The irony of attacks on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by cynical,
sadistic country-wreckers like Condoleezza Rica and John Negroponte can
be lost only on them. While Venezuela advances steadily towards
prosperity and social equity, the Bush regime commits its extraordinary
rendition of the US people to military disaster and falling living
standards. Speaking to a Congressional hearing on February 7th this
year, Rice declared, ""I do believe that the president of Venezuela is
really, really destroying his own country, economically,
politically."(1)
People walked out on the fictional Captain Queeg (2) when he took out
some silver balls on the court martial witness stand and proceeded to
fidget with them as his testimony collapsed into paranoid
mumblings.
In real life, Prince of Delusion George W. Bush, has yet to face
outright
mutiny from his fellow dysfunctional political leaders.
Presumably the motley corporate-behoven crew running the single party
US ship of State
are waiting until they and the rest of the world are in the lifeboats.
In Latin America people may be more tuned-in to reality. When respected
mainstream political analyst and historian Luiz Moniz Bandeira
publicy affirms that Brazil sees a US
invasion of Amazonia as its main external military threat, the Bush
regime's jaded-Reaganaut State Department's "freedom and democracy"
rhetoric has clearly lost whatever
slap-it-on-thick-maybe-they'll-never-notice credibility it ever had.
Although Bandeira discounts the
likelihood of such an invasion, he says it is the main premise for the
Brazilian army's strategic planning. He notes, the US
military "does not exist to defend its national frontiers but
rather for planetary domination and aggression to secure sources of
energy and raw materials." (3)
Shifting the perspective
It is now commonplace to argue that the US government is engaged in a
losing battle to defend its waning prestige and influence in Latin
America. Only the spell of North America's habitual narcissism
renders that interpretation of much interest. Looked at from south of
the Rio Grande,
the potential breadth and depth of imperial collapse is perhaps less
interesting than the nature, scale and ambition of the integration
processes
under way. If the US has lost influence, the wider imperialist global
corporate Thing seems to have adapted well, mutating fast to
continue its parasitic gorging on the peoples of Latin America.
Even so, when Captain Queeg toured five Latin American
countries recently, his tour underlined the comprehensive failure of
his regime's feints at regional leadership. Serious
high level
visits by Chinese and Russian political leaders contrast with the
contemptible, stagnant "do what we want, or else" corporate arrogance
of US government diplomacy. In that context, the fact that China has
prioritised Ecuador and Bolivia for increased oil and gas investment
incentives to Chinese companies (4) is very much worth noting. When
Russian and
Chinese leaders visit Latin America they are pushing at a door
to the imperial Bluebeard's Castle the US government left poorly
guarded, now prised wide open by the peoples once prisoners inside.
President Putin of Russia visited Cuba in 2000 and
Mexico, Brazil and Chile in 2004. Chinese President Hu Jintao also made
an extensive visit to Latin America in 2004. Russian Prime Minister
Mijail Fradkov visited Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 2006. Just
prior
to Queeg's Latin American jaunt, Russia's vice-Foreign Minister
Serguei Kisliak declared during a speech in Uruguay to the Association
for Latin
American Integration on March 9th "Russia wants to increase political
and economic cooperation with the countries of Latin America". (5)
The changing compass of Latin American diplomacy and the deep
political conflicts its competing integration
initiatives have engendered also indicate the extent to which people in
Latin America are focusing on their own needs, making the North
American imperial corporate plutocrat elite and their local allies
negotiate from relative weakness. 2007 has a sparse electoral calendar
compared to
the 2006 flurry of presidential elections. But the elections in
Guatemala in November and those in Argentina in October will probably
reveal a great deal about the durability of current trends against the
legacy of twenty years of Washington Consensus economic
policy, the latest stage in five centuries of colonial subjugation.
What kind of integration?
Paraguay votes for a new President in April 2008. Present incumbent
Nicanor Duarte said on March 15th, "It is not possible for the
North American government to do what it likes in much more sensitive
areas like waging war, fixing international prices when it does not
have the strength to convince first world countries to drop
protectionist barriers."(6) This March, Duarte sent his Foreign
Minister, Defence Minister
and armed forces chief to Bolivia to sign security agreements.
Paraguayan Foreign Minister Ruben Rodriguez said "We are going to look
at broad themes from commercial integration, cooperation and national
defence to regional security". Among the matters discussed was the
Infante Rivarola-Cañada Oruro frontier river port project, part
of a proposed East-West corridor from the Pacific ports of Chile and
Peru to the Brazilian port of Santos on the Atlantic. (7)
Such infrastructure projects raise the question of the logic behind
them. Are they principally to benefit multinational corporations so
as to increase profitability for international corporate shareholders?
Or are they an integral component of national development plans focused
on the needs of peoples? Sketching a definitive taxonomy of which
model which countries in the region favour is difficult, as arguments
are
constant and change as events develop. For example, many commentators
view Bolivia as clearly in the anti-neoliberal camp. But acute
participants in events like former hydrocarbons minister Andres Solis
Rada point
to half-baked nationalization policies and Bolivia's participation in
the UN's imperialist occupation of Haiti. His criticism
questions how those policies square with
claims of moves towards integration based on solidarity and recovering
resources from multinational corporations to benefit local people.
While it is undeniable that the influence of neoliberal bastions like
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund may have diminished,
the role of outfits like the Inter-American Development Bank, the
Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and perhaps too the intellectual
and advisory influence of UN's Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) are less clearly
diminished. For example the IADB's much trumpeted debt forgiveness for
countries like Bolivia, Nicaragua, Haiti and Honduras comes with the
standard neoliberal conditionalities that have consistently destroyed
the capacity of nations to protect the fundamental interests of their
peoples.(8) Nicaragua is still under
the thumb of the IMF.
Bolivia owes over US$700m to CAF paying over
US$100m in capital and interests each year. In this regard, the Banco
Sur initiative of Venezuela, Argentina, and now Bolivia is a decisive
shift towards financial autonomy for the region creating a funding
alternative that eventually may shove the US dominated international
financial institutions active in Latin America to the margins, along
with their immiserating conditionalities. In wider geopolitical terms,
Bancosur may help free countries like Ecuador that are currently tied
to the dollar. Pablo Davalos suggests Bancosur might allow
regional currencies to index themselves at a variable rate against the
Euro - something unthinkable under current arrangements.(9)
Such broadening of options appears also in the area of
telecommunications.
Telesur will shortly begin transmitting news from the
perspective of people in Latin America into Central America from relay
stations in Nicaragua. (10) So people will finally have a Latin
American regional alternative to CNN and the other corporate
imperialist news outlets. Nicaragua joins existing Telesur partners
Argentina,
Cuba, Uruguay, Bolivia and Venezuela. In the energy sector an
organization (OPEGASUR) of South American gas exporters is proposed,
comprised of Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia. (11) The
planned group will very likely integrate into a worldwide gas cartel
along with Russia, Algeria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Captain Queeg tweaks his balls
These moves aim at integrating Caribbean countries as well as countries
in Latin America. Venezuela and Cuba have worked together on determined
diplomacy
in the Caribbean for years now. Among the fruits of that diplomacy has
been the Petrocaribe initiative offering preferential terms of oil
supply to the island countries of the Caribbean. Recently Jamaica
signed another
Memorandum of Understanding with Venezuela aimed at improving its
ability to generate electricity from gas. (12) Trinidad and Tobago,
whose government has been resistant to Petrocaribe, recently signed a
gas agreement with Venezuela which may lead the Caribbean nation to
join OPEGASUR. Both Venezuela and Cuba have been assisting countries
to meet the needs of impoverished people in Latin America and the
Caribbean for years with free medical care for hundreds of thousands of
patients and educational support
ranging from literacy programmes to tens of thousands of university
scholarships
The contrast between this kind of creative solidarity and US government
practice is dramatic. During his recent Latin American tour,
Bush-Queeg refrained for a change from attacking Hugo Chavez. His
regime can
hardly accuse Chavez of anti-Americanism when Venezuela is helping
400,000 low income families in the United States this year with cheap
heating oil. As they showed in New Orleans, it is Queeg and his
corporate plutocrat cronies who
despise the people of the United States.
Likewise, their long record of depradations in Latin America has left
people there in
no doubt how the US government views them - disposable cheap labour and
dupes for paying illegitimate foreign debt.
Even Guatemala's president, conservative oligarch pin-up Oscar
Berger, questioned the vicious round up of over 300 undocumented
Guatemalans in Massachusetts by US immigration authorities. Mexico's
Felipe Calderon questioned the proposed US anti-migrant border wall.
Despite that polite dissent, most of Bush-Queeg's visit was a mutual
ball-fidget with corrupt
fascist regional
allies like the fraudulently elected, repressive
Calderon and Colombia's narco-terror paramilitary President
Alvaro Uribe. In Brazil and Uruguay, Queeg squeezed balls with social
democrat
"free market" wheeler-dealers Lula da Silva and Tabare Vasquez
respectively. If one looks for viable gametes from all that ball
squeezing, three
main swimmers squirted out.
One is the move to try and impose biofuel
crops like sugar cane and maize as monocultures for producing ethanol
across Latin America for the benefit of US corporate agri-business and
energy giants, made flesh in a signed agreement with President da
Silva.
A second is the exacerbation of existing divisions in the Mercosur
trading bloc whose member countries decisively defeated the Bush
regime's pet Free Trade
Area of the
Americas initiative. A third is to encourage governments to "stay the
course" with neo-liberal policies in the region like Plan Puebla Panama
and the South American Regional Infrastructure Initiative (IIRSA) and
the ragged looking efforts to tie up "free trade"-in-your-sovereignty
deals as the poor plutocrat's substitute for the Free Trade Area of the
Americas.
The second swimmer needs to hurry up if it is to penetrate and
fertilize a collapse of
Mercosur as an effective opponent of US and European double
standards on farm subsidies. The influence of Venezuela and
perhaps Bolivia will very likely shift the regional trade bloc towards
a broader, more
socially conscious interpretation of its role. To that end Bush
is putting stress on differences between Argentina and the Tabare
Vasquez's government in Uruguay - both members of Mercosur.
Vasquez's pro-US
Economics Minister Danilo Astori has played "will he?-won't he?" as
regards relations with Mercosur from
the start of Vasquez's administration. So one reads a headline in the
Financial Times of February 9th "Uruguay warns on Mercosur
policies" over an article saying "Uruguay would consider downgrading
its status in Mercosur if the
regional trade bloc prevents it from making a bilateral trade deal with
the US, the country's finance minister has said." A month later one
finds furious back-pedalling quoted in Prensa Latina of March 14th
"Danilo Astori, considered to be the Cabinet member most inclined
towards links with Washington affirmed that "it doesn't cross my mind"
to abandon Mercosur."
Nicaragua - a battleground again
The first and third swimmers are those designs for ethanol-producing
monocultures and Inter-American Development Bank driven infrastructure
mega-projects linked to free trade deals like the Central American Free
Trade Agreement. These schemes are the practical follow-up to the
neo-liberal policies of privatisation, deregulation and shrinking
government social spending that have condemned tens of millions of
people in Central America to wretched poverty or migration while
enriching a tiny international and local corporate elite. In Nicaragua,
with President Daniel Ortega's election last November the country
has once again become a zone of conflict.
This time it is an economic and ideological battle between global
corporate imperialism and the solidarity based Bolivarian Alternative
for the Americas driven by Venezuela and Cuba. When Hugo Chavez visited
Nicaragua's historic university city of Leon early in March to
announce, among other projects, a US$2.5bn oil refinery he and Ortega
were effectively using a kind of economic judo to throw imperial giants
like the United States, the European Union and their Pacific
allies. Leon is less than a 100km from Nicaragua's only important
international seaport - Corinto - in an area that is a key part of the
IADB's Plan Puebla Panama infrastructure mega-plan.
The ALBA planners have taken advantage of that mega-plan (designed to
foment benefits for international and local corporate shareholders) in
order to site a major ALBA capital investment. They will thus extract
maximum transport communications leverage from an ideologically opposed
economic investment plan. At the same time, Venezuela is working with
Nicaragua to rehabilitate a virtually abandoned existing highway across
northern Nicaragua, from Matagalpa to the backwater Atlantic
Coast port of Bilwis - known in Spanish as Puerto Cabezas. While that
project falls well short of the long proposed "dry canal" linking
Nicaragua's Atlantic and Pacific Coast, in the short term it represents
a very feasible and dramatic improvement on the 16 years of neglect
Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast suffered under successive previous
neo-liberal administrations.
The arguments over the cultivation of ethanol take on a special meaning
in Nicaragua and Central America generally where energy problems are
acute. But the strong memory of the results of cotton monoculture which
destroyed Nicaragua's Pacific Coast ecology and of the Nemagon
pesticide scandal in the area's banana plantations make the US inspired
ethanol project extremely controversial. Another sign of the complexity
of the ideological fight between versions of neoliberalism and ALBA is
the tepid and sometimes outright hostile reaction to Venezuela's
cooperation agreements with Nicaragua. El Nuevo Diario, the flagship
newspaper many people regard as the mouthpiece of the social democrat
MRS party, hardly reported the visit to Leon by Hugo Chavez, for
example, when in countries much bigger than Nicaragua it would have
been major front page news.
In this Nicaragua reflects continent-wide ideological divisions. Why is
the pro-capitalist social democrat government of Brazil so lukewarm
about ALBA and Banco Sur? In fact the main objection the governments of
Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay have to the neoliberal model is that the
imperial powers operate a double standard on farm subsidies. Presidents
Da Silva, Duarte and Vasquez seem to pretend that the mirage of
universal free trade will somehow magically benefit their peoples
rather than persist in marginalizing the poor majority while handing
disproportionate benefits to an already wealthy corporate elite.
Against massive odds, Venezuela and Cuba have demonstrated beyond any
argument that strong governments implementing decisive
redistributionist economic policies are the best guarantee of
prosperity and social equity. Nicaragua is a microcosm of wider
continental arguments like the struggle over the raison d'être of
Mercosur or the underlying logic of change in Bolivia and Ecuador. Old
habits die hard, especially habits 500 years old. The US may have lost
influence in the region but it still remains to be seen whether recent
changes will eventually lessen Latin America's economic dependence on
raw materials exports and family remittances from millions of migrant
workers. Without consolidating radical change, the region
could end up swapping one kind of imperialism for a different, equally
debilitating kind, shared out between the old imperial powers alongside
China, India and Russia - with Brazil as the local imperial enforcer.
Notes
1. "Condoleezza Rice: Hugo Chavez 'Destroying' Venezuela",
NewsMax.com, Feb. 7th 2007
2. Protagonist of Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny"
3. "Desde Brasil, advierten que es posible una invasión
estadounidense sobre la Amazonia y la Patagonia" Télam-
MR 17/03/07 in Aporrea.org 17/3/2007
4. "Iran, Sudan and Nigeria off China incentive list", Richard
McGregor, FInancial Times March 2 2007
5. "Rusia profundiza relaciones con Latinoamérica " Prensa
Latina, March 9th 2007
6. " Duarte dice que en Venezuela hay sobredosis de democracia" EFE in
Prensa Latina March 15th 2007
7. "Bolivia y Paraguay impulsan acuerdos de integración", Prensa
Latina 19th 2007
8. "El BID aprueba un alivio ¿para quiénes?" Jubileo Sur,
Rebelión 19/03/2007
9. "El Banco del Sur: La ruta hacia una nueva arquitectura financiera "
Pablo Dávalos, Rebelion, March 19th 2007
10. "Nicaragua se incorpora a TeleSUR" Telesur, in Rebelion 14-03-2007
11. "Sudamérica: Gas natural para la integración", Mario
Esquivel, Prensa Latina, March 14th 2007
12. "Jamaica y Venezuela firman Memorando de Entendimiento" Prensa
Latina, March 12th 2007
13. "Venezuela y Trinidad y Tobago proyectan alianza
energética", Prensa Latina, March 21st 2007