Defeated in Iraq, bogged down in Afghanistan, repudiated at home and in the world like no other U.S. President before, George W. Bush has started his tour of several Latin American countries where, right now, the epitaph of the Monroe Doctrine is being written. His sudden concern for ‘social justice’in the lands south of RÃo Bravo is a tacit recognition that the ‘great democratic advances’have not translated into satisfying the aspirations of the great majority and it reveals the great disquiet among the American elite about the powerful rebellion in what was their backyard.
The existing democratic political space in Latin America has, by the way, been achieved despite Washington, as a result of the huge struggles, armed and of the masses, against dictatorships or repressive regimes encouraged by it or the more recent popular struggle against neo-liberalism.
Illiterate in history and ill with contempt for the people, the imperial leadership and the plumed hired hands blame Hugo Chavez for the growing Latin American wave of rejection of the model of free market model of imperial recolonisation ‘ democracy for the rich. They ignore, or pretend to ignore, that leaders like Chavez and Fidel Castro are personification and products of the popular fight against that intolerable order, not the other way round’¦ the example of the Cuban resistance against the Colossus of the north led to the renewal of rebellion in our region, united like nowhere else by a common history and culture of profoundly revolutionary traditions of liberty, patriotism and anti-imperialism.
It is not chance that the emperor will be hindered, as has already happened in his country, from popping into any place in Latin America where there are people, and will be confined in enclosed spaces, fortified and surrounded by thousands of soldiers, policemen and his praetorian guard. Why is that the emissary of the ‘greatest western democracy’will be rejected on the streets as much as the ‘authoritarian’Chavez will be acclaimed?
Bush is delusional, as when he pompously declared ‘mission accomplished’in Iraq, if he imagines that the coloured pebbles in the portfolio he brings can put out the fire started by the imperium itself in the meadows of our America. This Indo-Afro-Latin America today lives once again the unfulfilled dreams of Bolivar and refuses to be a slave any longer of the United States, which the Venezuelan (Simon Bolivar) defined some two centuries ago as ‘destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty’.
The cynicism of the author of genocide, who has institutionalised torture and suppressed habeas corpus through legislation in the United States, known no limits when he shamelessly invokes the Liberator (Bolivar) and George Washington and goes to the extreme of declaring that the revolution that they initiated has to be ‘completed’. He isn’t wrong. That’s what the people of Latin America are already dealing with and perhaps at some point not too far away the Americans will do it.
The rented side-kicks suggest that the United States will gift the head of the Mexican state with resources to lead the campaign against Chavez in view of the consequences of the counter-productive one that Washington seems to be facing. There is no Latin American politician who can fulfil this mercenary function without splattering his brain against the wall of people who identify with the Venezuelan President. No respectable Latin American, which wants to maintain any popular support, will join the manoeuvre to isolate Caracas. Lula certainly will not do it, however much credit that Bush extends to the Brazilian technology funds for producing etanol.
The friends of Chavez, who include the vast majority of the governments of the most influential countries in the region, will stay so, though we should not underestimate the counter-revolutionary slant of the Bush tour and his subversive plans against Venezuela and Latin American unity. If this is done, they will not be able to alter the rebel direction of Latin America. There will be new Evos, Correas, Ortegas: the only ones isolated and politically buried will be those that oppose them.
Slightly abridged and translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee
The original article in Spanish was printed in La Jornada, Mexico, on March 8, 2007
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