Obama and Latin America: The First Six Months

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Obama and Latin America: The First Six Months

Jul 23 2009
Kevin Young

Far from embodying any dramatic changes, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy has thus far tended toward continuity or worse in most major areas. The administration has escalated the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the advice of knowledgeable observers of the region and against the wishes of the vast majority of the Afghan and Pakistani populations. Despite bowing to overwhelming Iraqi pressure by agreeing to withdraw at least some U.S. forces from Iraq, Obama has pushed hard for continued war funding and has sought to consolidate U.S. control over Iraq “without being seen to do so,” as publicly conceded by one high-level official. With regard to Palestine, Obama has refused to endorse the decades-old international consensus and the 2002 Arab League peace proposal calling for a two-state solution on the pre-1967 borders. And he has increased total military spending by four percent over Bush-era levels rather than redirecting those funds to meet human needs.1 As with domestic issues, Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric has sounded more compassionate and far less arrogant than his predecessor’s, like when Obama has insisted on an immediate end to illegal Israeli settlements and talked about reconciliation with the Muslim world. Yet even such small steps have usually been confined to the realm of rhetoric; there is absolutely no indication, for example, that Obama has even considered cutting the $2.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel to force it to comply with international law.

To what extent has this pattern applied to Obama’s approach to Latin America? Acutely conscious of the long U.S. history of imperialist intervention in the region and thoroughly disgusted with the U.S.-promoted neoliberal economic policies of recent decades, most Latin Americans have long been anxious to see a new U.S. policy in the region, one that respects international law and national sovereignty while helping to promote sustainable and egalitarian economic development. Any assessment of the new administration must acknowledge, of course, that Obama himself does not singlehandedly determine policy, and that corporate, financial, military, and other elite interests constitute powerful obstacles to substantial change. Yet the President himself and the people he appoints nonetheless deserve a large portion of the praise or blame for the direction of U.S. policy. With this partial caveat in mind, this essay evaluates the extent to which Obama administration policy in Latin America has thus far adhered to ideals of democracy, human rights, and international law.

Obama and the Leftward Turn

The most significant challenge that Latin America has presented to Washington in the last decade has been its much-discussed leftward turn. With just three major exceptions (Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, with possible 2006 election fraud in the last), nearly every country on the continent has elected a left-of-center president promising to abandon economic neoliberalism and to forge strong regional alliances that will increase Latin American economic and political independence. Although the corporate press usually implicates Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez as the key culprit behind this shift, recent elections and policy changes have in fact reflected the growth of grassroots social movements and the thorough disillusionment of the region’s people with the policies promoted by U.S. leaders and Latin American elites.

Recent Latin American efforts to build intra-regional trade alliances, to institute measures of limited economic protectionism, and to limit the power of foreign capital predictably met with overt hostility from the Bush administration. The Obama administration has at time shown signs of change in this regard: in March, after right-wing members of the U.S. Congress had publicly threatened to cut off remittances to El Salvador and deport Salvadoran immigrants if the left-leaning FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes won the presidential election, the administration yielded to pressure from Salvadoran and U.S. activists by issuing an official statement of neutrality—a welcome change from Washington’s blatant intervention in support of the far-right ARENA party in the 2004 elections. But unfortunately, a more comprehensive review of Obama’s approach to the region suggests that despite this example and despite the often more tolerant, conciliatory tone of administration rhetoric, the basics of U.S. policy and strategy have thus far undergone few substantial modifications. The key test of Obama administration goodwill in Latin America—the extent to which it supports the right of Latin Americans to elect presidents who favor economic policies of redistribution and national control over key resources and to support those presidents once in office—has so far yielded, on the whole, rather discouraging results.

https://nacla.org/node/6017">NACLA.org - read more (highly recommended finishing the rest)