Venezuela, an imaginary threat
Obama
is maintaining a hostile policy towards Hugo Chávez — which will
cost the U.S. friendships elsewhere in Latin America
By
Mark Weisbrot Read Spanish Version
From
the Guardian
U.S.-Latin
American relations fell to record lows during the Bush years, and
there have been hopes — both North and South of the border — that
President Obama would bring a fresh approach. So far, however, most
signals are pointing to continuity rather than change.
President
Obama started off with an unprovoked verbal assault on Venezuela. In
an interview broadcast by the Spanish language television station
Univision on the Sunday before his inauguration, he accused President
Hugo Chávez of Venezuela of having "impeded progress in the
region" and "exporting terrorist activities."
These
remarks were unusually hostile and threatening even by the previous
administration’s standards. They are also untrue and diametrically
opposed to the way the rest of the region sees Venezuela. The charge
that Venezuela is "exporting terrorism" would not pass the
laugh test among almost any government in Latin America. José Miguel
Insulza, the Chilean Secretary General of the OAS, was speaking for
almost all the countries in the hemisphere when he told the U.S.
Congress last year that "there is no evidence" and that no
member country, including the United States, had offered "any
such proof" that Venezuela supported terrorist groups.
Nor
do the other Latin American democracies see Venezuela as an obstacle
to progress in the region. On the contrary, President Lula da Silva
of Brazil — along with several other presidents in South America —
has repeatedly defended Chávez and his role in the region. Just a
few days after Obama denounced Venezuela, Lula was in Venezuela’s
southern state of Zulia, where he emphasized his strategic
partnership with Chávez and their common efforts at regional
economic integration.
Obama’s statement was no accident;
whoever fed him these lines very likely intended to send a message to
the Venezuelan electorate before last Sunday’s referendum that
Venezuela won’t have decent relations with the U.S. so long as Chávez
is their elected president. (Voters decided to remove term limits for
elected officials, paving the way for Chávez to run again in
2013.)
There is definitely at least a faction of the Obama
administration that wants to continue the Bush policies. James
Steinberg, number two to Hillary Clinton in the State Department,
took a gratuitous swipe at Bolivia and Venezuela during his
confirmation process, saying that the United States should provide a
"counterweight to governments like those currently in power in
Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the
interests of their people or the region."
Another sign
of continuity is that Obama has not yet replaced Bush’s top State
Department official for the Western Hemisphere, Thomas Shannon.
The
U.S. media plays the role of enabler in this situation. Thus the
Associated Press ignores the attacks from Washington and portrays
Chávez’s response as nothing more than an electoral ploy on his
part. In fact, Chávez had been uncharacteristically restrained. He
did not respond to attacks throughout the long U.S. presidential
campaign, even when Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden called him a
"dictator," or Obama described him as "despotic"
— labels that no serious political scientist anywhere would accept
for a democratically elected president of a country where the
opposition dominates the media. He wrote it off as the influence of
South Florida on U.S. presidential elections.
But there are
few if any presidents in the world that would take repeated verbal
abuse from another government without responding. Obama’s advisors
know that no matter what this administration does to Venezuela, the
press will portray Chávez as the aggressor. So it’s an easy, if
cynical, political calculation for them to poison relations from the
outset. What they have not yet realized is that by doing so they are
alienating the majority of the region.
There is still hope for
change in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, which has become
thoroughly discredited on everything from the "war on drugs,"
to the Cuba embargo to trade policy. But as during the Bush years, we
will need relentless pressure from the South. Last September UNASUR
(the Union of South American Nations) strongly backed Bolivia’s
government against opposition violence and destabilization. This was
very successful in countering Washington’s tacit support for the more
extremist elements of Bolivia’s opposition. It showed the Bush
administration that the region was not going to tolerate any attempts
to legitimize an extra-legal opposition in Bolivia or to grant it
special rights outside of the democratic political process.
Several
presidents, including Lula, have called upon Obama to lift the
embargo on Cuba, as they congratulated him on his victory. Lula also
asked Obama to meet with Chávez. Hopefully these governments will
continue to assert — repeatedly, publicly, and with one voice —
that Washington’s problems with Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela are
Washington’s problems, and not the result of anything that those
governments have done. When the Obama team is convinced that a
"divide and conquer" approach to the region will fail just
as miserably for this administration as it did for the previous one,
then we may see the beginnings of a new policy toward Latin America.
Mark
Weisbrot
is
Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in
Washington, D.C. (www.cepr.net).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/17/barack-obama-venezuela-hugo-chavez
