Signals from the South for U.S. policy

In the public perception battles being waged for minds and hearts in Latin
America, the United States is playing the weak, negative card. In one
recent week, the region’s media raged at the Rev. Pat Robertson’s call to
“assassinate” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, focusing on the fact that
U.S. President Bush would not condemn such a notion from the politicized
preacher. The seeming tacit approval spoke the obvious, as both Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
crisscrossed the region warning of security concerns about Venezuela with
not a small degree of saber rattling.

But the U.S. vision of a war without end, combined with an economic policy
of shifting wealth toward the wealthy, meets with growing rejection among
democratically elected governments from one end of the hemisphere to
another. For a Latin American public with deep memory of dozens of
U.S.-backed regime-change incursions in the past century, coupled with
decades-long wars involving death squad murders and “disappearances,” the
message fails to inspire.

By contrast, Chavez — love him or hate him — has consolidated his
democratically elected government, is set for three more years of
legitimate authority and has launched a hemispheric initiative to link oil
and industrial production to social justice issues. It is a campaign the
likes of which has never been seen in Latin America. Chavez, in partnership
with Cuba’s President Fidel Castro, has rallied all of the Caribbean
countries (except Haiti) and much of South America into petro-alliances and
health campaigns that are highlighting one of the more clear gains of the
Cuban Revolution — doctors and health care personnel in the hundreds of
thousands.

In the same week as Robertson’s universally condemned ravings, these two
countries were announcing a major health initiative to conduct free medical
procedures on hundreds of thousands of the poor and sick in Latin American
countries (and even poor people in the United States). This “Mission
Miracle,” as the media dubbed it, is a public relations home run by Castro
and Chavez. Cuba, rich in highly educated medical personnel, offered
thousands of eye doctors and is training thousands more from throughout
Latin America. Venezuela is providing transportation and medical supplies.

At the end of the same week, as the damage of Hurricane Katrina was felt in
the United States, Chavez — this time with Jesse Jackson at his side —
launched a home heating oil preferred-price program for North American poor
people. Venezuela’s CITGO stations now begin to challenge Saudi-embedded
ExxonMobil Corp. for the heart and soul of the American underclass. Chavez
would offer some 66,000 barrels per day of heating fuel, 10 percent of
Venezuela’s U.S. sales, to poor communities in the United States. Urging
the cutting of intermediaries, Chavez designated the oil to serve “poor
communities, hospitals, religious communities, schools.” Seven to 8 million
poor Americans might see a price reduction of some 30 percent this winter
as a result of the offer.

The Venezuelan initiatives underscore the potentials of an oil-rich power
willing to radicalize and create the social change needed to address the
misery of Latin American masses, where all sectors except the mega-rich —
whether professional, working class or campesino — have slid into
not-so-quiet economic desperation. They are providing hope for the poor,
even as U.S. policy-makers wonder that even a famished economic system like
Cuba’s is projecting some answers to pieces of human poverty and misery.

On the backbone of America, the Andean mountain chain is home to one of the
largest nuclei of American Indian population and cultural bases in the
whole Western Hemisphere. Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru (in that order) are
major Indian-populated republics with serious Indian political movements —
Aymara and Quechua organizing joined to federations of Amazon tribes and to
the many national labor and other coalitions. In Bolivia, Evo Morales’
Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) is gearing him up as the likely winning
presidential candidate this December.

Chavez, who recently returned a large piece of land to Indian communities,
is appealing to Andean Indians with his pro-Indian actions. While in the
United States, congressional and Supreme Court decisions strip away Indian
land rights, Chavez granted title in August to six of Venezuela’s
indigenous communities, recognizing a territory covering 314,000 acres in
the eastern states of Anzoategui and Monagas for some 4,000 Indian people.
He was hailed by tribal elders as the “first president to keep his word” to
Indians. The Venezuelan leader vowed to legalize titles in 15 other
indigenous community cases in 2005. In a country where nearly 80 percent of
Venezuela’s farmland is owned by 3 to 4 percent of the hacendado
population, a little social justice has a long way to go.

Chavez’s Latin American initiatives and growing list of relations have
flabbergasted Rice, who is still rattling sabers, imposing economic
“blockades” and hinting at military solutions. This is another one of those
major areas over which the American administration is increasingly lacking
actual clues. Set to fight a forever war on insurgencies and terrorists
(and drug dealers), the policy is not encountering much of that (except in
Colombia), while losing steadily at the ballot box. Democratically elected
socialist candidates are being placed into office as the exhortations of
market forces grind down into the people’s need for basic food and shelter
and health security. Meantime, Cuba and Venezuela have put up useful health
initiatives, buttressed by a new agenda providing cheaper oil and a more
just distribution of oil profits.

It is too early to tell how the social experiments being launched will turn
out. But there is no doubt the thinking signaled by the political action on
the ground is most telling. A massive resistance to the U.S. economic
policy is taking hold, which a modern superpower country on the verge of
serious superpower problems must address and encompass — rather than
confront and make war upon.

The great opportunity for U.S. business to shine in Latin America in the
decade after the demise of the old Soviet Union, by providing the highest
example of fairness and genuine mutual development for its southern
hemisphere, evaporated. U.S. right-wing thinkers gleefully imposed their
dictums and in country after country, including the United States, the
living standards of millions got worse or, at the very least, remained
stagnant. Corporate consolidation undermined food security for large masses
of people; land grabs threatened people’s access to vital natural
resources; financial structures squeezed out small, independent producers,
including indigenous-based agricultural families. Malignant poverty was
unleashed that is made all the more acute for the destruction of the
regional farming communities throughout the hemisphere, largely resulting
from the globalization of agriculture under policies intensely driven by
the United States.

Until the U.S. government begins to better represent its people to the rest
of the hemisphere — actually thinking and planning as if the masses of
people matter — the hostility, resentment and outright confrontation with
its designs, good or bad, will only worsen.