Virgil
04-19-2008, 08:52 AM
http://counterpunch.org/ross04182008.html
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Apri1 18, 2008
Losing Latin America ... All the Way to Tierra del Fuego
The Bush Legacy
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.
For George Bush, the March 1 anti-terror strike by the Colombian air force under U.S. guidance on a FARC guerrilla camp deep in the Ecuadorian jungle had everything to do with legacy.
During eight years in the White House, Bush's war on Iraq so absorbed his attention that for once in three centuries of Yanqui hegemony, Latin America has breathing room to shore up common defenses against the Colossus of the North, build alliances, as the pendulum swings left from neoliberalism, and even elect some social democratic presidents.
"We're back!" U.S. Undersecretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom Shannon greeted the crowd at the Council of the Americas in New York on April 2, signaling renewed Bush government interest in the Western Hemisphere. Not that the U.S. had ever really been away: "Our influence is not diminishing--it's just changing," the undersecretary argued before his well-heeled audience, most with serious fiduciary interests south of the border. Shannon conceded that the administration's temporary inattention had created a vacuum that "offered an enormous opportunity to articulate one vision"--a long-winded euphemism for the hated Hugo Chavez. But now Chavez's space was "shrinking," and with Colombia (the key U.S. proxy on the continent), Brazil (neutered by Lula's ambition), Peru, Chile and Mexico back on board, "together we can overcome our recent history."
What seemed most significant on Shannon's shopping list of new and old accomplices were the absences: Argentina, for example, the third largest economy in Latin America and an important player in the southern continent's tilt to the left, where Peronist Social Democrat Cristina Fernández de Kirchner succeeds her Social Democrat husband Nestor. The Kirchners have been in the Bush doghouse since they helped torpedo his neoliberal pipedream ALCA (Free Trade Treaty of the Americas) at a 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar de Plata.
To complicate Cristina Kirchner's investiture, U.S. authorities in Miami and Washington charged that the dreaded Chavez had financed her campaign. The scenario was a twisted one. On the eve of Cristina's inauguration last November, Argentinean customs agents in Buenos Aires confiscated $800,000 from a Venezuelan "businessman" living in Florida, Guido Antonini Wilson. The ultimate destination of the money was obscure.
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Apri1 18, 2008
Losing Latin America ... All the Way to Tierra del Fuego
The Bush Legacy
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.
For George Bush, the March 1 anti-terror strike by the Colombian air force under U.S. guidance on a FARC guerrilla camp deep in the Ecuadorian jungle had everything to do with legacy.
During eight years in the White House, Bush's war on Iraq so absorbed his attention that for once in three centuries of Yanqui hegemony, Latin America has breathing room to shore up common defenses against the Colossus of the North, build alliances, as the pendulum swings left from neoliberalism, and even elect some social democratic presidents.
"We're back!" U.S. Undersecretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom Shannon greeted the crowd at the Council of the Americas in New York on April 2, signaling renewed Bush government interest in the Western Hemisphere. Not that the U.S. had ever really been away: "Our influence is not diminishing--it's just changing," the undersecretary argued before his well-heeled audience, most with serious fiduciary interests south of the border. Shannon conceded that the administration's temporary inattention had created a vacuum that "offered an enormous opportunity to articulate one vision"--a long-winded euphemism for the hated Hugo Chavez. But now Chavez's space was "shrinking," and with Colombia (the key U.S. proxy on the continent), Brazil (neutered by Lula's ambition), Peru, Chile and Mexico back on board, "together we can overcome our recent history."
What seemed most significant on Shannon's shopping list of new and old accomplices were the absences: Argentina, for example, the third largest economy in Latin America and an important player in the southern continent's tilt to the left, where Peronist Social Democrat Cristina Fernández de Kirchner succeeds her Social Democrat husband Nestor. The Kirchners have been in the Bush doghouse since they helped torpedo his neoliberal pipedream ALCA (Free Trade Treaty of the Americas) at a 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar de Plata.
To complicate Cristina Kirchner's investiture, U.S. authorities in Miami and Washington charged that the dreaded Chavez had financed her campaign. The scenario was a twisted one. On the eve of Cristina's inauguration last November, Argentinean customs agents in Buenos Aires confiscated $800,000 from a Venezuelan "businessman" living in Florida, Guido Antonini Wilson. The ultimate destination of the money was obscure.
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