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The naming of things: Obama and the United States’ legacy in Latin America

By Gaveliers, The Gavel Media Team, on December 7, 2009 5:54 PM

By Edward Shore -

On April 18, 2009, fresh into his third month as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama, attended the Organization of American States-sponsored Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, meeting with the heads of every government across the Western Hemisphere (excluding, of course, Cuba, whose delegation was expelled in the early 1960s) to discuss the future of inter-American relations. Speaking from my own experience abroad at that time in Quito, Ecuador, onlookers throughout the region met Obama with unbridled enthusiasm.

A frenzied Latin American media surrounded the “new kid on the block,” tagging along with Obama’s entourage and documenting his every move. And finally, the Latin American heads of state welcomed Obama with unprecedented cordiality, if not exuberance, while expressing optimism that the direction of U.S. policymaking would finally change; in short, Mr. Obama would be more attentive to the region and less arrogant than his predecessor, President George W. Bush. So impressive was Obama, that then-President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras (since ousted in a rightwing military coup this past June, the coup regime’s “elections” have since been recognized by the United States this past week) remarked at the time: “I’m pleased with Obama’s ‘listen and learn approach.’ The treatment that we’re receiving is totally different in terms of more openness, more dialogue, and more respect.”

But as he passed through the hotel conference rooms, a familiar regional adversary met Obama: President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.  Chavez shook Obama’s hand, exchanged brief pleasantries with the “new kid” in broken English and Spanish, and passed along a most uncomfortable regional housewarming gift to the new president: Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 classic critique of U.S. interventionism in Latin America, The Open Veins of Latin America. Make what you will of his Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, but Chavez made a powerful statement to the United States and indeed the world. All eyes are now on Obama to practice what he so eloquently preached on the campaign trail; a return to a more enlightened and participatory cooperation with the international community.

Fast-forward eight months later to December 2009, and Latin America is hardly a priority (remember that whole immigration reform ‘thing’?)and not even a peripheral concern, for the Obama administration. Sure,  Obama has finally lifted the travel ban for Cuban Americans to visit their relatives living on the island, but it doesn’t exactly take a Harvard law degree to reach the conclusion that the embargo has failed to remove Fidel Castro (who has outfoxed ten U.S. presidents) from power, never mind the fact that such sanctions are criminal assaults on families and the Cuban poor. Rather, Obama has not only relied upon, but embraced the imperialist policies of his predecessor, el diablo, as he is affectionately known throughout the region, George W. Bush.

Yes, I said “imperialism” and will give a few noted historical examples: the Mexican American War of 1846 (that’s where we got California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the most resource rich parts of Mexico), the Spanish American War of 1898, the Platt Amendment of 1902, the School of the Americas in 1946, the CIA/United Fruit Company coup in Guatemala 1954, support for General Fulgencio Batista until the day before he fled in exile (with hundreds of thousands of dollars in public Cuban tax revenues in a briefcase and Swiss banks) in 1959, the Marine landing in the Dominican Republic, 1964, the “other 9/11” in Chile, 1973, Kissinger’s appraisal of the Argentine junta in 1976, Reagan’s Contras in the 1980s, George H.W. prior support for drug peddling SOA graduate Pres. Manuel Noriega before deposing the disgraced leader by bombing Panama in 1989 (Noriega now lives in a decadent Miami mansion), Clinton’s protection of maquilas in Mexico, the armed removal of Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004, etc. In October, Obama made his first dent in joining that storied tradition by signing an agreement with the Colombian government authorizing the United States to control not one, not two, but seven new military bases throughout the country to “combat narcoterrorism.” Several of them are situated along the Venezuelan border. Why is this significant? Aside from the fact that such a policy has failed almost humorously to contain narcotrafficking or the FARC and perpetuated the indiscriminate SOA trained paramilitary slaughter of peasants, the United States has an almost as fanatical obsession with removing the democratically-elected Chavez from power as it does for Fidel Castro (remember that old exploding cigar?), attempting in 1992 to secure Chavez’ prison sentence, attempting to sabotage his 1998 presidential electoral campaign, and orchestrating a failed coup d’état in 2002 to remove the president from power. And how did that turn out? Well, to start, Chavez, the region, and the world don’t really like us. And how did they demonstrate that, besides throwing a shoe at George W. Bush in a press conference in Iraq? They not only revolted in the streets against rightwing corruption and the Washington Consensus in Latin America… but also voted against it. Nearly all Latin American countries, with the exception of Mexico, Colombia, Peru (those Latin American countries closest to Washington’s payroll), and now Honduras (if you want to call their elections legitimate…and you don’t, don’t worry, you’re not alone- only three OAS members states, including the US, do), have elected center-left, to leftwing presidents, their political consciousness’ shaped by U.S. Cold War policies, leaders who aren’t so eager to jump aboard the WTO bandwagon. But let’s look beyond the Colombian bases. Obama has continued playing that old, broken record of a “war on drugs” in Mexico, stepping up billions in military aid by backing the Bush-Calderón sponsored Plan Merida. And the result? Mexico, now the second largest consumer of the School of the Americas, has seen its murder rates skyrocket. Murder rates in Mexico doubled in 2008 compared to pre-Merida numbers (5,800 reported murders in 2008), while Ciudad Juarez sees 130 murders for every 10,000 inhabitants (over 2,000 murders in the city this year alone), making this border metropolis now the most dangerous city in the world, and it’s located just a stone’s throw away from El Paso, Texas. Meanwhile, two weeks ago, Obama renewed the embargo against Cuba. The only two countries in the world that back our embargo? Israel and Palau. But I won’t go there. Furthermore, the top military commanders involved in the Honduran coup were trained at the SOA. And this past week, recently declassified files attained in Spain documenting the murders of the six Jesuits and their two housekeepers twenty years ago by SOA trained soldiers reveal that the operation was not only planned by then President Cristiani and his military chief of staff, General Ponce, but was approved two days prior by the CIA.

Think of U.S. imperialism as the swine flu and the SOA is that miserable cough that keeps you up at night. University health services (the State Department and WTO) will tell you that your fever, chest pain, and horrendous cough aren’t the swine flu that it’s just a little bug, nothing that a bit of rest and cough syrup (in our case, a little dose of deregulated, free market capitalism, defended by a U.S. trained death squad here and there to crush the angry Coca Cola factory workers) can’t cure. So you see, the cough (the SOA), that small training school in Ft. Benning that has been used to train Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics to combat guerrilla movements for over sixty years isn’t the root problem here. Rather, the existence of the swine flu, those internal factors that would make such a school possible and indeed “necessary,” is. It’s our “security” and “stability” fetishes, supported by our decadence, arrogance, greed, consumerism, and our self-proclaimed armed foreign expeditionary kick (remember Teddy Roosevelt and his fond recollection of that ‘splendid little war’ he fought as a roughrider in Cuba?), or what most objective, marginally literate observers might call “imperialism,” are to blame.

You see, the day the SOA really closed, if you want to believe the spokesmen of the since-renamed WHINSEC (Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation) in 2001, was the day the State Department decided finally to “update” and “modernize” its exploitation of Latin America. That old name recalled painful memories of rape, slaughter, and forced disappearances. And how do you decorate and even forget the past? You rip a page out of the Ronald Reagan playbook. You call the world’s most infamous terrorist, that elusive young guerrilla fighter in the Afghan mountains crusading against the Soviets by the name of Osama bin Laden a “freedom fighter.” You call the landless, starving Mayan campesina whose young child died from diarrhea a “subversive.” And you might even declare before the most catastrophic economic crisis of the modern era “that the fundamentals of the global economy are strong.” But this time, myself and the 40 other BC students who protested the SOA this past weekend in Ft. Benning, Georgia, were finally able to call “security cooperation” what it really is: imperialism.