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.
The
ethanol OPEC 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. The rural United States is
delirious. Even Bill Gates wants to invest in
ethanol. With global warming and the oil-and-war
syndrome, this is the inevitable way of the
future. Patriotic US entrepreneurs ready to make
millions have already coined the slogan "our crop,
our fuel, our country".
For their biofuel,
the US uses corn (maize); Brazil uses sugarcane.
Because of the gentler climate, Brazil's crops are
50% more efficient. Brazil has the largest
plantations in Latin America, millions of hectares
controlled by a small, powerful oligarchy eager to
do business with global capital and now dreaming
of drowning the US in biofuel. But there's a huge
problem. Brazilian alcohol is taxed in the US at a
heavily protectionist 54 cents a gallon (14.27
cents a liter).
Even with this tax, in
2006 Brazil exported 10 times as much alcohol to
the US than in 2005. No wonder huge US
conglomerates and investment funds - many of them
no different from robber barons - are frantically
searching for land and partners to invest in
Brazil. In some regions in the rich Brazilian
state of Sao Paulo, sugarcane harvest is fast
displacing citrus and soy cultivation.
Under Secretary of State for Political
Affairs Nicholas Burns, in meetings early last
month to prepare for the Bush visit, went straight
to the point. He said Brazil is "the most powerful
country in South America", and added that the US
did not want to depend on oil from "countries such
as Iran and Venezuela". Burns was fascinated by
Brazil's high-tech expertise in biofuel
production, stressing that in the future biofuels
will be "the main link between Americans and
Brazilians".
Burns conveniently forgot to
mention that paramilitaries in Colombia's
northwest are violently evicting or even killing
Afro-Colombian and peasant communities to the
benefit of huge companies - of which the
paramilitaries are shareholders - exploiting palm
oil to process biofuel.
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 streets have
voted 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
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