By Iroel Sánchez on February 22, 2022
image: Al Mayadeen
The political genius of Biden and Blinken continues to reap fruits: not only has it united China and Russia, but while they talk about alliances of the latter with Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua and invent a “Russian invasion of Ukraine”, it is the Presidents of two of its neighbors with more economic weight, Alberto Fernandez of Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who have visited Moscow.
From that “new beginning” with Latin America proclaimed in 2012 by Biden’s then boss, Barack Obama, we are rather witnessing the end of the region as the exclusive preserve of US transnationals that must increasingly share more space with companies from extra-regional powers that the US sees as enemies in an area that Washington has historically considered its “backyard”.
Who, or what, made such a shift possible? The counter-offensive undertaken by Obama: since 2009 more or less bloody coups d’état in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil, his negotiations with Cuba, while he sawed the floor out by applying a hard economic siege to Venezuela, the island’s main ally, gave way to Trump’s isolationism, with a discourse that at times became openly racist towards Latinos – “shithole countries” he called them- and a confrontation that was on the verge of military intervention against Caracas.
Particularly with Cuba, Trump went further than any other U.S. president. Based on two fallacies constructed from Miami: 20,000 phantom Cuban military personnel in Venezuela that nobody talks about anymore and some “sonic attacks” on US diplomats in Havana that even the CIA now denies, the New York magnate not only reversed the thawing process between the two countries, but also applied in full pandemic 243 additional measures to the economic war that Washington has waged against the island for sixty years. Biden, in breach of his campaign promises, did not resume the Obamist policy towards Cuba and has maintained with few variations the Trumpist discourse on Latin America, although without the xenophobic extremism of the latter.
With the right wing leaving the government in Chile and Peru, with a government in solidarity with Havana in a country as important as Mexico, with Colombia also at risk of abandoning the right wing, and with the return of leftist forces governing in Bolivia and Honduras, embroiled in bilateral disputes with El Salvador, and with the avowedly Trumpist Bolsonaro in Brazil, the scenario is not favorable for Biden’s Mayanist policy in the face of a new Summit of the Americas to be held in the U.S. city of Los Angeles in June of this year. The Organization of American States (OAS), the U.S. instrument that organizes the Summit together with the State Department, is still in the hands of the servile luis Almagro, highly discredited for his direct involvement in the 2019 coup d’état in Bolivia, which poses an additional difficulty for the success of the event.
Trump dismissed that forum and downgraded it by not attending himself and sending his Vice President to the last such event held in Lima in 2018. But now Biden, embroiled in tough disputes with Russia and China expanding ties and influence in the region, needs to rebuild a relationship that is not only badly deteriorated, but by excluding Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, something that even Trump himself did not do, he is going to have an additional reason for confrontation.
Wrapped in challenges to its global hegemony, with a lack of consensus among its European allies, Washington needs Latin America as never before. But the eagerness to avoid upsetting the Trumpist nucleus based in Miami, which lives from and for the confrontation with Cuba and opposed to everything that means a minimum of recognition to Latin American sovereignties, puts Biden in the worst conditions to face a world where he is increasingly questioned, relying on his natural zone of influence.
Source: Al Mayadeen, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English