Progressive Policy in the Americas? A NACLA Rountable
Weisbrot, Deborah Poole, Lesley Gill, Greg Grandin, Christy Thornton, and Mark
report: u.s. policy Progressive Policy for the Americas? A NACLA Roundtable I n early september, nacla invited lesley gill, ceasing of hostilities toward Latin America’s left-Greg...
...Even in the case of Argentina this happened recently: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was barely in office when the Bush administration unleashed the “suitcase scandal,” which was completely political...
...influence in the region, and you may even see the few allies that the United States has, like Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, joining the Bank of the South, for example, because that becomes the new norm and the new way of integration...
...The purpose of this trial was to generate dirt on the Venezuelan government that could be used against Chávez, especially in the November municipal elections...
...One is that the United States is in a recession, so over the next couple of years you won’t have this expanding market...
...And that has really collapsed in almost all of the middle-income countries in the world, including in Latin America...
...So, as we predicted, Chávez responded very warmly to Obama’s election and offered to turn a new page and normalize relations...
...During the Obama administration, there will probably be a turning back toward Latin America, an attempt to reorganize policy toward Latin America in very nontraditional ways, because the traditional base, and the way the United States has projected its power, either through the IMF or what Mark has called the “creditors cartel,” has collapsed, and there is less influence in the military...
...And that involves broadening the spectrum in terms of who we understand as making democracy, making policy, making policy work or not work in the region...
...But there is a way in which the metaphor of Latin America as the United States’ backyard doesn’t really work...
...national security vis-à-vis Latin America in Colombia or Mexico that the United States to someone in has expanded since the end of the Cold War and has ignored Latin America...
...There is a recognition, if you look at social movements and the ways that alternative political imaginaries are being articulated in the region, that a lot of it is happening through these local artistic collectives...
...intervention in the region if not for that...
...This is language that the Bush administration has been using for two or three years now, since just after the disastrous Summit of the Americas in Argentina...
...I don’t think many Latin Americans are convinced by this rhetoric, but I do think that it resonates among sectors of the U.S...
...But there have been within “Good left, bad left”: over the last year, the media have constantly held up lula as an alternative to Chávez...
...But also to set out a series of humane issues that small-d democrats can agree on, whether it be debt reduction or the right to nationalization...
...So the norms have changed...
...There is still a certain thug factor— going in with a big stick and beating people up—but there is also some element of sophistication and complexity which is important to recognize...
...This is not necessarily permanent, but I think that if just five or six or seven years ago you had had an election like the one Paraguay just had, for example, where someone like Fernando Lugo is elected, there would have been much more threat of a military coup than there is now...
...the wake of the presidential election, the press has given this “good left, bad left” storyline a new twist: It is explicitly drawing a sympathetic parallel between Obama and Lula, as moderate-center leftists from humble origins, and contrasting both to the “irresponsible” Chávez...
...But of course, you always read any statement about what the U.S...
...They clearly supported the coup in Venezuela...
...values, Greg touched on biofuels, and we’ve talked a bit about issues of trade and debt relief, and so I wonder: Given this crossroads we’re standing at, if we were to artificially narrow down a set of pillars of a progressive agenda, what kinds of things should we push a new administration for...
...This problematic view, and the innocence that lies at the heart of it, ensures that in the eyes of many U.S...
...That’s at least four times as much as what the United States is spending in the region, and probably half of that is for military and police...
...A good example of how to fight this kind of thinking and how to begin talking about social justice and human rights in a sensible way is the movement to close the School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation...
...You don’t see the same movement that you had in the 1970s with the direct military years...
...authorities condition any deal with extradited paramilitary commanders, who are currently imprisoned in the United underlying any improvement in u.S...
...So I think that will be a big test for Obama...
...won’t have it for possibly an even longer time than that, because the United States has built up an unsustainable trade deficit during this period, so it cannot provide the big expanding market that it provided for Latin America over the last decade and a half...
...wars in the Middle East...
...Over the last year, governments there has been a constant drumbeat in the media holding up Lula as an alter whose first native to Chávez...
...It’s just not going to be resolved...
...But then we can also look for little margins of—I almost said “hope”!—of possibility in, say, Obama’s foreign policy statement on strengthening the State Department, an idea that may be read as against the grain, a move away from the Pentagon’s primacy in hemispheric policy...
...It’s of course a false priority is not choice, as Lula, or Michelle Bachelet or any other so-called good leftist, making rich doesn’t buy it...
...There are all kinds of possibilities...
...In addition, I would suggest cutting off military support to the government, supporting strong prolabor policies, and investigating accusations of complicity between U.S...
...It also helps U.S...
...And if an end to Plan Colombia—one that creates a negotiated settlement to the conflict there, and entails significant social reform— isn’t feasible, then we need to push for at least bringing in neighboring countries to broker a settlement, as well as recognizing the FARC as a belligerent force...
...The movement is very important because it challenges American exceptionalism and the amnesia that surrounds U.S...
...Ultimately, the big thing is Venezuela...
...He responded, “I fully recognize that money alone is not a sign of compassion or care, but it’s money aimed at helping people improve their lives...
...Because it is the demand for drugs that causes these problems in Latin America, and that comes from the United States and Europe...
...So that leaves them with USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other, even more covert actions—I say “more covert” because even though USAID is not a clandestine organization, it refuses to disclose its recipients...
...The United States was also heavily involved, through the IRI and other institutions, in overthrowing Haiti’s government in 2004...
...That was a powerful incentive for countries in the region to adopt policies that Washington wanted, including a lot of the neoliberal reforms, and that has also fallen apart for a couple of reasons...
...As an ascendant, confident world power, the United States treated Latin America as a unit...
...Then, when things start to fall apart, you blame it on neglect...
...It is the only region in the world where you have governments whose first priority is not making rich people richer...
...government has of Latin America...
...So, for all of those reasons I think there is going to be a continued decline of U.S...
...Bolivia and Venezuela are the prime examples...
...One of things NACLA does well, and can continue to do, is map out this very different terrain that the new administration is going to inherit...
...Plan Colombia has 9/11...
...That region in the kind of recklessness would have been unheard of even during the height world where of the Cold War...
...That was the major avenue of U.S...
...So these agreements will continue to be rejected, I think...
...relies on these kinds of efforts today because it has lost two important means of influence in the region: the IMf and sympathetic militaries...
...Anything less—including Obama’s call for a return to FDR’s Four Freedoms or the Good Neighbor Policy—is just empty rhetoric...
...The U.S...
...And it’s intervening in all these other ways as well...
...zations, in both Bolivia and Venezuela, and in other countries as well...
...government was to throw away the possibility of good relations with the new Argentine government, just to create another big public relations stunt to be used against Chávez...
...I also think that progressives could demand a new agenda for the U.S...
...Weisbrot: In terms of “social justice money,” I don’t think the government is going to get very far with that (laughter...
...government thinks it might do as having some nefarious motive...
...It goes beyond the last eight years, at least to 1959 and the “who lost Cuba...
...This makes widening the parameters of what is considered democracy very difficult...
...These countries have now gotten control over their natural resources in a way they never had...
...For instance, there is one program that I came across as I was looking for funding for myself—and I didn’t apply to this one (laughs)—that was a State Department/Defense Department joint program for grants to indigenous artistic collectives...
...debates...
...foreign policy is highly sophisticated and often seems more radical in its understanding of what’s happening than some of the left’s proposals...
...So that presents the question: How do we on the left talk about actual change and promoting social justice when the Bush administration is already doing it...
...policy The language of neglect goes hand-in-hand with that— if Latin America is secured, you can go about doing whatever you’re doing in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe or Africa...
...And you Combating “american exceptionalism”: a vigil and protest at the former School of the americas (now WHInSeC) at ft...
...involvement in Latin America’s dirty wars...
...So we’re at another historical crossroads: Latin America is once again on the move, and U.S...
...Greg Grandin: Another of NACLA’s strengths is that it has a very heterodox readership, ranging from people who are interested in social movements to those who are more sympathetic to the revived statist and developmentalist left...
...In people richer...
...Let’s start with Mark, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive policy institute that has managed to avoid that conundrum, pushing very progressive agendas without falling into the trap that other think tanks working on foreign policy sometimes fall into...
...power is in recession as a result of military overreach...
...We don’t know how much, but we know that they had advance knowledge, according to CIA documents that were released...
...benning, Georgia...
...But again, any small difference would be welcome...
...strategic reserve, the place where the United States constantly returns every time it enters into some kind of global crisis...
...There is a huge divide in how politics is happening now...
...Grandin: That language of neglect has a long history...
...But it’s unrelenting...
...In trying to gain traction with policy makers, you wind up trying to sell “soft power” and adopting the assumption that, say, Cuba or Nicaragua, or now Venezuela or Bolivia, are “problems” that have to be dealt with—thereby trying to couch the policies in terms of how to make U.S...
...They’re only now slowly moving in, but Venezuela now has a joint investment fund with China of $6 billion, where China has put in $4 billion...
...And Mark is right about normalization, but any real normalization would have to entail a return to Washington’s recognition of the right to national sovereignty...
...What we have called a “progressive policy agenda” is, I think, just a way to map that out...
...it happens through all of these different institutions, and it’s not a centralized thing...
...market for Latin American exports...
...Colombian victims and survivors worry that these individuals will never reveal what they know about atrocities, about the structure of their organizations, about the illegal wealth that they amassed, and about the involvement of Colombian politicians, foreign firms, and prominent individuals with their criminal activities, because they are imprisoned on drug charges...
...citizens to care about what happens to people outside their social universe...
...Then when that liberal multilateral system collapsed, as a result of Vietnam and other factors, the New Right turned to Latin America to regroup and developed the strategies of militarism and everything that goes along with Reaganomics...
...Weisbrot: If I could just add one thing, in terms of the so-called war on drugs: a shift to the demand side of the problem...
...The key question is if Obama would abandon the strategy, which we have seen over the last eight years, of Washington trying to play one region off the other...
...We also know that the IMF, within hours of the coup—and this is not a decision that’s made without the U.S...
...Deborah Poole is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University...
...Key to this relationship would be expanding Bush’s biofuel initiative, which greatly benefits Brazil’s agro-industry...
...What izing relations and not funding groups that are follows is an amended version of that conversa-trying to oppose, destabilize, or get rid of these tion, moderated by NACLA director and publisher governments—which the United States is con-Christy Thornton...
...You don’t have that combination anywhere else in the world...
...If you only engage in policy debates in terms of the state, state actors, and what we traditionally think of as policy makers, you’re not getting what the new terrain of politics is in Latin America...
...The statement also mentions debt relief and debt cancellation...
...Clinton used human rights to justify a New World Order in which the United States would arbitrate global peace in the post–Cold War era, and Bush appeals to human rights in the war on terror...
...Agency for International updated their remarks following the November 4 Development (USAID) funds all kinds of organi presidential election...
...What do you all make of this “neglect narrative...
...A NACLA Roundtable I n early september, nacla invited lesley gill, ceasing of hostilities toward Latin America’s left-Greg Grandin, Deborah Poole, and Mark of-center governments...
...It’s a great disservice to how we think about policies, critiques, and alternatives to not take seriously the idea that U.S...
...It is important to think about how, for example, the fear and xenophobia that have intensified in the United States since 9/11 not only feed justifications for the loss of domestic civil liberties, the deportation of immigrants, the militarization of the border, and the “tough on terror” logic, but also undergird support for, or at least indifference to, a hypermilitarized foreign policy and the trampling of human rights abroad...
...military...
...The U.S...
...Thornton: Another interesting thing that Greg has pointed is the increasing use of the phrase “social justice”—in scare quotes—by institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), with the idea that if the United States is able to promote “social justice” efforts in Latin America, and particularly in Venezuela, that this will serve to counter to the efforts of Chávez...
...Greg Grandin teaches history at NYU...
...That’s all you really need...
...There’s also resource nationalism...
...Southern Command (Southcom) has grown, and the military has laid out a plan for the next decade that defines all kinds of threats, including drug trafficking, crime, gangs, natural disasters, corruption, terrorism, poverty, and inequality, and it fans fears about radical Islam in the region...
...to contend with the social disorder and political opposition that have largely grown out of its own failed, free-market policies...
...government actually understands really, really well what’s happening in the region...
...citizens, “we” are always victimized by the violence of others, and any U.S...
...Grandin: Though it would be radically beyond anything that could actually happen, people should be allowed to move freely across borders...
...Washington is relying more and more on these kinds of efforts, because it has lost two of its most important means of influence in the region...
...Poole: Trying to read what Obama will do, I think there will be considerable pressure on him to continue the hostility toward Chávez, toward Morales, toward other governments that the United States and corporate capitalism don’t like in the region...
...Washlatin america ington’s quite reckless encouragement of Colombia almost brought the Andes is the only to the point of war last March...
...For example, Lula has consistently defended Chávez...
...But now, what you’re seeing is a more desperate strategy, that of a weakened, threatened hegemon—namely, an increased willingness to play one part of Latin America off another...
...policy Poole: We should also strongly demand a radical rethinking of drug policy, starting with decriminalization...
...Treasury Department—said it would support the coup government...
...province...
...Not that they didn’t try an awful lot anyway...
...It reminds anyone who listens that torture in the U.S...
...Capital and commodities have that right, so why not the citizens of Mexico and Central America...
...And its not just the you have State Department...
...and Latin American elites put into place the system that New Left diplomatic historian David Green described in the 1970s as a “closed hemisphere in an increasingly open world,” whereby Washington, through multilateral treaties and institutions, confirmed Latin America as a U.S...
...It would be United States or to cities in Latin America...
...Venezuela has, in one year, provided $9 billion in aid and zero-and low-interest loans for financing of oil in the Petrocaribe program, which is expanding...
...public, where deep-seated notions of American exceptionalism—the idea that the United States is essentially good and that it only uses its power for virtuous ends—shape perceptions of the world...
...strategy has been to isolate Venezuela, or to split Brazil and Chile off as a good left, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia as a bad left...
...What do you think is the key to a progressive policy toward Latin America...
...I think you begin to see a return to Latin America as a way to regroup...
...The Latin American side of the equation has less public presence, certainly less direct military involvement, but I see the two as strongly linked, rather than in competition...
...Much of the Cold War discourse about security came out of Latin America and was reworked for the Middle East, and the two complement each other...
...Thornton: The idea of turning back toward Latin America, which Greg mentioned, seems to be a reaction to a narrative that has we’ve heard a lot recently, one that says the Bush administration has neglected Latin America...
...So if all of these participatory organizations and movements are withdrawing from the domain of formal party politics, and “Policy,” as we understand it with a capital P, means engaging only with state actors and political party actors, then what does it mean to propose a policy agenda...
...orbit...
...government is not even going to be able to compete...
...Whatever opinion one may have of the FARC, it has been around for a long time, and any humane settlement will have to include it...
...policy become a better neighbor, or to bring those countries back into the U.S...
...Congress isn’t willing to give them the money even if they asked for it...
...It wasn’t anything on the order of what they’ve done in Bolivia and Venezuela, but it was pretty clear that it had a political motive, although they framed it all in terms of “good governance...
...attack is always understood as defensive...
...Deborah Poole: One major issue is how we think about constructing an alternative understanding of what policy itself is...
...policies, it puts the blame on its supposed lack of policy...
...Weisbrot: The main thing, as I said earlier, would be to normalize relations with Venezuela, with Cuba, with Bolivia...
...In terms of U.S...
...Gill: I agree that the United States has not neglected Latin America, even though, as Mark suggests, the region has probably benefited from U.S...
...As the Christian Science Monitor (November 12) counseled: “He came from the left and poverty, but da Silva rules from the center, as Obama must...
...power...
...The whole U.S...
...Because this is a very critical moment...
...Meanwhile, the boundaries between police and military functions have blurred in Latin America...
...The Bush administration has been very active and very aggressive, but there has been a limit to what it can do, and the norms have changed...
...The budget of the U.S...
...So, actually, it’s further to the right than the CFR...
...Of course, on the biggest and worst policy initiatives in the region, Obama has come out saying pretty clearly that he supports Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative—and these are going to be real sources of tremendous conflict, division, and violence in the region...
...power, even though this is difficult to imagine at the moment...
...A whole range of different actors from the grassroots organizations, indigenous organizations, and popular mobilizations comprise “participatory democracy” in Latin America...
...So this gives them some independence...
...As long as the drug trade continues to be criminalized, and militarized, violence is going to continue proliferating in Colombia and Mexico and Peru, and Ecuador, and now Argentina, throughout the region...
...They don’t really need a lot of help from the United States, they just need a lot more respect for even basic electoral democracy, let alone participatory democracy...
...Second, they don’t have the kind of leverage they used to have with the various militaries...
...policy the past, Washington tended to mobilize Latin America as a coherent region...
...And he has defended the Venezuelan government consistently as a democracy...
...And not just because of my own prejudices...
...So, in that sense, the whole category of policy opens up...
...It’s crucial to draw connections between the ways that neoliberalism and militarism have intensified race, gender, and class inequalities in both the United States and Latin America, and how these have brought people together and pushed them apart in new and old ways...
...If the United States does turn back to Latin America to reassert its hemispheric power, it will have less to do with prior neglect than a need for the U.S...
...policy works now...
...Greg suggests some good ways to go about renegotiating a relationship with Colombia...
...The question about where democracy is located and how we think about it is highly important to thinking critically about how we want to engage policy debates...
...If you look at Obama’s policy paper on Latin America, it echoes that of the Council on Foreign Relations, except that the CFR talks about normalizing relations with Cuba, which Obama doesn’t do...
...Grandin: It’s like what Noam Chomsky said about U.S...
...Poole: One of the really important things the left needs to do is recognize the complexity and the multiple ways in which the United States works its power in the region...
...It serves an obvious function: Instead of blaming poverty and misery in Latin America on U.S...
...A better metaphor is Latin America as the U.S...
...I think it would also see the two—in terms of the discourse and the politics of security and what it has meant for the military and corporate capitalism in the United States, as closely connected...
...An important task for progressives is to find ways to address the fear and xenophobia that sustain U.S...
...Mark Weisbrot: The main thing we should look for in a progressive policy agenda would be the the International Monetary Fund (IMF...
...there is a direct connection between them, as Greg’s work has shown...
...That’s about eight or 10 times what we’re spending on the Iraq war, relative to Bolivia’s economy...
...In that sense, I’m sort of making a plea to take seriously the degree of understanding that the U.S...
...And so there are calls for the United States to turn back, to report: u.s...
...it can’t just be generosity...
...Lesley Gill: We also have to consider how U.S...
...One of the important things is that some of these demands for decriminalization, many of which come out of Latin America itself, get put on the table and seriously considered...
...That’s probably the biggest change in the international financial system since the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1973...
...It’s not all just ignorance (laughs...
...It’s unlikely that the new administration is going to engage questions of participatory democracy...
...Another reason is that there are now alternative sources of capital, even besides Venezuela: China, Iran, and the oil countries that have built up enormous reserves...
...The Bush administration probably wouldn’t argue that it has ignored Latin America, if it’s going to be honest...
...policy Progressive Policy for the Americas...
...Christy Thornton: In thinking about how NACLA should address the possibilities for U.S...
...So, in terms of Cuba, ob-Weisbrot to participate in a roundtable discus-viously, that means lifting the embargo...
...The plan demonstrates how the definition hard to argue Poole: Yes, it would be hard to argue to someone of U.S...
...Other governments are pulling people out of poverty, but mostly as a by-product of making rich people richer, and not as a main goal of the government...
...On the other hand, the speech he gave in Miami to the Cuban American National Foundation, obviously crafted to win Florida, a “national security” state, was indistinguishable from anything McCain or Bush would say...
...There would have been even more U.S...
...The domain of culture tends to get written off as fluff because it’s not the hardcore, devastating part of foreign policy...
...power, promoting biofuels has the added benefit of strengthening the most reactionary sectors in Latin America, as we recently witnessed in Argentina, with the opposition to Fernández de Kirchner’s attempt to impose a modest tax on the surplus profits of agro-exporters...
...I think from the perspective of Plan latin america sized workers, unemployed youth—cluster...
...citizens make connections between the past and the present—to realize that the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib was less about a “few bad apples,” which is the same justification that the army offers up to explain away the SOA, than about a long-standing practice of the U.S...
...States and charged with drug trafficking, on their accounting for human rights crimes committed in Colombia...
...Thornton: That segues nicely into trying to develop what left proposals might look like...
...Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net) in Washington, D.C...
...This broadening of what democracy is in Latin America involves a broadening of thinking about what policy is, and how we direct our thinking about how policy is made, how it’s resisted, and how it works on the ground...
...policy under a new administration, there was a fear that in attempting to create a progressive policy agenda, you can end up adopting a lot of the assumptions that underwrite the more noxious aspects of U.S...
...But despite this worry, we felt strongly that there is a need for progressives to think of what such a policy agenda would look like, and that not staking out a progressive policy agenda would mean ceding the debate to other institutions...
...One, which I already mentioned, is the loss of their creditors’ cartel and the influence of the IMF...
...Many of the threats identified by SouthColombia or been a completely devastating pumping of milicom, like crime, gangs, and drug trafficking, supMexico that the tary support, lots of money for military purposes, posedly fester and grow in ungoverned spaces, support for the paramilitaries, support for the such as urban shantytowns, where the power of united States government, which is extremely unpopular and the state does not reach, and where the victims of has ignored has direct, known, and documented links to the free-market policies—displaced peasants, downparamilitaries...
...It’s a pity that most of the progressive community in the United States, outside of NACLA and a few other groups, doesn’t see this region as important, because it really is...
...power in this changing landscape...
...Meanwhile the left governments have developed stronger solidarity, which is completely overlooked in the United States and in the international press...
...If one country or another tried to break out of the dependent relationship set up after World War II, the United States did what it did to bring that country back into the fold...
...influence for the past 30 years...
...government is trying to influence politics now, and it would Lesley Gill teaches anthropology at Vanderbilt University...
...Another factor is the loss of an expanding U.S...
...There’s a hope among mainstream foreign-policy types that an Obama administration will develop a special relationship with Brazil, if not with Lula than with whoever is elected in 2010...
...It is also crucial that U.S...
...intervention or supporting of coups, but the idea of supporting these kinds of links with the government of Uribe, and now Calderón, that have direct links to paramilitaries, which claim to be fighting the drug cartels but are actually, in different and complex ways, ensuring that the drug cartels continue...
...In terms sion on the question of proposing a progressive U.S...
...foreign policy happens through all of these different means of co-opting, and getting money to people to find out what’s happening, entering even into things like local political and artistic collectives...
...So these are the main avenues on which the U.S...
...The first was after the Great Depression, when the United States’ ability to project its power entered into a crisis and the New Deal coalition worked out the strategies in Latin America of what became liberal multilateralism and the regional alliance system, which it then put into place elsewhere after World War II...
...You now have a common regionalist agenda that ern wars...
...This means trying to shift the discussions of drug policy off of the moral register, drop the idea that drugs is a moral problem that needs to be squashed militarily: That could be a really important demand to be pushed...
...He will appoint better labor attachés at embassies and better human rights people, and maybe try to strengthen the State Department...
...Even if your focus is on social movements, this is still an important element of social change...
...nationalism and that make it difficult for a lot of U.S...
...It will continue to lose influence for a whole set of structural reasons...
...I think at some point the Latin Americans themselves will demand that and say: Look, it really is your problem, your societies are the cause of this problem, and no matter what you do here, there is still going to be a supply if you still have this demand for it in your countries with so much money...
...But taking into account all of those differences, it’s incumbent on NACLA to come up with a policy agenda—not to influence Washington, but to give readers a set of tools to understand what’s happening...
...That’s the most influential country in the region right now, and that’s the one that the United States is completely hostile to, in a lot of ways even more than to Cuba...
...One of the historical achievements of NACLA has been that it has not directed itself toward top-down policy makers—and I agree with Mark’s assessment of how U.S...
...They’re going nowhere and running into trouble on the Washington side, as well...
...In a few cases, participants tinuing to do...
...It’s sad but true...
...Take a country like Mexico: People are withdrawing massively from the electoral party system, and all sorts of regional autonomy is happening, both in indigenous regions and in terms of popular organizations...
...This whole discourse of security in Latin America hasn’t just spilled over from the U.S...
...And it’s not just rhetorical...
...Bolivia is running a current account surplus representing 14% of GDP...
...There are going to be new strategies of reasserting U.S...
...Policy is both what the United States tries to do and how those attempts sometimes succeed and often fail...
...of Venezuela, Bolivia, that would mean normalforeign policy agenda toward Latin America...
...For example, it is not going to inherit a Mexico with a firm political party system—it’s just a complete mess, and almost irrelevant in terms of the real direction that country will be taking...
...Nevertheless, such a demand could begin with big cuts to the military budget, the end to Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative, the closure of foreign military bases in Guantánamo, Aruba, Curaçao, and El Salvador, as well as training centers like the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, and an end to outsourcing military operations to mercenary firms like DynCorp and Blackwater...
...Because today it just won’t be tolerated by the other countries...
...The concern with drug trafficking and criminality arose after the Cold War, when the U.S...
...What do you think the most important policy issues would be...
...He did promise to help Latin America free itself from “want,” but as Christy just reminded us, even Bush was talking about “social justice,” so where’s the difference...
...even when Venezuela denied the broadcast license to RCTV, Lula said that was within their rights, and he said that publicly and defended it...
...military did not start in Iraq, and it undercuts the army’s attempt to frame its training program for Latin American security forces in the discourse of human rights...
...But whatever immigration reform Obama does support, which he hopefully will, progressives should at least understand it in relation to NAFTA and other trade agreements, which have created the rural dislocation that has led to an increase in migration...
...firms and right-wing paramilitaries...
...As they pursue more regional energy integration, it takes them outside of the hub-and-spoke model that the United States has tried to build up through NAFTA and these bilateral agreements...
...It goes hand-in-hand with the way that the United States has mobilized Latin America since the years after World War II, when U.S...
...There will be strong pressure from the Washington foreign policy establishment for the Obama administration to reject Chávez’s overtures, and to reject him in a way that makes it almost impossible for Chávez to come back with another offer...
...policy must be giving Latin Americans the space to work out their own problems...
...Reading about this grant made me realize that the U.S...
...Argentina was just collateral damage as far as the Bush administration was concerned...
...So the U.S...
...And there was no espionage here...
...The trial showed how willing the U.S...
...For example, one of the countries Obama poses debt relief for is Bolivia, so this would help him get ahold of what’s happening there...
...The goal should be to have them treat the region more like they would treat Europe, for example: to respect their efforts at economic integration, as happened in Europe over a 50-year period, and say, OK, you can have this integration, and we’ll have commerce with you as you choose as a unit, as well as with individual countries, instead of trying to promote the huband-spoke model of the so-called free trade agreements or bilateral investment treaties...
...Weisbrot: There is no doubt that Latin America has benefited from the United States having two wars in the Middle East and another one in the planning stages...
...China has also stepped up its investment in Cuba...
...policy must be giving latin americans the space to work out their own problems— a recognition of the right to national sovereignty...
...First of all, it doesn’t have the money...
...You now have progressive governments that have not only accomplished quite a bit, but are really trying to be accountable, democratic, and pursue a progressive linDA PAneTTA agenda, and are willing to use non-neoliberal economic policies...
...the State Department, for a long time, a whole domain of cultural programs...
...Underlying any improvement in U.S...
...And we know that the Bush administration supported the coup by trying to convince the rest of the world that the coup government was legitimate...
...There are economic policies and military interventions, but there are also cultural policies...
...power more effecThe main thing we should look for in a progressive policy agenda would be the ceasing of hostilities toward latin america’s left-of-center governments...
...But NACLA has always been directed toward solidarity networks, activist networks, and trying to think about linkages between activist networks in Latin America and in the United States...
...It is not surprising that the military, as Mike Davis has noted, has become increasingly interested in developing more effective urban-warfare tactics, after the debacle in Mogadishu, for example, and given the power of the Iraqi insurgency in Baghdad...
...have to give up on this if it wanted to normalize relations with democracies in Latin America...
...We’ve raised a few: cultural promotion of U.S...
...that’s all on the record...
...policy in Latin America is intertwined with domestic concerns in the United States and how this shapes understandings of democracy, domestically and internationally...
...involvement in Middle Eastlarly evident in cities...
...Never mind that someone outside the United States donating to a foreign political campaign is not a crime under U.S...
...They can take care of themselves (laughs...
...Uribe enjoys enormous popular support—a bit like Fujimori did during the war against Sendero Luminoso—even though he and his administration are deeply connected to the paramilitaries who have been murdering and terrorizing civilians for many years...
...It’s social justice money...
...Gill: I agree, but I think that in addition to normalizing relations with Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia, there also needs to be a rethinking of the United States’ relationship to Colombia, where Uribe is Bush’s staunchest supporter in the region...
...government did intervene, even violently, in the cases where it thought it could accomplish something...
...Activists point to the long list of infamous military officials who passed though the SOA at some point in their careers, and they emphasize the army’s current refusal to hold anyone accountable for the training methods that were used at the school and to deal with its Cold War past...
...The Colombia, it’s hard to argue that they’ve ignored social crisis generated by neoliberalism is particu during the bush Latin America...
...When Bush visited Brazil in March 2007, a reporter asked him if the United States has turned its back on Latin America...
...One of the ideas for this issue is to flesh out a number of areas that we want to bring to the attention of the NACLA audience...
...What’s going to be happening politically on the ground...
...So I think it has done what it could to undermine these governments...
...In that sense, if he’s willing to keep supporting those, then there will not be a huge difference between his policies and those of Bush...
...These are not all new issues...
...Gill: Appeals to “social justice” and “human rights” go back to at least the Carter administration...
...They charged the defendants—Venezuelans accused of pressuring a businessman to keep quiet about $800,000 in cash that he tried to smuggle into Argentina, allegedly to donate to Fernández de Kirchner’s presidential campaign—under a law that’s almost never been used, except in cases of espionage...
...In report: u.s...
...One is tive...
...military, one that is less concerned with projecting U.S...
...According to Folha de São Paulo, the International Republican Institute (IRI), which is headed by John McCain, intervened in Brazil 2004–05 to push for legislation there that would help consolidate an opposition to the Workers Party (PT), Lula’s party...
...military had to find a new justification for intervention in Latin America, and when free-market policies started uprooting more people and forcing many to either make a living in the underground economy or migrate, either to the has become very difficult to reverse...
...On an administrative level, an Obama administration will represent an improvement...
...power—it’s so vast that any difference in degree is significant...
...This happened multiple times in the 20th century, but there were two really big moments...
...So to give up on that particular vision of all of these countries being tied to the United States ArCHiVO lATinO in a dependent manner, and treat the region more as a region that’s integrating economically and politically, as they want to do...
...It’s potentially volatile...
Vol. 42 • January 2009 • No. 1
