Asia Times: Bush down south

[seafan]

Bush down south

By Pepe Escobar
March 8, 2007

SAO PAULO - US President George W Bush - biting the dust in Iraq, contested at home, despised around the world - is taking a break and heading south on a five-stop tour of Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. He is not visiting the 100,000-hectare family ranch his daughter Barbara bought last autumn in the Paraguayan chaco. He might be tempted to stay in. The Bush reception won't be exactly of the Rolling Stones variety. Massive protests are scheduled everywhere - even in countries where he is not showing up. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - Bush's continental nemesis - will address a huge crowd in Buenos Aires, probably in a soccer stadium, as US Secret Service paranoia turns Sao Paulo into an immense Green Zone.


This had to be, fundamentally, a Bush-against-Chavez tour. Inevitably, it is also a Bush-against-Ahmadinejad tour. Last month, strengthening ties with Latin America, the Iranian president visited Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which in the neo-con scheme of things qualify, along with gas-rich Bolivia, as the southern "axis of evil".

For the Bush visit, the White House/State Department tactic is once again imperial "divide and rule'. Mercosur - the South American common market that is evolving as a true, indigenous integration model - will be actively bombarded, via different strategies targeting Brazil and Uruguay. Venezuela became a full Mercosur member last year.
Brazil is the big prize. The White House/State Department dream is semi-officially to crown President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as a "moderate reformist" capable of representing a continental alternative to the revolutionary Chavez. The masses all over South America are not buying it.

.....


Chavez' active proposal of South American integration via, among other projects, the giant Gasoducto del Sur (Gas Pipeline of the South) will be counteracted by Bush's proposal of an energy deal related to biofuel production and trade. Seventy percent of global ethanol production is divided between Brazil and the US. ..... In theory, the White House/State Department would like the setting up in South America and the Caribbean of a multinational system of biofuel production. But there won't be an ethanol cartel like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. For all the warm rhetoric, the ultra-powerful US corn lobby will never allow any president to open US markets to Brazilian ethanol.
Lula will ask, and Bush will change the subject. The State Department adviser on energy, Greg Manuel, made it clear that tariffs will remain the same. What the Bush administration is aiming at, medium-term, is a modest 5% contribution of biofuels to the United States' energy needs. Former Saudi ambassador Turki al-Faisal nailed it when he said that the United States' independence from oil is a "political myth".

.....


The political strategy of the White House southern offensive is much more complex. It involves changing tack in the combat against dreaded "radical populism" - this is how Washington views the current nationalist-revolutionary wave in Latin America. US right-wing think-tanks are now noticing that downright hostility against popular-elected governments in Latin America only make Bush and the US even more detested. The hostility will continue, of course, but the White House/State Department is still looking for the new, "softer" formula.
With Bush totally discredited and under siege at home, nothing is more refreshing than taking a break by courting client right-wing regimes such as Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala, as well as pseudo-center-left, progressive-turned-conservative governments in Brazil and Uruguay. The propaganda value cannot be underestimated - as the meetings will be mercilessly spun by the White House as evidence of "support" in South America for the Bush-engineered Iraq tragedy and the possibly imminent attack on Iran.

Fragmentation is the name of the game. Bush will provide separate, one-on-one deals, always trying to prevent any alliance/composition of these governments with Venezuela's Chavez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa. .....

.....

(emphasis added)

-------------------------------------
EDIT: COPYRIGHT. PLEASE POST ONLY
4 OR 5 PARAGRAPHS FROM THE COPYRIGHTED
NEWS SOURCE PER DU RULES. ALSO
PLEASE DO NOT COMBINE PARAGRAPHS.