alliance/composition of these
governments with Venezuela's Chavez, Bolivia's Evo
Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa.
Thus
bombarding Mercosur is key in Washington's
strategy. Lula was forced to fly to Uruguay late
last month to meet with President Tabare Vazquez
and offset the risk of Uruguay abandoning Mercosur
and signing a free-trade agreement with the US. A
flagrant Mercosur asymmetry is that giants Brazil and
Argentina do not open markets
for Uruguayan exports. Lula promised that the
asymmetry will be corrected. Uruguay will sign
deals with the US, but not an asymmetric,
US-corporate-friendly, comprehensive free-trade
agreement.
Whatever Washington's designs,
Valter Pomar, secretary of international relations
of Brazil's Workers' Party (Partido dos
Trabalhadores, or PT), has already set the tone:
"Brazil may be a mediator [in the event of any
US-Venezuela discussions], but without opening
space to imperialist pretensions. Don't count on
Brazil to put pressure on Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia
or Ecuador."
Whatever cozy deals with
Alvaro Uribe in Colombia and Felipe Calderon in
Mexico, and polite reception by Lula in Brazil and
Vazquez in Uruguay notwithstanding, the fact is
that all along South American streets Chavez is
king and Bush is - in the words of Brazilian union
leaders - the No 1 "terrorist".
Lula and
Argentina's Nestor Kirchner have introduced no
financial or monetary reform and are still
implementing the neo-liberal, Washington Consensus
agenda. On the other hand, the popular appeal of
the Bolivarian Revolution is enormous - with its
socially minded welfare state, a mixed economy
based on a strong state sector, and real, direct
democracy based on neighborhood councils.
The masses all over South America have
already compared these advances with the abject
failure of neo-liberalism. There may be flagrant
polarization - but that concerns the absolute
majority of national populations, along with most
governments, against discredited former
progressives, client regimes and small but
powerful supporting oligarchies. In a nutshell,
this spells doom for Bush's proposed anti-Chavez
coalition.
So many evildoers The road, anyway, is tortuous. Since September
11, 2001, as far as its relations to South America
are concerned, Washington has lost ideological
control, soft power and the remaining credibility
of the supposedly neutral International Monetary
Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization and
Organization of American States. The Iranian
president and the Chinese president straddle South
America at will, forging new alliances. The crisis
of US hegemony couldn't be more serious. But
worrying trends remain.
Spanish foreign
policy in Latin America is now somehow aligned
with the United States'. It's all about a blind
neo-colonial approach in both Washington and
Madrid that sees Latin America only as a compound
of fabulous natural resources and markets. Huge
populations continue to be submitted to varying
degrees of coercion, economic pressure,
information control, cultural manipulation, spying
and even (in the case of Venezuela) military
threats.
For the Pentagon's Southern
Command, Latin America is a dangerous powder keg
of illegal aliens, dispossessed peasants,
smugglers, subversives (anybody say
"communists"?), alterglobalizers,
narco-traffickers and Islamic sympathizers - so
the one and only way to deal with all these
"evildoers" is by "full-spectrum dominance".
Thus the ongoing, $2-million-a-day
intervention in Colombia (the Trojan horse now
that Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador are out of US
control), the spying and destabilization attempts
on Venezuela, the Manta military base in Ecuador
(equipped with a $1 billion, ultra-high-tech spy
station charmingly named the Sensitive
Compartmentalized Information Facility).
And then there's sinister death-squad
expert John Negroponte as Condoleezza Rice's No 2
at the State Department. Rice knows absolutely
nothing about Latin America, so Negroponte may
soon be in charge of the region. This will mean
renewed merciless war against Chavez, Morales and
Correa.
It's not coming from Lula, Vazquez
or even Kirchner. Millions in South America - and
millions all over the world - have already noticed
that the shock of the new is coming from Chavez,
Morales and Correa. Much more than Asia or Africa,
South America, politically, is now the most
progressive and hopeful region in the world -
forging, in a messy, imperfect, even utopian but
always exciting way a compound of real
alternatives to the ravages of neo-liberalism
while Washington, from the peaks of its unrivaled
full-spectrum dominance, has nothing to offer but
war, death and devastation.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
