[THS] Iraq's gift to Latin America

[Peter Webster]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephen_kinzer/2008/04/iraqs_gift
_to_latin_america.html

Iraq's gift to Latin America

Distracted by the Iraq war, the United States is ignoring a growing
socialist hegemony in Latin America which once it would have swiftly
countered

Stephen Kinzer


April 23, 2008 6:00 PM 

Trying to figure out who won the Iraq war is a challenging parlour
game. Nearly every faction, group and nation has lost. The only evident
victors are Iran, the Kurds and a handful of giant American
corporations.

It is slowly becoming clear, however, that there is another winner: Latin
America. With the United States so totally consumed by the Iraq
conflict, it has no time, energy or political capital to crack down on
challenges south of the Rio Grande. Sensing their historic chance, many
Latin nations have embarked on experiments that the US would in past
eras have instantly stepped in to crush.

The independence that many Latin American countries have shown in
the last five years borders on outright defiance of US power. Yet to a
degree unprecedented in modern history, Washington is allowing them
to do as they please.

This week voters in Paraguay elected a left-leaning president who
admires Che Guevara and whose three activist brothers were tortured
during the long US-sponsored dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.
Although he is likely to be the newest Latin American president to join
the club of anti-Yanqui leaders, the US made no concerted effort to
prevent his victory.

Just a few days before, it was reported that Miguel D'Escoto
Brockmann, who as the foreign minister of Sandinista Nicaragua during
the 1980s was one of the era's most virulently anti-American figures, will
be the next president of the United Nations General Assembly. Under
other circumstances, Washington might well have launched a full-scale
campaign to block his candidacy.

The government of Ecuador has announced that it will oppose renewing
the American lease on the sprawling military base at Manta, one of the
largest US bases in Latin America. The US, which has spent $60m
upgrading the base so it can be used by a variety of aircraft including
Awacs surveillance planes, is mightily unhappy, but is doing little to stop
Ecuadorans from closing it. In no previous era would the US have
simply sat quietly and allowed this to happen.

Earlier this year, Colombian soldiers pursued guerrillas into Ecuador,
thereby setting off a crisis that briefly seemed about to explode into
war. With Colombia ruled by one of the hemisphere's few remaining
pro-US governments, officials in Washington might have been expected
to rally ostentatiously to its side. Instead they uttered barely a peep,
and the crisis was resolved by Latin Americans without any guidance
from "el norte".

This is a radical departure from more than a century of US policy
toward Latin America. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that
policy in 1904, in his succinct "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. Its
essence was an assertion that the US had assumed "an international
police power" and would intervene in any Latin American country that
engaged in "chronic wrongdoing" or failed to meet its "obligations".

In the decades that followed, the United States sponsored dictatorships
from Cuba to Brazil, deposed governments from Chile to Guatemala,
landed Marines on shores from Panama to Haiti, and thwarted the
election of independent-minded leaders from Guyana to the Dominican
Republic. Generations of Latin Americans grew up understanding that
any challenge to US hegemony in the hemisphere would be crushed
swiftly and with all necessary violence.

That has now changed so decisively that this week, President Rafael
Correa of Ecuador felt moved to predict the emergence of a "socialist
Latin America". He recently fired his defence minister and chief military
commanders on the grounds that had allowed Ecuador's intelligence
apparatus to become "totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA". Not
long ago, any politician who spoke like this would have brought the full
wrath of the United States down upon himself and his country.

The US has not suddenly become more tolerant of challenges from
south of its border. It simply has no resources left to deal with them.
The Bush administration has become the geopolitical version of the
proverbial simpleton who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.
Overwhelmed by what is happening in and around Iraq, it is paying
little attention to other parts of the world. No region has taken more
advantage of this felicitous turn of events than Latin America.

Many voters in the US were horrified when senator John McCain
suggested that the occupation of Iraq might last for another century.
Latin Americans, however, could be forgiven for liking the idea. The last
five years have shown them that the more fully the US sinks into its
Middle East quagmire, the more freedom they will have to chart their
own futures.