Obama and the US-Latin America Time Bomb

[Joanne98]

Defusing US Policy Toward Latin America Requires Cutting the Wires in Proper Order


By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
May 26, 2008

We’ve all seen those action movies in which a bomb – its digital clock ticking down the seconds to explosion – must be defused. There is typically a clump of wires and a hurried discussion between the heroes – “no, no, don’t cut the red one!” – because the wires have to be disconnected in a certain order or the whole city will be instantly destroyed.


Such is the situation in the Western Hemisphere today. The bomb was built and planted by decades of US imperial policy, from Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The old methods of imposing Washington and Wall Street agendas on Latin America never went away: attempted Coups de E’tat, political assassinations, dirty wars of repression carried out by torturers trained by the US School of the Americas and by paramilitary death squads remain part of the daily nightmare in so much of the hemisphere. But those “traditional” techniques been surpassed by new, more technologically proficient means of control: state-of-the-art electoral fraud, mercenary swat teams contracted from the corporate private sector and not beholden to any country’s law or constitution, technologies of total surveillance upon dissidents via telephone, Internet and satellite, economic blackmail through “free trade” deals and the daily confusing blare wrought by mass media simulation.

And yet the “old” and “new” methods of anti-democratic imposition rely on the same foundations and priorities as always: In the place of Spaniard, Portuguese, French, British and Dutch conquerors, with their horses, armaments, priests, viceroys and informants recruited from the native populations, today the invaders and looters are faceless global corporations (many still from Europe, but even more of them from the former British colony that is the US). The new invading armies are their stockholders and money launderers, bureaucracies and police corps, and the corrupt television stations and newspapers that have become an increasingly powerful part of the local oligarch political classes. Then as now they get a few of the crumbs in exchange for managing these implements of submission upon the majority populations. Below and to the left: the multitudes of humans that are kept poor in pantry, shelter, health, education, and the authentic freedom that remains out of reach not only for the oppressed, but also – in this devil’s bargain, and including in the United States – for so many of their remote-control oppressors.

Into this quagmire, on Friday, stepped 46-year-old Barack Obama, the US Senator from Chicago that is the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States. In a policy speech in Miami he presented his proposals for US policy toward Latin America. Earlier this week, Narco News vetted the policies and doctrine of his presumptive Republican opponent, Senator John McCain: Not much to see there other than Cold War nostalgia and a continuation of the time bomb’s countdown toward destructive explosion; essentially what was offered by US presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II over the past 28 years.

Obama’s policy speech – which broke definitively from some of those policies while pandering to others – is far more difficult to vet. It will renew some of the same old debates between liberals, libertarians, progressives and leftists about whether the glass he holds out to Latin America is half empty or half full, and whether it contains refreshment or just a better-tasting venom… or whether it’s a glass at all.

Decades of imperial bipartisan US policy toward Latin America have calcified thinking on the Left and the Right alike. Partisans of each will pull out their litmus papers and declare the Obama doctrine acid or alkaline. Your writer, who has studied the Obama phenomenon as closely as any journalist, has learned from decades of practice not to take anything that any politician says during a political campaign as gospel regarding policy proposals. Once the candidate enters public office, hard realities come crashing down, and he or she are left alone only with his or her instincts, and those instincts – not the position papers – are what, in the end, determine policy.

http://www.narconews.com/Issue53/article3110.html