opinion

Also in this section:

Sirias, A Wounaan journey
Kuna General Congress of Madugandi, Our just claims and the government's repression
Avnery, 12 years after Rabin's assassination
Amnesty International, Making a diplomatic issue of violence against women
Weisbrot, A bank of Latin America's own
Carpio, Disaster reduction and the media

Pilgrim, The Trinidad-Tobago election

Sánchez, Lula's yellow submarine

Jackson, Republicans and Democrats and Latin America

Bernal, Setting up a presidential re-election?

Leis, Who watches the watchers?

The other day George W. Bush gave a speech to an audience composed in part of Cuban exile activists and in part of Latin American diplomats, and vowed that the United States would not tolerate the continuation of the Cuban dictatorship after Fidel Castro's death. He reportedly got delirious applause from the Miami Cubans and stony silence from the Latin Americans.

The other shoe dropped at the United Nations. The world voted 184-4 to condemn the US economic embargo against Cuba. Latin America was unanimous in its condemnation.

That's not to say that most Latin Americans don't wish to see a more democratic Cuba in which basic freedoms command more respect. Even most Latin American leftists hope for that. But most people in this region, including a fair number of strident anti-communists, don't believe that any worthy solution to Cuba's problems can be made in the USA.

People in Panama, as in the rest of Latin America, are divided over the "Washington Consensus" of privatizing everything and selling ever larger chunks of the region's economy to US-based corporations. The politicians may not be so divided, but then most people think they're a bunch of crooks anyway.

Even the politicians, however, don't tend to like American meddling in other countries' affairs. Two things in particular have raised suspicions about and lowered the reputation of the USA in these parts: George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq under a theory of "preventive war," and US support for the failed 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela. "Free trade" on US corporate terms may find buyers in this region, but gunboat diplomacy will not.

In the September / October edition of Foreign Affairs, GOP front runner Rudy Giuliani expounds on US foreign policy in an article entitled Toward a Realistic Peace. It's one of those documents that every Democrat, every peace activist and every Latin American patriot ought to read, not for pleasure.

Giuliani isn't pushing peace. "This war will be long," he writes, "and we are still in its early stages."

He makes the coded appeal for a continued policy of torture ("We must... not unrealistically limit electronic surveillance or legal interrogation," bearing in mind that the Bush administration considers torture legal).

"Most of the problems in the world today arise from places where the state system is broken or has never functioned. Much of... Latin America remains mired in poverty, corruption, anarchy, and terror," Giuliani opines. "Elections are necessary but not sufficient to establish genuine democracy. Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly.... Sometimes America will be compelled to act in those parts of the world where few institutions function properly...." Isn't he really advocating some sort of US right to invade Latin American countries and replace even democratically elected governments?

Giuliani has his problems in the campaign for the nomination because his public appearances in drag and his stand on abortion put off many of the religious fanatics in the GOP. On the other hand, when he was mayor of New York cops shouted at a black immigrant who spoke English as a second language --- albeit well enough to get his US citizenship, as he had --- and when the unarmed man who had done nothing wrong reached for his ID he was shot 33 times and killed, whereupon Giuliani defended the trigger happy cops and vilified poor Amadou Diallo. Yes, everyone knows the hatreds to which Giuliani plays in his domestic policy, which have been so well received by so many Republicans. But then hatred of immigrants, especially those of the dark-skinned variety, is not one of the strains in US culture that's particularly attractive to Latin Americans.

And Giuliani is the Republican front runner, allegedly the moderate.

So do Latin Americans fervently hope and pray that the Democrat wins the White House next year? No doubt there's a preference for Democrats throughout the region, but it's a wary and mistrustful one at best.

Why is that?

Because past Democratic presidents have tended to allow Cuban exiles who see the entire region through a distorted lens of perceived Fidel Castro plots to dominate all US policy toward Latin America. After all, the UN similarly condemned the embargo against Cuba when Bill Clinton was enforcing it. Moreover, a lot of Democrats seem willing to transfer this paranoiac regional outlook to a panicky and overblown preoccupation with Hugo Chávez plots, as many Republicans have. To a gringo like me it's ridiculous to say that there's no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, but I've heard a lot of well educated Panamanians say it and the demons that politicians of both major US parties apparently perceive is Exhibit A for that argument.

Because most Democrats in Washington have, out of fear of looking weak or for whatever other reasons, backed some truly awful policies like the failed War on Drugs and the paramilitary death squad massacre known as Plan Colombia.

Because in the economic sphere, Democrats who support "globalization" seem to have a concept of it that's not much different from the Republicans' --- cheap labor, movement of capital but not people, no democratic features in NAFTA-model international institutions or the WTO, panels composed of corporate lawyers empowered to strike down laws passed by elected governments and those sorts of things. Nor have many of the Democrats recognized the devastation that Washington Consensus policies have wrought on Latin American societies.

There are some real differences between how the two main US parties treat this region. Bill Clinton, with the single exception of Haiti, then ruled by murderous hoodlums who shot their way into office, didn't send out secret agents or the Armed Forces to overthrow governments in this hemisphere. His cultural outreach to the Americas contrasts with the Bushes' general neglect. He didn't go building any walls on the Mexican border. His ambassadors generally stood up for human rights, democracy and the rule of law, but temperately so and with too many inconsistencies.

(Consider one of the incongruities as affected Panama. When boat people threatened to overwhelm Florida, Clinton convinced Panama to allow their temporary incarceration in a camp at what was then the US Army's Empire Range, west of the canal. There was no running water at that campsite, but lo and behold, that problem was temporarily dealt with by giving then President Ernesto Pérez Balladares's son-in-law's company the bottled water contract. Later, after negotiations to continue an overt US military presence here after 1999 failed, the Clinton administration pulled Toro's visa over the sale of Panamanian documents to Chinese citizens seeking to sneak into the United States. It was just a bit more tawdry than the time-honored practice of looking the other way while it's convenient to do so.)

Hillary Clinton is the Democratic front runner, and one wonders if, to what extent and in which particulars her policies toward the region would be different from her husband's. She really does deserve to be judged on her own merits rather than as an extension of Bill, but she just hasn't had many specific things to say about the Americas.

Although it's possible to extrapolate the other Democratic presidential hopefuls' stands on other things into possible differences about US policies toward Latin America, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich we can't be very sure about what these alternative visions might be. One might expect that Bill Richardson and Christopher Dodd, who speak Spanish and have lived in Latin America, would by virtue of those facts be in closer touch with hemispheric realities than the rest of the Democratic field.

However, other than with respect to immigration, Latin America is unlikely to be an issue in the US presidential campaign. For one thing, the mainstream media in the United States have not prepared the public for an informed and rational debate. Latin Americans, it seems, are a bit more attentive to what goes on in the USA than people in the States are to what's happening here.

Also in this section:

Sirias, A Wounaan journey
Kuna General Congress of Madugandi, Our just claims and the government's repression
Avnery, 12 years after Rabin's assassination
Amnesty International, Making a diplomatic issue of violence against women
Weisbrot, A bank of Latin America's own
Carpio, Disaster reduction and the media

Pilgrim, The Trinidad-Tobago election

Sánchez, Lula's yellow submarine

Jackson, Republicans and Democrats and Latin America

Bernal, Setting up a presidential re-election?

Leis, Who watches the watchers?