opinion

When will they wise up?
by Eric Jackson

Maybe I'm thinking about the wrong "they."

In Washington, politicians of both parties and all political stripes say the dumbest things about Panama and the rest of Latin America, and tend to act on these notions. Or is it that they do things for other reasons and, well knowing that they're talking trash, talk nonsense to their constituents with the expectation that they won't be called on it?

From troglodyte Republicans in Congress, particularly Dana Rohrabacher, we got this fantasy about how "Red China" runs the Panama Canal. Other conservatives had expressed alarm about a Hong Kong corporation with Beijing government ties that got the ports concessions at Cristobal and Balboa. This may or may not have been a well-founded concern, given that a defense of the canal or anything else ought to be based on a potential enemy's capabilities rather than its present intentions. The whole routine about the Chinese running the Panama Canal was a complete fabrication. But lots of Americans believed it.

And then there was the progressive Democrat, Sheila Jackson Lee, who got used as a medium for the dissemination of a lie by the pompous overpaid construction exec who runs the canal. Representative Jackson Lee, a top figure in Hillary Clinton's campaign effort along the Gulf Coast, told Americans all about the Panama Canal's much improved safety record under Panama's administration. The reality is that when the American flag came down from the Administration Building canal administrator Alberto Alemán Zubieta changed the definition of "accident" --- before, it was counted as an accident every time a ship touched a wall or gate in the locks, but it was changed so that only those much rarer incidents in which an insurance claim would be filed would be counted. Then the overpaid Alemán Zubieta pulled an Aggie frat boy trick and compared statistics under the old definition of accident with those under the new definition as if they were the same thing and got Jackson Lee to repeat that lie as some sort of justification for a US - Panama free trade agreement, when the reality is that there has been no significant safety improvement since Panama took over the canal administration.

Panama is by no means unique. Washington politicians say the dumbest things about Latin America. Sometimes it's a matter of their gullibility. Sometimes they are trying to deceive voters when the reality is that they're backing narrow special interests and they prefer not to admit this. Sometimes it's that they are being advised by dogmatists with a tenuous grasp on reality, in most instances the Miami Cuban exile establishment that views all events in Latin America in terms of plots hatched by the Castro brothers, or now by Hugo Chávez. Sometimes they have learned some of the realities of one Latin American country and treat all Latin Americans as a fungible mass, making their own versions of the "Tequila Effect" error of so many US investors who pulled their money out of the entire region because of an economic burp peculiar to Mexico.

I know what Bill Clinton's administration was like --- the Plan Colombia death squad offensive, the failed War on Drugs, pandering to Toro Pérez Balladares and his corruption when seeking something from him and then pulling his US visa afterwards, appointing a close friend of Hillary's brother to be one of the worst US ambassadors to Panama in a long time, trade policies that drove millions of Mexican farmers off of their land and prompted many of them to illegally cross the US border in search of work. Is Hillary any wiser? I don't know.

And Obama? He's largely an unknown. He voted against CAFTA but for the US - Peru free trade pact. He has expressed a healthy skepticism about the way the Washington politicians supposedly inform themselves about situations in other countries. He at least recognizes that the US economy's dependence on armies of cheap undocumented foreign workers is a central fact to be addressed under the heading of "immigration." As a relative newcomer to Washington, he's relatively unattached to old policies and commitments that don't serve Americans well in this day and age, but then we may not like all the foreign policy surprises of an Obama administration.

I went through all the Republican candidates' websites, especially looking at such Spanish sections as some of them had, and if the leading Democrats raise questions, the Republicans downright insult the intelligence of Hispanic voters even when speaking directly to them. Ron Paul has different foreign policy ideas, but he's not going to be the GOP nominee. Otherwise I don't see any new ideas, even though by most indications US relations with the rest of the Americas are more troubled now than they have been in living memory.

The November US election won't be decided on the basis of relations with Latin America --- the Republicans may try, with hatred of Latin American immigrants as their wedge issue, but it's unlikely to work. We will get a change in the White House, and probably in the direction the country takes on a number of important issues. But that change will be far more positive if the voters systematically impose a penalty on politicians who talk gibberish, whether about Latin America or anything else.