By Atilio Boron on January 2, 2024
Crisis or exceptional situations are a constant in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), not an alteration of a supposed normality we never knew in this, the most unjust continent in the world. And, for the record, the closest to “American Rome”, as Martí called U.S. imperialism.
Our America is, therefore, Washington’s favorite prey, the one over which its claws reach the furthest and sink the deepest. Sometimes we are told that wars are very rare in this continent, and it is true that there is no war between nations as we see them in Africa, Europe or Asia, not to mention the Middle East.
The last such war between countries in the region was the 1969 “Soccer War” between Salvador and Honduras, a minor incident. A brawl of soccer fanatics led to a two-day war with minimal casualties. An armed skirmish rather than a war.
The other case, and the most serious, was the one fought between Peru and Ecuador in 1995, the so-called Cenepa River War, whose toll is estimated at just over one hundred dead in combat. Some territorial disputes still survive, such as those between Venezuela and Guyana over the Essequibo, the maritime conflict between Nicaragua and Colombia, or the diplomatic confrontation between Belize and Guatemala.
The insertion of Latin America and the Caribbean in the Western Hemisphere makes us a region marked by a kind of “historical and geographical fatality”. We are, for the supremacist and racist sectors, the “backyard of the U.S.”.
At the end of last year, December 2023, the Monroe Doctrine will have been in force for two hundred years. It is not a minor fact that this was the first foreign policy doctrine drawn up by the U.S. government and that it preceded the Wilson Doctrine by almost a century, conceived in the context of the First World War to establish guiding parameters for Washington’s relations with Europe.
But, I insist, the first foreign policy definition was for us (LAC). The fact of being part of the so-called Western Hemisphere -a kind but lying expression used by the rulers in Washington to talk about this part of the world and avoid saying that we are the periphery of the empire- granted us that dubious privilege.
This very special situation of LAC can only be explained by the fact that this region is a veritable emporium of natural resources -oil, gas, water, various minerals, lithium, biodiversity, etc.- and, moreover, very close to the coasts of the United States, it is understandable that it is of priority interest to Washington.
Moreover, and this is not a minor fact, LAC is the border of the United States with the turbulent world of underdevelopment and poverty. Ensuring the stability of that region, having “friendly governments” that avoid relations with countries that are enemies of the United States (formerly the Soviet Union, now China, Russia, Iran, among the main ones) and that favor U.S. companies and contain the flow of migration towards the North are priorities of enormous importance for Washington, although its officials have always tried to negotiate with the countries of the area “ignoring” their importance.
But this underestimation is belied by the hard facts of U.S. foreign policy. Concerned about containing the expansion of “Soviet communism”, Washington created NATO in April 1949; but almost two years earlier, in September 1947, it had created the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), which is the model that would later be applied in Europe with NATO. And in 1948 he created the OAS, a regional organization that much later would have its counterpart in Europe.
In short: first things first, as a well-known American adage says, and when it came to safeguarding regions, Washington had no doubts. First, we had to protect LAC from Soviet expansionism, and then we would deal with the Europeans.
The same reasoning applies to the creation of U.S. military commands in different parts of the world. The Southern Command, with jurisdiction over all of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the exception of Mexico (incorporated into the U.S. Central Command) was created in 1963; twenty years later, in 1983, a command was created to monitor and safeguard U.S. interests in the Middle East and the Africa Command only came into being in 2007.
Finally, there is a reason why, as early as 1783, John Adams, then ambassador of the young American republic in London, proposed to the new government of the Thirteen Colonies that the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico be annexed to U.S. jurisdiction as soon as possible.
The reason: U.S. independence could lead to some future conflict with the United Kingdom, and the British crown has many possessions in the islands of the Caribbean Sea. Securing control of Cuba and Puerto Rico, Adams went on to say, is essential to U.S. national security in the event of a future confrontation with the United Kingdom, which in fact broke out in 1812.
Needless to underline the astonishing timeliness of those words on the eve of Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency of that country. As the great Italian philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) said, history is an endless succession of “corsi e ricorsi,” cycles that repeat themselves over time in different guises and appearances.
Source: Revista Accion, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English