The South American Zeitgeist

May 12, 2006

As the US struggles from a position of weakness with a pugnacious Iran on its nuclear program, the downside of today's energy crunch has reared its head around the planet and has showcased, somewhat ironically, America's long-term strategic myopia in its own backyard.  As Iran skillfully uses its own vast oil reserves to drive a wedge in the UN Security Council, two troublesome issues tie Washington's hands with respect to Iran:  1)  the operational capacity of existing planetary production and refining facilities; and 2) new energy demands from the emergent titans, China and India.  While Washington obsesses over the Persian dilemma, South America moves steadily away from a global economic model favored by America and the G-8 and more toward an antithetical economic platform being cobbled together by America's old buddies, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, along with their diligent and brilliant new upstart, Evo Morales.  Sometimes you just can't win for losing.

Never mind for the moment that longstanding resentment still smolders from the memory of US military invasions of Mexico,  Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Grenada, and Haiti.  Never mind all the US mischief-making in Central America in the eighties.  Never mind that the CIA orchestrated the overthrows of elected governments in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973, and that the US trained and funded death squads and provided military and intelligence support for right-wing dictators throughout the hemisphere in the sixties and seventies when tens of thousands of the civilian opposition simply went missing. 

With the planetary economy in flux from the new paradigm of globalization, it should be clear to many casual observers as well as global economic wonks that there is a basic unsustainability to practices long in vogue among Big Oil players.  The festering unrest in Nigeria perhaps ideally exemplifies the results of exploiting vast wealth while conceding the local community no more than token crumbs in social improvement and heightened standards of living.  How is it possible, one asks, that a situation so dire can arise as to motivate perfectly intelligent people into potential self-immolation (200 dead, yesterday alone) for the meager gain of a few gallons of gas?   Can we be surprised that foreign oil workers are being gunned down in Port Harcourt and kidnapped from production fields in the Niger Delta or that there is a growing militant insurgency demanding some local benefit from these proceeds?

While the forces of globalization have played out with hopeful signs in South America's largest economy, Brazil, they have not been so kind to impoverished Bolivia, which has suffered years of mass protests among its indigent population, or neighboring Peru, where resentment likewise festers over a failure in governance.  The US watched Mexico nationalize its petroleum sector in 1938 and then Venezuela do the same in 1975; it would have taken little imagination to predict the 2005 election of anti-globalization socialist, Evo Morales, or his subsequent nationalization of Bolivia's substantial natural gas industry, now his proud fait accompli.  Despite the fact that Venezuela created an opening in the early nineties for a cautious return to private foreign investment, it appears all but a foregone conclusion that Chávez is now poised to re-expropriate the now partially developed fields among the vast reserves of the Orinoco, currently under nominal foreign development.

The US has played its cards poorly through a running tit-for-tat of brinksmanship with Chávez.  The 2002 attempted coup, given the nod by administrative front man Elliot Abrams (a convicted Iran-Contra alum pardoned by the President's father) on retrospect appears to have been a simple error in judgment, given that Chavez was more widely popular--by far--than the corrupt, moneyed, compliant oligarchy favored by Washington.   The irony of America's support for a coup of a populist president who won office fair and square can hardly be lost on the Latin American people in general and must be inescapable to the average Venezuelan.  That Chávez won in a landslide on the subsequent referendum on his leadership is a lesson to America concerning "political capital."  America has been facing a rash of awkward results from free and fair elections around the world, of late, it seems.  Discounting the imminent Maoist political inclusion in Nepal and the electoral might of Hamas in Palestine, in Peru, the Left-leaning Nationalist Army General Ollanta Umala is poised for victory in a runoff election scheduled for June.  The South American dilemma posed to US global strategists is indeed significant.  The Peruvian front-runner is a virtual mirror-image of Chávez, and if, as expected, he is elected President, it is a fair bet that Peru will move toward the South American bloc currently comprising Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba.

But if South America is beyond the scope of the average American's challenged geography skills, then one need look no further than Mexico to see anti-globalization forces gaining traction, where left-leaning Andrés López Obrador is the current front runner for presidential elections scheduled for July.   Mexico, by the way, is the country to the south of the US, and the two share a common 1400-mile border.  Mexico, remember, also has an ongoing Marxist guerrilla insurgency in the southern state of Chiapas, though a longstanding ceasefire has thankfully kept this little problem off world news reports.

The US would do well to take a deep breath and divert part of its diplomatic agenda back to Central and South America.  In theory the region should ostensibly constitute a base of solidarity within which the US should be able to sustain a sphere of influence through basic market principles and the advocacy of human dignity.  But to gain the ground lost on perceptions of exploitation, inattention, and verbal brinksmanship, the US has to get with the program proactively and facilitate the dialog to get this detour back on track.   No better place to start than in Cuba.

Just as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has had a central role in Middle East resentments toward the US, so too has America's Cuba policy provided a persistent bone of contention between the US and its Latin American neighbors.  While unilateral economic sanctions may have been at one time a hopeful experimental tool to seek the ouster of Castro, it is past time to recognize that these measures have failed and that the Cuban people have borne the brunt of the economic hardship intended for the Castro regime. 

While saber-rattling with Fidel mostly died out years ago, the Left's new Water Carriers in South America are less susceptible to American economic aggression than the vulnerable island-nation ninety miles from American shores.  Consider the outlandish reality that a full 15% of American petroleum imports come from Venezuela, which Washington would have Americans believe is a pariah state.  Perhaps the US should refuse to buy Venezuelan oil as a manner of pressuring Venezuela toward regime-change.  Of course, if analysts' claims that disruption of Iran's supply, which contributes 5% of America's oil, will cause $100 per barrel prices, shutting off Venezuela's imports might prove a bridge too far.  And if unilateral economic sanctions against Venezuela are too unpalatable to American policy crafters, then perhaps it is time to remove the hypocritical embargo of Cuba and wean ourselves of the ridiculous practice of subsidizing American sugar production, when we can buy the stuff for dimes on the dollar in Havana.

While the Central American nations remain relative economic and political backwaters, the potential bloc of Latin American nations Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and likely Peru, have a sympathetic ear in left-leaning Brazil's Lula.  And remember that a Communist insurgency has raged for nearly fifty years in violent Colombia, and despite rebel groups' long philosophical dilution with the politically corrupting sums of cocaine money involved, the consolidation of the left in South America looks conceivably favorable to the revolutionary mafiosi FARC and ELN in Colombia, a nation riven for most of the post WWII era.

As the US balances the play of power in the war with Islamic fundamentalism and plays cat and mouse with Russia in its former Soviet satellites, and while the administration ignores the North Korean madman and founding member of the Axis of Evil with pragmatic hopefulness, Washington policy makers will ignore Latin American aspirations for inclusion in the global economic playbook at America's own peril.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.

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