Obama's Latin America Policy: Renewal or Further Decline?

[Judi Lynn]

Obama's Latin America Policy: Renewal or Further Decline?
Greg Grandin
March 16, 2011

Barack Obama heads to Latin America tomorrow, bringing with him little more than a winning smile and the hope that the afterglow of his election, which Latin Americans celebrated with great cheer, still warms.

The trip is meant to show that his administration has not let crises, domestic and foreign, prevent a proactive engagement with the region. In reality, Obama will be playing catch-up, trying to slow down China’s inroads into what used to be the United States’s backyard, shore up an alternative to the so-called “bad left” countries of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and sometimes Ecuador and Argentina, and win back Brazil. With its $6 trillion economy, Brazil has helped lead what Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa recently called the “second and definitive independence” of Latin America, opposing Washington on issues ranging from climate change to trade, Palestine to Honduras.

Let’s recap. Promising a new focus on Latin America is as expected of presidential candidates as kissing babies, yet many did think Obama would be different. At the time of his election, Latin America was governed by presidents who each represented a different progressive tradition—liberation theology (Paraguay’s Lugo), trade unionism (Brazil’s Lula), peasant and indigenous organizing (Bolivia’s Morales), feminism (Chile’s Bachelet), social democratic economics (Ecuador’s Correa) and even military populism (Venezuela’s Chávez)—and these leaders hoped to induct Obama into the pantheon, seeing him as a fulfillment of the US civil rights movement.

Having been early critics of the militarism (most Latin American countries opposed the “War on Terror” broadly and the invasion of Iraq in particular) and extreme neoliberalism that crashed the United States, they believed he would help them create a new hemispheric framework, leaving behind the old failed orthodoxies and finding a way to cooperatively deal with transnational problems like poverty, inequality, crime, migration and climate change. At the very least, they thought he would finally end the US cold war against Cuba.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/159256/obamas-latin-america-policy-renewal-or-further-decline

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