Editorial, If Harley Mitchell is sincere

"Oh, you really don't expect anything to change, do you? Harley Mitchell is as hardcore PRD as they come." Such was a comment that the editor heard in a conversation about the presiding magistrate of Panama's Supreme Court ordering a review of criminal cases against very wealthy men that were approaching the statute of limitations cutoffs due in large part to judicial delays, and about his demand that long-stalled petitions to lift various legislators' immunity from criminal investigation or prosecution be acted upon sooner rather than later.

Yes, Mitchell's PRD. But then, sitting on a bench in judgment of others can do strange and remarkable things to a person's mind.

Look at US history. Who would have thought that the former Republican governor of California who led the crusade to intern his fellow citizens of Japanese ancestry in World War II concentration camps would once on the bench lead a civil rights revolution in American law? Who would have thought that one of his accomplices in this civil rights revolution would be Justice Hugo Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan?

We should not dismiss Harley Mitchell's professed intentions to cleanse the Panamanian justice system until and unless we see ample evidence for the proposition that he never really meant it. Nor should we take a wait-and-see attitude --- we should clamor for the clean-up he says that he wants and be quick to protest if it turns out we have been misled.

As we get down to the last of the major US presidential candidates left standing, enough has been said, and enough omitted, and sufficient extraneous facts pointed out, that those of us living down here ought to know enough to be informed and alarmed.

Although there have been Spanish-language debates this year, the Spanish-speaking candidates are all out of the race. We have two candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, who have lived outside of the United States. We have one candidate, Barack Obama, who has expressed an understanding of the snow jobs to which American politicians on overseas fact-finding missions tend to be subjected.

With respect to Latin America John McCain espouses the most belligerent ideas of the far right wing of the Miami Cuban exiles, while Hillary Clinton espouses the slightly less belligerent ideas of the "mainstream" right-wing Miami Cuban exiles. Barack Obama comes across as not so well informed about the region as Latin Americans would like, but on the other hand not misinformed by all the usual suspects.

If you like Plan Colombia, the embargo on Cuba, the War on Drugs, a tendency to see all events in the Americas as manifestations of sinister plots by the evil leaders of the day or heroic resistance by the enemies thereof, and US diplomatic missions whose contacts with the societies in which they work are limited to narrow oligarchic fringes and maybe the Catholic hierarchy, then Hillary Clinton represents continuity while John McCain represents a more militant expression of these same phenomena. Barack Obama remains a question mark.

In the course of this campaign, as part of her divorce from African-American Democrats, Hillary Clinton upheld Lyndon Johnson as more important to the civil rights struggle than Martin Luther King. When you look at it closely, you find that Hillary's take on foreign policy harks back to the estrangement of King from Johnson over the Vietnam War, with her instincts about America's role in the world much like LBJ's and her stands on the Iraq War and issue after issue in stark contrast to the ways that King saw things.

John McCain is a Teddy Roosevelt Republican --- too much a social reformer for the party's corporate elite, but with respect to Latin America a total reactionary who would take us back to the days of gunboat diplomacy. His response to the leftward turn across much of the region would be expressed in terms of coups, wars, economic strangulation, alliances with right-wing totalitarians and attempts to personally destroy democratically elected leaders from the left side of the spectrum.

Barack Obama? He seems ready to get beyond gunboat diplomacy, the Cold War and most predatory forms that globalization has taken. Where he would lead the United States in its relations with the rest of the Americas can only be indirectly inferred from tangential bits of evidence.

And what are the closest and most pressing issues of US relations with Latin America for people up in the States?

First and foremost, it's an understanding that the United States itself is partly a Latin American country, with its history including a series of incorporations of Spanish-speaking peoples, including the purchase of Florida, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican Cession, the conquest of Puerto Rico and other examples. It's also an understanding that, urgent as it may be to get better control over the US borders, the realities are that a huge fence offends most Latin Americans, that it's not practical to try to catch and deport all of those who are currently living and working illegally in the USA, and that without substantial immigration the United States faces demographic problems that would in short order have too many retirees trying to live in a society with too few working people. If any of the major US presidential candidates get any of this, they're not talking about it on the campaign trail. At least Americans are fortunate to have no remaining major candidate who embraces the extreme immigrant-bashing for which there is no US political base outside of the most racist fringe of the far right.

Also close and pressing --- at every port of entry into the United States, in fact --- there is the unfriendly treatment that virtually all foreigners, Latin American and otherwise, get as they arrive in the USA, or attempt to do so in a legal manner. The increasingly petty and arbitrary denials of visas to those who would visit the United States; the unfriendly treatment that those who manage to get them receive from Homeland Security upon arrival; and the new restrictions on persons who would overfly or make connecting flights in US territory en route from one foreign country to another are all factors that do direct harm to the US economy. We know that Clinton and McCain, both supporters of the Patriot Act and both remarkably silent in the face of the train of abuses that has followed, are insensitive to this harm. Whether Barack Obama would behave any differently, we can only guess.

So Clinton and McCain offer us different shades of the same, while Obama offers us some nebulous change. In all cases, the force of public opinion might cause them to reconsider some points. Rather than accept a pig in the poke or allow carefully calculating politicians to presume that what we have now is acceptable, now is the time for US citizens living in Latin America to breach the Beltway bubble, inform the mainstream politicians about the way things actually are in these parts and insist that Washington adjust its policies to reality.