Varieties of imperial decline : rearguard success, strategic defeat

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Varieties of imperial decline: rearguard success, strategic defeat - by Toni Solo

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Latin America's long struggle to throw off the dead seigneurial hand of US and European domination is complicated now by confusion and ambivalence among local middle classes and business classes about where their best interests lie. This is reflected, for example, in Nicaragua, where former Contra leader banker Jaime Morales works hard as Vice-President to get the best out of commercial relations with countries committed to "free markets" as well as supporting Daniel Ortega's decision to join ALBA led by Venezuela and Cuba.

Morales' pragmatic ambivalence is becoming more and more typical among his counterparts throughout Latin America. The willingness of the Zelaya government in Honduras and the Colom government in Guatemala to join Petrocaribe may well be pure pragmatisim. But Petrocaribe and the wider ALBA project are already showing advantages and benefits well beyond the reach of the miserable, one-dimensional "free trade", debt-plus-aid, anti-development model propounded by the United States and its G7 allies. ALBA countries' geographical reach makes nonsense of traditional Latin American diplomacy and geo-strategic planning, forcing even their local enemies to re-think regional strategy.

Still, in the course of the long strategic defeat they are suffering, the United States and the European Union and their allies can claim some rearguard successes. In 2006 they had Felipe Calderon's fraudulent electoral win in Mexico, Alan Garcia's dodgy defeat of Ollanta Humala in Peru and Alvaro Uribe's narco-terror-based presidential win in Colombia. In 2007, US and EU proxies scraped a win against the Chavez government's proposed constitutional reforms in the December 2nd referendum in Venezuela. Prior to that, US allies in Costa Rica squeezed out a suspiciously tight win in the referendum on the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

But the separatist inspired disruption of Bolivia's constituent assembly failed to prevent the handover of the country's new constitution by the December 15th deadline. Nor has the local oligarchy been able to rally effectively so far against the recently installed constituent assembly in Ecuador. For the US and its allies, win-some-lose-some has become win-a-few-mostly-lose-'em. Their tactics, especially with death-squad terror veteran John Negroponte in the State Department, are likely to become more vicious as the potential scale of their strategic defeat grows clearer and the temptation to double or quits grows stronger.

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