” said McCain. “The same country that’s helping us try to stop the flow of drugs into our country that’s killing young Americans.”

Now, in a heavily doctrinaire public discourse in the U.S., criticizing the Colombian government is like criticizing Israel, you don’t do it, despite the despicable human rights records of both countries. You just don’t go there.

Knowing Obama’s acquiescence to the Israel lobby, I was expecting the usual formulaic response about Marxist guerillas, etc. But he came out with this: “Actually, I understand it pretty well. The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions.”

Now, this is all true, but truth has never been a prerequisite for this election season, so to see Obama come out with it without being jumped on indicates a genuine shift in how the U.S. has been made to see Latin America. No longer, it seems, under a President Obama, will the country support any regime that subjugates its people and represents U.S. business interests. A brief history lesson is required to show how astonishing this really is.

Since 1823 and the so-called Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere has been designated by American planners as “our backyard,” a vast resource-rich expanse open for pillage and exploitation for the gain of the elite class in the U.S. and a handsomely rewarded quisling elite in the raped countries.

This dynamic has been constant and unbroken for two centuries.

President James Monroe obviously didn’t put it in these bald terms when he made his address to Congress on December 2, 1823, which forms the basis of this so-called doctrine. Monroe said that day that countries in the Western Hemisphere “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power,” which sounds like a good idea for the subjected peoples – until you realize Monroe instead gives his own country the right to take over from the European powers. “We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers,” he continues, “to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

He was telling the European powers simply, “It’s ours now!” Under this naked imperialism dressed up in fusty diplomatic language, the U.S. took Cuba from the Spanish in 1852 (the U.S. still illegally occupies Guantanamo Bay today), and then Puerto Rico from them in 1898 (which the U.S. still owns today).

As the European empires broke down completely after WWII, the idea of imperialism became increasingly untenable as indigenous movements removed their oppressors at a rapid rate. But as Europe lay in ruins, the U.S. was rising to its superpower status, and the elites weren’t going to lose control of their “backyard” during the ensuing Cold War with the Soviet Union. Occupations were frowned upon now, not least by an American population culturally averse to empires and imperialism. So instead the intelligence services turned to subverting any Latin American government that did not support American business interests away from the attention of the American people.

First went Guatemala in 1954, a coup against the center-left President Jacobo Arbenz who had the gall to redistribute land to landless peasants from the United Fruit Company. The CIA stepped in and installed a military junta and started one of the most horrendous civil wars in history that left 200,000 people dead.

Any country that elected any sort of left politician would incur a terrorist war of anti-democratic aggression. Brazil went down in 1961, Dominican Republic in 1963, Chile through the ’60s and eventually culminating in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1970s, and on and on. All the governments I mention were democratic, and many times they were replaced with a collection of open neo-Nazis, fascists and other dregs of humanity. It was all cloaked under the guise of the war against the “Evil Empire:” Soviet Russia. Much like today where Islamic fundamentalism gives the U.S. an excuse to do whatever it wants.

Millions upon millions of peoples were slaughtered across Latin America with the support of many U.S. household names: John Foster Dulles starting the Guatemalan bloodbath, Henry Kissinger backed the dictatorship in Chile, Ronald Reagan supporting the fascist Contras against the democratically elected Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These figures are all hailed as great heroes to this day in mainstream American culture, although not by the rest of the hemisphere, for obvious reasons.

John Perkins, who worked as an “Economic Hit Man” for a U.S. corporation for decades, has written a book exposing the type of work he did. He puts it succinctly: “Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It’s been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It’s only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.”

But even with this tragic history of exploitation and mass murder, I want to now sound an optimistic note. The Western Hemisphere — especially Latin America — is finally taking off the shackles of the imperial bully, and this time they will win.

No longer will democratically elected leaders from Chile to Bolivia to Brazil to Venezuela allow their sovereign nations to balk under the giant upstairs. When they propose economic plans to actually give the wealth of their lands to the people that live in it rather than rich corporations and exiles in Miami, they no longer take the U.S. trying to overthrow them with a shrug, they are ready.

In Bolivia recently, when the fascist paramilitary groups in eastern provinces like Pando massacred indigenous peasants and the pale-skinned traditional elite tried to start an uprising against the democratically elected president, Evo Morales, he didn’t stand for the encouragement the U.S. was giving. He kicked out the ambassador. And he also brought the governor who had incited the massacre to justice. On top of this stern action, all the newly independent center-left leaders of the Latin American bloc came to Morales’ aid at the U.N. They knew together they were a powerful force that couldn’t be crushed under the boot of the American government.

Hugo Chavez in Venezuela even followed suit and kicked out the ambassador there. And who can blame him? In 2002 when he himself was ousted temporarily by a U.S.-backed coup that put a billionaire businessman into power and suspended the constitution and democracy, the people of the Venezuelan barrios fought back; marching in their hundreds of thousands for the first leader that had ever considered them worthy of their own minerals. He had to be reinstated because the people of Venezuela were too powerful and alive to their plight to be raped again by another lackey of the U.S.
On top of this, the new independence is being entrenched through the new Bank of the South, which will gradually bring Latin American countries away from their reliance on the agents of Western governments, the IMF and World Bank. And then there is Telesur, a Latin American analogue to Al Jazeera, a continent-wide news network that undercuts the corporate media bias of the U.S. and their supporters in Latin America. These are important developments that will outlast any individuals, which is the kind of change that is truly needed for this new independence to be resilient.

There are a number of reasons for the U.S. losing grip of its backyard. First, this generation of left-wing leaders have learned from the past. They know about the dirty tricks of the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy and other agents of the U.S. government. They are aware that they have a constant battle against reactionary elements supported by the U.S. But in Bolivia, for example, the indigenous communities are equipping themselves to fight back; there will be none of Salvador Allende’s erroneous belief in pacifism. “If the right-wing tries to liquidate democracy we will fight you to defend civility,” is now the message.

The second important factor is that because the Cold War has ended it is harder for the U.S. government and their conduits in the corporate media to paint any politician who is vaguely left of center as an agent of Soviet Russia. Admittedly the New York Post, without shame, does describe Chavez – one of the most frequently elected leaders in the world – as a dictator. The childish invective against him comes from all over the narrow media spectrum in the U.S. But when they try to destroy democracy, like in 2002, the old Cold War lie doesn’t work. The left in Latin America are using this to their advantage by accentuating their independence from anyone and building alliances all over the world from Iran to China.

The third reason is that the U.S. imperial project is so bogged down in the Middle East — where support for dictators has been equally obscene — so they have in many ways taken their eye off the ball. It’s arguable that without September 11, Chavez would be history by now, as well as Morales.

The fourth reason is that when the U.S. helped set up Operation Condor — a continent-wide terror network — with their surrogate General Pinochet, they could count on the compliance of the security states they had helped set up. Now the tables have turned. With Fernando Lugo’s election in Paraguay, the whole continent is a left-wing independent bloc, so they can’t be subverted as easily and a strong alliance has been built between all the leaders, who now come to each other’s defense against subversion.

For the first time in centuries, down in Latin America things are looking up. Democracy, economic justice and dignity are returning to the continent that has been crushed under the U.S.’ boot for so long. This time they will win.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.