Obama and Latin America: The First Six Months
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< p>
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.
The administration’s approach to its
predecessor’s arch-enemy in the region, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, has
involved a bizarre mix of conciliatory gestures and rhetoric, on the one
hand, and occasional statements that have outdone even the Bush
administration in their hostility toward Chávez, on the other. In the
first category, Obama has restored the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, whom
Chávez had expelled last September to protest U.S. support for right-wing
separatist groups in Bolivia. And in a small move that triggered an absurd
amount of commentary in the mainstream press, Obama greeted and shook hands
with Chávez at last April’s Summit of the Americas. At the same time,
much administration rhetoric has continued to vilify Chávez and to blame
him for the continent-wide revulsion against Washington’s neoliberal
policies. In a January interview broadcast on Spanish-language television,
Obama labeled
Chávez “a force that has interrupted progress in the region” and, with
no evidence whatsoever, accused Chávez of “exporting terrorist
activities.” Analyst Mark Weisbrot noted the charge “would not pass the laugh test among
almost any government in Latin America.” At other moments, Obama has
called Chávez “despotic,” while Hillary Clinton and Vice President
Biden have each called him a “dictator."2
Obama’s hostility toward Bolivia has extended
beyond rhetoric into concrete policy actions, with potentially dire effects
for tens of thousands of Bolivian workers. On June 30 Obama declared that Bolivia, the poorest country in South
America, no longer deserved U.S. trade preferences. President Bush had
rescinded those preferences last fall, but Obama had widely been expected
to reinstate them; instead, he permanently eliminated them. The public
rationale of both presidents has been that Bolivia has failed to reduce
cocaine and coca leaf production, a major stipulation of the original
agreement. Leaving aside the question of whether Washington has the right
to prohibit Andean nations from growing the coca leaves which are central
to Andean highland culture, the statistics on coca production suggest that
the Bush-Obama policy of revoking Bolivia’s trade preferences has
political motives. While Bolivian coca production increased by only 5
percent in 2007, Colombian coca production increased
by 27 percent. The 2008 figures released in June do show a significant decline in Colombian coca and cocaine production, but
Colombia remains the leading producer of both products.3 Yet while the Obama administration punishes Bolivians
by ending much-needed trade preferences, it has rewarded the Colombian
government with over half a billion dollars in aid for next year (more on
this below).
With regard to Cuba policy, Obama has done nothing
that U.S. business elites and the Cuban-American mafia in Florida would
find offensive. He has maintained the 47-year-old embargo—which has been
roundly condemned in the international community for
decades—in nearly every point.4 While the press has showered much attention on the
ending of travel restrictions on Cuban Americans, with many hailing this
change as a progressive move, Obama explained during his campaign why he
would do so. In May 2008 he appeared before a cheering audience of the
Cuban American National Foundation, a group long known to have planned and
promoted terrorist operations in Cuba, and told the group that the U.S. needs “a new strategy”
for converting Cuba to a subservient, neoliberal economy, since the old
strategy (five decades of terrorism, economic strangulation, and attempts
at isolation) hasn’t worked. “There are no better ambassadors for
freedom than Cuban Americans,” he said. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton later added that Cuban-American visitors to the island
would also serve as “ambassadors…for a free market economy.” At the
same time, Obama has plainly stated, “I will maintain the embargo.”5 Obama’s approach to Cuba, far
from constituting any substantial progressive change from the Bush era, is
rightly viewed as a more intelligent use of U.S. coercion to obtain the
desired results. There are signs that Raúl Castro is more open to certain
capitalist policy shifts than Fidel was. Raúl has, for example, publicly defined
“equality” as the “equality of rights, of opportunities, not of
income,” suggesting that perhaps Obama’s approach may prove a more
effective imperial strategy for influencing developments on the island.6
Obama’s most publicized test on Latin America,
however, has come from a relatively unexpected source. On June 28 the
Honduran military overthrew and kidnapped democratically-elected President
Manuel Zelaya in the first Latin American coup in five years. Since his
2005 election, Zelaya had surprised his right-wing supporters by promoting
a minimum-wage increase and a number of other mildly reformist measures
and by his move to poll Hondurans as to whether they would like to convene
an assembly to re-write the Constitution.7 (He was deposed the day the vote was to be held.) In
a nearly unprecedented show of hemispheric unity, Latin American
governments—including even U.S. allies—immediately denounced the coup
and called for Zelaya’s reinstatement. Obama and Secretary of State
Clinton followed Latin America’s lead by calling for a
restoration of “constitutional order.” The U..S. reaction to the coup
at first glance seemed to signal a refreshing change from the Bush
administration, which supported the last two coups (in Venezuela in 2002
and Haiti in 2004) against democratically-elected Latin American
governments.
Upon closer inspection, though, the Obama response
appears far more equivocal. At least some in the administration (though
perhaps not Obama himself), knew about the coup plot beforehand and did nothing to
prevent it. Once the military had seized power, the administration refused
to legally label it a “coup,” which by law would have required it to
cut off all military aid to the new regime. On July 8 Obama did end direct U.S. military aid, totaling $16.5 million, though as
of this writing has left a $180 million aid package intact. Meanwhile,
Honduran soldiers continue to receive training at the infamous School of
the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia (which Obama has also left open for
business) and U.S. military personnel continue operating without any change
inside Honduras itself. The U.S. ambassador,
who lent tacit cooperation to the coup once it was in motion, remains in
Honduras.8 The administration has tried to
justify the maintenance of these links using the rationale that
“engagement” enables the U.S. to exert positive leverage over a
regime’s behavior—reasoning that sounds suspiciously similar to an
excuse often given in the 1970s and 1980s for aiding Latin America’s many
terrorist states in their wars against their own people. But even this
rationale does not accord with the actions of Obama, who has issued no condemnation
of the violent repression and press censorship that the illegitimate
Honduran government has unleashed since seizing power.
Obama administration officials have called for
Zelaya’s reinstatement, but have tended more often to emphasize instead
the need for “dialogue”
between the two parties. Obama, Clinton, and others have firmly supported
the mediated negotiations that began in Costa Rica on July 9 between Zelaya
and the coup leaders.9 The implicit message to all would-be coup plotters
throughout Latin America is that an illegal military coup will result not
in a prison sentence but in at least a seat at the negotiating table and,
if they serve U.S. interests in the region, permission to stay in power.
Needless to say, the U.S. equivalent—a renegade band of military brass
overthrowing President Obama—would hardly be greeted with cool-toned
calls for “dialogue” here at home.
On one hand, the Obama administration has sometimes
appeared quite forceful in its rhetorical condemnations of the coup. But it
has used ambiguous and carefully-selected language and has refrained from
taking any substantive measures (e.g., ending military aid or freezing the
bank accounts of the coup leaders) that would lead to Zelaya’s
reinstatement. As in other areas of its Latin America policy, the
hope-inspiring tone of the Obama administration’s public rhetoric has not
been matched by its actions.
Obama and the Ever-Faithful: Colombia, Mexico,
and Peru
Though it has garnered far less media fanfare, the
administration’s policy toward key U.S. allies in the region will have
extremely important consequences in the years to come. In his first six
months Obama has placed Colombia and Mexico in particular at the top of his
Latin America agenda with emphasis on expanding U.S. trade and
“security” links with the two countries.
On June 29 Obama welcomed Colombian President Álvaro
Uribe to Washington, assuring him that “moving forward on a free trade
agreement” with Colombia was among the administration’s top priorities
and in “the interests of both countries."10 Obama firmly believes in the general desirability of
the so-called “free-trade” agreements that have increased poverty and
inequality throughout Latin America. His partial hesitance toward a
free-trade agreement with Colombia has never derived from the well-known
detrimental effects of such agreements on the vulnerable sectors and the
environments of underdeveloped countries, but from the constant and
undeniable human rights violations of the Uribe government.
Recently, though, Obama has even suggested that he
may be willing to overlook the Uribe regime’s human rights record—by
far the worst in Latin America—in the interest of passing a trade
agreement. On June 29 he praised Uribe’s “diligence and courage” and
applauded “the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia,”
noting that “obviously we’ve seen a downward trajectory in the deaths
of labor union[ist]s and we’ve seen improvements when it comes to
prosecution” of the offenders. Obama neglected to note the specifics of that downward trajectory: from 2007 to
2008 in Colombia there was a 34 percent increase in murders and
disappearances of trade unionists (49 were murdered last year, the most in
the world), plus a 52 percent increase in forced displacement and a 102
percent increase in death threats.11 Obama has rewarded Uribe for that downward
trajectory by continuing the Clinton-Bush legacy of extending massive military aid to
Colombia. Although his 2010 budget reduces by about $36 million the amount
dedicated exclusively to Colombia’s military and police apparatus, next
year's Colombia funding still amounts to over $508 million in U.S. aid,
$268 million for military and police. Recently the administration has also
sought to finalize agreements
that will expand the direct U.S. military presence within Colombia.12
But Mexico will become the hemisphere’s top
recipient of U.S. military aid over the coming year, displacing Colombia to
second place. In June the U.S. Congress approved
a $420 million supplemental allocation to the Mexican government to combat
Mexican drug cartels, bringing total 2009 U.S. military and police aid to Mexico to
$832 million. This latest allocation comes as part of the Mérida
Initiative (also known as Plan Mexico) that Bush signed last year and which
the Obama administration appears eager to continue. Obama’s 2010 budget includes an additional
$481 million for the Mexican government, increasing the three-year total
for Plan Mexico to $1.6 billion. The current administration’s approach to
the drug trade in Mexico has thus far been modeled on the deeply-flawed
U.S. approach in Colombia over the past decade, placing heavy emphasis on
military aid and paying insufficient attention to the endemic corruption
and culture of impunity for human rights violators that characterize the
governments of both countries. And Obama, like Bush, has done nothing to
reassure those who worry that the Mexican government may also use U..S. aid
to help repress domestic dissent, as it has been quick to do in recent
years and as the Uribe government in Colombia has done quite unabashedly
with the help of U.S. military assistance. The White House’s aid request
for 2010 actually proposes eliminating even the tepid human rights conditions upon
which current aid to Mexico and Colombia is contingent.13
Peru is less prominent on the U.S. radar, but did
present the Obama administration with an important symbolic test in early
June when government police forces massacred
around 60 indigenous protesters who were seeking to prevent the entry of
mining, logging, and biofuels companies onto their land. The massacre was
clearly linked to the expansion of Washington-style neoliberal
globalization: Along with the implementation of the U.S.-Peru Free Trade
Agreement, Peruvian President Alan García signed a series of laws
facilitating the entry of extractive industries onto indigenous land.
Following the massacre, a wave of Peruvian and international condemnation
forced the government to rescind two of the controversial laws.14 The Obama administration did not
join in that condemnation, however, remaining entirely silent. Such silence
suggests that Obama, like his predecessors, is willing to overlook the
crimes of those who support U.S. economic and geopolitical interests in
Latin America. By contrast, those who “interrupt progress” in the
region, like indigenous communities in Peru who believe they should they
have a say in how their resources are used, will continue to pay the price
for their misbehavior.
An Obama Doctrine for Latin America?
It may still be too early to talk of a distinctive
“Obama Doctrine” in Latin America. Moreover, doing so is difficult
because of the conflicting signals the administration has sometimes sent.
Historian Greg Grandin noted recently that “what you see often in the Obama
administration is Obama making very good pronouncements on any number of
issues…and then on-the-ground, second-level officials either hedging or
being actually quite provocative.” Secretary of State Clinton, for
example, has been considerably more bellicose in her statements on Venezuela, Cuba, and Honduras, consistent with her past record of greater contempt for international law.
One of Clinton’s advisers is reportedly John Negroponte, the man who helped militarize Honduras
and direct Reagan’s terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, and
Clinton also has close links to lobbyists hired by the Honduran coup leaders. Other
Obama advisors with much-vaunted Latin American experience include
Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela (a Plan Colombia architect) and
Summit of the Americas adviser Jeffrey
Davidow (who served as ambassador to Chile when the U.S. helped
overthrow the Allende government in 1973). Clinton, Davidow, Joe Biden,
Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, and others have all made public
statements that seem to outdo Obama in terms of hostility toward
left-leaning governments.15
Of course, this lack of coherence might not be
entirely accidental. For an administration facing pressures from many
sides, part of the strategy may be for Obama to issue hopeful and inspiring
rhetoric to placate those demanding change, and then for his subordinates
and his actual policy formulations to dispel any illusions of a genuine
change in U.S. policy. As some of the more perceptive critics have pointed
out, Obama seems to have a unique ability to mesmerize
everyone—including much of the Left—with his rhetoric while
implementing or continuing policies that bear no necessary relation to that
rhetoric.16
In any case, at least one general tendency of
Obama’s policy thus far has been clear: to continue discriminating
against, albeit with less confrontational rhetoric, the most left-leaning
governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. In marked contrast, “moderate
Left” governments like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina have enjoyed much
stronger support from Obama’s Washington, signaling a relative continuity
with the Bush strategy of trying to split the “aggressive” and
“moderate” Latin American leftists and thereby promoting adherence to
the latter position. As one close observer of Bolivia, Jim Schultz, suggested following Obama’s June 30 elimination of
Bolivia’s trade preferences, the administration may have “decided that
Bolivia might make a nice line in the sand.” Deputy Secretary of State
Steinberg publicly advocated this strategy when he spoke of the need to foster a “counterweight to
governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which
pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the
region."17
In sum, the Obama Doctrine gradually taking shape is
less brazen and less confrontational than what Latin Americans have seen
coming from the North in recent decades, but is so far substantively quite
similar to the approach of the Clinton and Bush administrations. As Greg
Grandin predicted about a year ago, Obama has begun “to
implement a more rational, less ideologically incandescent deployment of
American power.” Journalist Eva Golinger refers to this strategy as “smart power,” featuring
“a mix of military force with all forms of diplomacy, with an emphasis
[on] the use of ‘democracy promotion’ as a principal tactic.” (As
Golinger notes, Obama’s 2010 budget has increased the funds allocated for
this latter activity, which has often included channeling money to
opposition groups in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia.) Long-time solidarity
activist Chuck Kaufman describes it as “a kinder, gentler imperialism,”
a phrase that others have also used to describe Obama’s more
general foreign policy approach—although it’s difficult to see how some
of Obama’s policies are any kinder or gentler than Bush’s.)18
Whatever label is applied to characterize it, this
approach bears some resemblance to that of past U.S. presidents who have
been faced with waning U.S. power in the hemisphere. Some have compared it
to FDR’s Good Neighbor policy, which responded to the rise of
nationalism in Mexico and Central America and the crisis of capitalism at
home by renouncing direct intervention and opting instead for bilateral
trade agreements geared toward rehabilitating capitalism and reaffirming
Latin American economic dependence on the United States. A quarter-century
later, the Kennedy State Department bemoaned the fact that Latin America’s “poor and
underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now
demanding opportunities for a decent living.” Its response was
three-pronged, combining hopeful and progressive-sounding rhetoric about
the need for social reform; economic aid intended to curb the spread of
redistributive and nationalist inclinations; and a huge increase in
military assistance to Latin American governments.19
Obama shares Roosevelt and Kennedy’s rhetoric of
respect and cooperation, and, as they did, he surely understands that such
rhetoric is necessary if the U.S. is to stand any chance of recouping its
declining influence in the region. Yet as in times past, and as in Iraq
right now, the nice-sounding rhetoric also conceals a desire to strengthen
U.S. control in the region “without being seen to do so.” And like FDR and JFK,
Obama has suggested that there are real limits to this newfound tolerance.
Just as Roosevelt welcomed the dictatorship led by Somoza in Nicaragua as
“our son of a bitch” and Kennedy authorized any number of illegal
actions against Cuba, Obama has remained quite hostile to the three most
left-leaning governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba.20
If the Obama
administration believes it can reassert U.S. power in the region through a
strategy that tries to pit “good Left” against “bad Left,” it will
probably fail. Latin American governments, despite their diversity, are
more united in support of democratic sovereignty than at any time in recent
memory, as their unanimous denunciations of the Honduras coup and of last
fall’s right-wing violence in Bolivia have demonstrated. Mark Weisbrot writes that “when the Obama team is convinced that a
‘divide and conquer’ approach to the region will fail just as miserably
for this administration as it did for the previous one, then we may see the
beginnings of a new policy toward Latin America."21 I hope so, but with one qualification: What is
needed is not just a new strategy that leaves intact many of the
traditional assumptions about U.S. rights and privileges in the region, but
an entirely new perspective that breaks, explicitly and completely, with
the Monroe Doctrine and all its concomitant attitudes and policy
formulations.
Kevin Young is a
doctoral student in Latin American history at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook. He thanks to Chuck Kaufman of the Alliance for Global
Justice for his comments on the first draft of this essay.
Notes:
[1] On Iraq, see Michael
Schwartz, “Colonizing Iraq: The Obama Doctrine?” TomDispatch,
July 9, 2009, and Democracy Now! headlines for June
17 and June 25, 2009. On Afghan and Pakistani public opinion,
see the 2009 Western-run polls cited here and here. On Israel and Palestine, see Noam Chomsky, “Obama
on Israel-Palestine: Carefully Framed Deceit,” Z Magazine
(March 2009), and, on Iraq and Central Asia, Chomsky’s “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours,” June 2009 speech
reproduced on Democracy Now! July 3, 2009. Also useful is Jeremy
Scahill and Anthony Arnove’s joint interview, “Rebranding
War & Occupation,” ZNet, June 18, 2009, where Schahill
points out that Obama will “say a few things…that sound like they’re
new, like a totally different U.S. approach, but then he’ll also at the
same time roll out a policy that is further than even Bush took things.”
[2] Quoted in Garry Leech, “U.S.
Policy Towards Venezuela and Colombia Will Change Little Under Obama,”
Colombia Journal, January 20, 2009, and in Weisbrot, “Venezuela, an Imaginary Threat,” Guardian,
February 18, 2009.
[3] UN statistics quoted in “Morales: Bolivia Trade Suspension Shows Obama
‘Lied to Latin America’” (headline), Democracy Now! July 2,
2009; UN Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2009
(New York, 2009), 11.
[5] Carol J. Williams and Johanna
Neuman, “Obama Says He Would Meet with Cuba’s Leaders,” Los
Angeles Times, May 23, 2008; “Senate Confirmation Hearing: Hillary Clinton,” New
York Times, January 13, 2008.
[6] Sarah Miller Llana and
Matthew Clark, “Cuba
under Raúl: Creeping toward Capitalism?” Christian Science
Monitor, July 23, 2008. Though the writers probably exaggerate the
younger Castro’s capitalist proclivities, and like other U.S.
commentators erroneously attribute the thrust of Cuban economy policy to a
single man rather than the wishes of the Cuban people, the difference in
rhetoric between the two Castro brothers is significant.
[7] On Zelaya’s background see
Benjamin Dangl, “Showdown
in Honduras: The Rise and Uncertain Future of the Coup,” Toward
Freedom, June 29, 2009, and Stephen Zunes, “Showdown in ‘Tegucigolpe,’”
Foreign Policy in Focus, July 10, 2009.
[8] “Obama
Condemns Honduran Coup, But Won’t Suspend Aid,” Democracy Now!
June 30, 2009, and DN’s collection
of news and interviews on the coup; John McPhaul, “U.S. Suspends Military Aid to Honduras before Talks,”
Reuters, July 9, 2009; James Hodge and Linda Cooper, “U.S. Continues to Train Honduran Soldiers,” National
Catholic Reporter, July 14, 2009; “Honduras
Rivals Back Peace Moves,” BBC, July 8, 2009; Nikolas Kozloff,
“Obama
and Honduras: It’s All About the Constitution,” ZNet, July
19, 2009; for evidence that the State Department had prior knowledge of the
coup, as well as the argument that the Obama administration may have been
closely implicated in it, see Eva Golinger, “Honduran Coup: Made in Washington,” MRZine,January
15, 2009; for a recent report on over 1,000 human rights violations in the
two weeks following the coup, see Comité de Familiares de Detenidos
Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH), Informe
preliminar: Violaciones a derechos humanos en el marco del golpe de estado
en Honduras (Tegucigalpa, July 15, 2009).
[13] “Obama
Signs War Funding Bill” (headline), Democracy Now! June 25,
2009; Bill Weinberg, “Plan Colombia: Exporting the Model,” NACLA Report
on the Americas 42, no. 4 (July/August 2009); Abigail Poe, “Mexico to Surpass Colombia as
the #1 Recipient of U.S. Aid in Latin America” (blog on Just the
Facts website), June 17, 2009; Kristina Aiello, “Obama’s Choice: Human
Rights First or Plan Mexico,” NACLA (online), June 1, 2009;
White House Office of Management and Budget, FY2010 Budget Request for Department of State and Other
International Programs, 883, 895, with analysis by the Center for
International Policy’s Colombia Program here. For the ways
in which “Washington is funding both sides of the drug war” in Mexico,
see Todd Miller, “Mexico’s
Emerging Narco-State,” NACLA (online), July 1, 2009.
[14] Laura Carlsen, “Victory in
the Amazon” (Special Report of the Center for International
Policy’s Americas Program), June 22, 2009.
[15] Greg Grandin, Interview by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! July 2,
2009; Mark Weisbrot, “Who’s in Charge of U.S. Foreign Policy?” Guardian,
July 16, 2009; Stephen Zunes, “Hillary Clinton’s Disdain for International Law: Change
We Can Believe In?” AlterNet.org, December 1, 2008; Eva
Golinger, “Honduran Coup: Made in Washington.”
[18] Grandin, “Losing Latin America: What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?”
TomDispatch, June 8, 2008; Golinger, “Honduran Coup: Made in Washington”; Chuck Kaufman,
personal correspondence; Corey D.B. Walker, “A
Kinder, Gentler Imperialism? Getting Beyond the Either/Or Choice,” Counterpunch.org,
July 18, 2008.
[19] Clifton Ross and Marcy
Rein, “Honduras, Washington and Latin America: Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Good Neighbor,” UpsideDownWorld.org, July 8, 2009; “Summary Guidelines Paper: United States Policy toward Latin
America,” July 3, 1961, in Foreign Relations of the United States,
1961-1963, Vol. XII: American Republics (Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1996), 33; Greg Grandin, Empire’s
Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New
Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 47-49.
[20] The approach taking shape
under Obama also has at least something in common with that of two less
likely figures, Eisenhower and Nixon. Both presidents were firmly committed
to projecting U.S. power in the region, but also sought to minimize the use
of overt, direct U.S. intervention (though both men would authorize major
direct interventions, most notably in Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile).
Eisenhower emphasized covert action and, in the case of the Bolivian
Revolution, a policy of engagement and U.S. aid in order to channel the
revolution in safe directions. Nixon sought to reduce direct U.S. military
involvement by shifting military responsibility onto Latin American forces
themselves. (To be sure, there were also significant differences among
these presidents—Roosevelt, for example, was far less open to overt
intervention in Latin America than Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon all
were).
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