Congressl Hearing - Subc. Western Hemisphere: US Policy Toward Latin America in 2009, 2/4/09

[magbana]

SUBCOMMITTEE HEARING NOTICE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20515

SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
Eliot L. Engel (D-NY), Chairman

January 28, 2009

TO: MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS

You are respectfully requested to attend the following OPEN
hearing of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, to be held in
Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building:

DATE: Wednesday, February 4, 2009

TIME: 11:00 a.m.

SUBJECT: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in 2009 and
Beyond

WITNESSES: Mr. Sergio Bendixen
President
Bendixen & Associates

Cynthia McClintock, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science and International
Affairs
Director, Latin America and Hemispheric Studies
Program
The George Washington University

Mr. Eric Farnsworth
Vice President
Council of the Americas



NOTE: Witnesses may be added.

By Direction of
the Chairman

The Committee on Foreign Affairs seeks to make its facilities accessible
to persons with disabilities. If you are in need of special
accommodations, please call 202/225-5021 at least four business days in
advance of the event, whenever practicable. Questions with regard to
special accommodations in general (including availability of Committee
materials in alternative formats and assistive listening devices) may be
directed to the Committee as noted above.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Hope they'll have this on C-Span for those of us who live far away.

WEDNESDAY. I really want to be able to remember this, so I can look for it. C-Span broadcasts on the internet, too, of course, and in case you don't catch the hearing live, it may be available soon after, then later in archives:

http://www.c-span.org/

Here's one of the speakers, Bendixen:

Sergio Bendixen
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Sergio Bendixen, a member of the New Democrat Network (NDN) board of advisors, is "the President of Bendixen and Associates a Florida-based survey, management and communications consulting group which focuses on the characteristics of the Latino population and market in the United States and Latin America."

"Before forming Bendixen and Associates, Mr. Bendixen was the on-air political analyst for the Spanish International Network (1985-86), Univision (1987-92), CNN en Español (1993) and Telemundo (1994-98), and played a leadership role in several presidential campaigns."

"Bendixen, who conducted NDN's groundbreaking pre-election poll of Hispanic voters, will help develop a major new project at NDN that will create a new and more effective national strategy for Democrats in the Hispanic community. He joined NDN's Advisory Board in November 2002."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sergio_Bendixen

This article says he also worked for Hillary Clinton during her campaign.
http://www.nysun.com/national/latino-vote-is-in-play-in-presidential-contest/81332/

You may recall her brother Hugh Rodham married a virulent anti-Cuba Cuban "exile" activist, Maria Victoria Arias in South Florida as his second wife, seen here standing on the left, in the rose blouse.

http://mensual.prensa.com.nyud.net:8090/mensual/contenido/2005/12/01/hoy/fotos/597188.jpg

~~~~~~~~~
You may remember his surveys conducted regularly on the Cuban "exile" community in South Florida. Hope their stupid name, the "New Democrat Network" doesn't mean they are a buncha fascists, but no Democrat takes kindly to any abuse of the word.

http://images.politico.com.nyud.net:8090/global/arena/bendixen_sergio.jpg

Sergio Bendixen
~~~~~~~~~
Cynthia McClintock "is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, where she has been teaching since 1975. Cynthia earned her B.A. from Harvard University in 1967 and her Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1976. For the 2006-07 academic year, she has received a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for her project, "The Majority Runoff Presidential-Election Rule in Latin America."

"Cynthia's book The United States and Peru: Cooperation at a Cost (co-authored with Fabian Vallas) was published by Routledge in January 2003. Her previous books include Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998) and Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change in Peru (Princeton University Press, 1981). She is the author of numerous scholarly articles, which have appeared in World Politics and Comparative Politics, among other journals.

"During 1994-95, Cynthia was President of the Latin American Studies Association, an international scholarly association with more than 4,000 members. She has served in numerous administrative positions at George Washington University, in particular as Director of the Latin American Studies Program. A 1998-2000 member of the Council of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Cynthia was elected chair of APSA's Comparative Democratization Section for 2003-2005.“ <1>

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cynthia_McClintock

Here's an article by Cynthia McClintock you may want to scan!

Latin Americanists Urge Obama to Revamp Policies
Cynthia McClintock | November 13, 2008

Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco

Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org

I was pleased to join 12 past presidents and more than 200 members of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in signing a letter to Barack Obama urging him, as president, to respect and support the movements for progressive change in Latin America. We also called on him to dramatically reform U.S. policies toward the region.

Why were we so concerned? For most of the 20th century, the United States was the preponderant power in Latin America; after the end of the Cold War, it was the sole power. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States pushed and prodded Latin America to the adoption of what was called "the Washington Consensus" — namely, free markets and neoliberalism. In most countries, the result was a further concentration of wealth in an already severely unequal region and frequent financial crises — but disappointing economic growth.

At the same time, however, Latin America's democracies were becoming more robust. Gradually, movements representing indigenous peoples and the poor began to help elect leftist leaders who sought to develop alternative economic models: Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998; Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2005; Rafael Correa in Ecuador in 2006; and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2008. A particular goal was to secure the benefits of natural-resource wealth for citizens. Additionally, presidents such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile didn't reject neoliberalism outright but were much more committed than their predecessors to anti-poverty initiatives, political and social inclusion, and diverse global alliances.

So it should come as no surprise that the association wrote this letter to the new president shortly before his election. Founded in 1967 amid a U.S. obsession with communism that abetted the rise of repressive military regimes in many Latin American countries, and focused on a region with the world's most severe inequalities, LASA has long been committed to a progressive agenda. Most recently, for example, the association decided to hold its congresses outside of the United States in good part because of U.S. restrictions against scholarly exchange with Cuba.

The key goal of our letter was to encourage President-elect Obama to consider the "new Left" in Latin America as part and parcel of the movement for change in the United States. As we point out in the letter, Latin America's grassroots are rejecting its traditional elites for the same reasons that the U.S. "Main Street" is rejecting its "Wall Street."

2002 Coup Attempt
Unfortunately, as the letter states, "Washington's tendency to fight against hope and change has been especially prominent in recent U.S. responses to the democratically elected governments of Venezuela and Bolivia;" for most Latin Americanists, the nadir of Bush administration policy toward the region was its welcoming of the 2002 coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez. There had been no question for the Organization of American States, the Carter Center, or any other set of international observers that Chávez had been freely and fairly elected, and so Washington's support for a coup was blatantly hypocritical and odious. In both Venezuela and Bolivia, the Bush administration has allied with government opponents, many of whom have not been committed to the democratic rules of the game.

Does Obama recognize the parallel between the movements for a just and fair society in the United States and in Latin America? It seems clear that he does. In his book The Audacity of Hope, he writes of his experiences in Indonesia, where General Suharto had unleashed a massive purge of leftists just as the six-year-old Obama arrived. Obama writes of Suharto's harshly repressive rule, the International Monetary Fund's insistence on draconian measures hurting the poor during the country's 1997 financial collapse, and the worsening gap between rich and poor (pp. 271-279). He also criticizes U.S. foreign policy in general for its "tireless promotion of American-style capitalism and multinational corporations" and its "tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served our interests" (p. 279).

Also, in Obama's comments about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed free trade agreement with Colombia, he has made clear that he seeks to protect workers' rights not only in the United States but around the globe. Obama has been passionate in his call for a dramatic increase in U.S. aid for "bottom-up development," which would emphasize microfinance, vocational training, and the Millennium Development Goals, as well as debt cancellation for impoverished countries and reforms to the International Monetary Fund. In his campaign speeches, Obama called for change first in localities and then the United States and finally the world and ended with the pledge: "We can change the world."

Yet — and this is the premise of LASA's letter — if President Obama is to act on his recognition of the parallel between the two movements, it's almost certain the encouragement, and indeed the prodding, of LASA and the spectrum of progressive groups will be needed. Latin America won't be Obama's top foreign-policy priority. There are only 24 hours in every day with which to counter well-financed, entrenched interests such as the arms industry, investors and exporters seeking unregulated markets, the Cuban American National Foundation, the farm lobbies, and the National Rifle Association.

Concerns
In the campaign, Obama's positions on Latin America were many times more progressive than Republican nominee John McCain's, but for us at LASA they still fell short. Whereas McCain excoriated Chávez as a dictator and ridiculed Obama's openness to dialogue with him, Obama said that "it's important for us not to over-react to Chávez….we are interested in having a respectful dialogue with everybody in Latin America in terms of figuring out how we can improve the day to day lives of people." Yet, in September, Obama's national security spokesperson Wendy Morigi said that Obama was "very concerned" about President Evo Morales' decision to expel U.S. Ambassador Phillip Goldberg from Bolivia and suggested that Morales was "attempting to lay blame on outsiders." She also said that Obama was "profoundly troubled by President Hugo Chávez's unprovoked expulsion of U.S. Ambassador Patrick Duddy."

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5666

Could be worse, right? Looking forward to her part in this hearing.


Cynthia McClintock

~~~~~~~~~~
Well, you can't win them all. Eric Farnsworth seems to be a completely materialistic advocate for business interests, as revealed in any of his articles:

http://www.iie.com/publications/opeds/oped.cfm?ResearchID=781


http://business.fiu.edu.nyud.net:8090/newsletters/BusinessNetworks/2008/05/images/Global-Energy-3-Eric-Farnsworth.jpg

Eric Farnsworth