Urgently Needed: A “New Good Neighbor Policy”
The following article
was written up for Code Pink’s Latin America Campaign. The intent is to
present the nation with a proposal for a long-due overhaul of U.S. policy
toward Latin America at a time
when there will be new faces in both executive and legislative branches in Washington.
Indeed, a draft of a letter that Code Pink and other progressive organizations
will be sending presidential candidate Joe Biden, states: “We hope that your
administration will adopt a New Good Neighbor Policy” based on the “principles
of non-intervention and non-interference, mutual respect and acceptance of our
differences.” Of course, Biden does not represent any change at all when it
comes to foreign policy. The Washington “consensus” on foreign policy can only
be broken by pressure from below, from social movements, and from people who
are just fed up with our bullying and militaristic foreign policy.
LONG OVERDUE FOR
LATIN AMERICA; A NEW “GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY”
by Medea Benjamin
and Steve Ellner
Posted in Common
Dreams, July 20, 2020
LONG OVERDUE FOR
LATIN AMERICA; A NEW “GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY”
by Medea Benjamin
and Steve Ellner
Posted in Common
Dreams, July 20, 2020
U.S. policy towards Venezuela has
been a fiasco. Try as it might, the Trump regime-change team has been unable to
depose President Maduro and finds itself stuck with a self-proclaimed
president, Juan Guaidó, who President Trump was reported to have called “a
kid” who “doesn’t have what it takes.” The Venezuelan people have paid a heavy
price for Trump’s debacle, which has included crippling economic sanctions and
coup attempts. So has U.S. prestige internationally, as both the UN and the EU
have urged lifting sanctions during the
pandemic but the U.S. has refused.
This is only
one example of a string of disastrous policies toward Latin America. The Trump
administration has dusted off the 19th century Monroe Doctrine that subjugates
the nations of the region to U.S. interests. But as in past centuries, U.S.
attempts at domination are confronted at every turn by popular
resistance.
Instead of
continuing down this imperial path of endless confrontation, U.S. policymakers
need to stop, recalibrate, and design an entirely new approach to
inter-American relations. This is particularly urgent as the continent is in
the throes of a coronavirus crisis and an economic recession that is compounded
by low commodity prices, a belly-up tourist industry and the drying up of
remittances from outside.
A good reference point for a
policy makeover is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy”
in the 1930s, which represented an abrupt break with the interventionism of
that time. FDR abandoned “gunboat diplomacy” in which Marines were sent throughout
the region to impose U.S. will. Though his policies were criticized for not
going far enough, he did bring back U.S. Marines from Nicaragua, Haiti and the
Dominican Republic, and scrapped the Platt Amendment that
allowed the U.S. to intervene unilaterally in Cuban affairs.
So what would a Good Neighbor
Policy for the 21st Century look like? Here are some key planks:
An end to military intervention.
The illegal use of military force has been a hallmark of
U.S. policy in the region, as we see from the deployment of Marines in the
Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989; involvement in
military actions leading to the Guatemalan coup in 1954 and destabilization in
Nicaragua in the 1980s; support for coups in Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and
elsewhere. A Good Neighbor Policy would not only renounce the use of military
force, but even the threat of such force (as in “all options are on the
table”), particularly because such threats are illegal under international law.
U.S. military intimidation also
comes in the form of U.S.
bases that dot the continent from Cuba to Colombia to further south.
These installations are often resisted by local communities, as was the case of
the Manta
Base in Ecuador that was shut down in 2008 and the ongoing opposition against
the Guantanamo Base in Cuba. U.S. bases in Latin America are a violation of
local sovereignty and should be closed, with the lands cleaned up and returned
to their rightful owners.
Another form of military
intervention is the financing and training of local military and police forces.
Most of the U.S. assistance sent to Latin America, particularly Central
America, goes towards funding security forces, resulting in the
militarization of police and borders, and leading to greater police brutality,
extrajudicial killings and repression of migrants.The training school in Ft.
Benning, Georgia, formerly called the “School
of the Americas,” graduated some of the continent’s worst human rights
abusers. Even today, U.S.-trained forces are involved in egregious abuses,
including the assassination of
activists like Berta Cáceres in Honduras. U.S. programs to confront drugs,
fromthe Merida
Initiative in Mexico to Plan
Colombia, have not stopped the flow of drugs but have poured massive
amounts of weapons into the region and led to more killings, torture and gang
violence. Latin American governments need to clean up their own national police
forces and link them to communities, a more effective way to combat drug
trafficking than the militarization that Washington has promoted. The
greatest contribution the U.S. can make to putting an end to the narcotics
scourge in Latin America is to take measures to control the U.S. market for
those drugs through responsible regulation and reforms,
No more political meddling. While
the U.S. public has been shocked by charges of Russian interference in its
elections, this kind of meddling is par for the course in Latin America. USAID
and the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), created in 1983 as a neutral sounding
alternative to the CIA, spend millions of tax-payer dollars to undermine
progressive movements. Following the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, for
instance, NED
ramped up its assistance to conservative groups in Venezuela (which
became the foundation’s number one Latin American recipient) as a leadup to
regime change attempts.
Universal
threats, such as coronavirus and the climate crisis, have taught us the limits
of borders and should act as incentives to construct a Good Neighbor Policy for
the 21st Century based on those principles of non-intervention and mutual
respect. Unfortunately, the State Department's definition of democracy
includes free market capitalism, which gets translated into special relations
with conservative governments that prioritize the interests of the elite and
U.S. corporations. Under Trump, this has meant that Washington's closest allies
are governments on the extreme right of the political spectrum that have been
accused of flagrant violations of human rights: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Ivan
Duque in Colombia, Jeanine Añez in Bolivia, Sebastián Piñera in Chile and Nayib
Bukele in El Salvador. A New Good Neighbor Policy would follow the example of
the United Nations in not letting ideology determine relations with other
nations.
An end to the use of economic
blackmail. The U.S. government uses economic pressure to impose its will. The
Trump administration threatened to
halt remittances to Mexico to extract concessions from the government of Andrés
Manuel López Obrador on immigration issues. A similar threat persuaded
many voters in
El Salvador’s 2004 presidential elections to refrain from voting for the
candidate of the left-leaning Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
The U.S. also uses economic
coercion against the socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
For the past 60 years, U.S. administrations have sanctioned Cuba—a policy that
has not successfully led to regime change but has made living conditions harder
for the Cuban people. The same is true in Venezuela, where one study says that
in just 2017-2018, over 40,000 Venezuelans
died as a result of sanctions. With coronavirus, these sanctions have become
even more deadly. A Good Neighbor Policy would lift the economic sanctions
against all three nations and help them recover economically.
Support trade policies that lift people
out of poverty and protect the environment. U.S. free trade agreements with
Latin America have been good for the elites and U.S. corporations, but have
increased economic inequality, eroded labor rights, destroyed the livelihoods
of small farmers, furthered the privatization of public services, and
compromised national sovereignty. When indebted nations seek loans from
international financial institutions, the loans have been conditioned on the
imposition of neoliberal policies that exacerbate all of these trends.
In terms of the environment, too
often the U.S. government has sided with global oil and mining interests when
local communities in Latin America and the Caribbean have challenged
resource-extracting projects that threaten their environment and endanger
public health. We must launch a new era of energy and natural resource
cooperation that prioritizes renewable sources of energy, green jobs, and good
environmental stewardship.
With the economic crisis brought
on by coronavirus, the protests that rocked Latin America before the pandemic
will return with a vengeance unless countries are free to explore alternatives
to neoliberal policies.A New Good Neighbor Policy would cease imposing economic
conditions on Latin American governments and would call on the International
Monetary Fund to do the same. An example of international cooperation is
China's "Belt
and Road Initiative," which, even with some downsides, has generated
goodwill in the Global South by prioritizing investments in much-needed
infrastructure projects without conditioning its funding on any aspect of
government policy.
Humane immigration policy.
Throughout history, U.S. administrations have refused to take responsibility
for the ways the U.S. has spurred mass migration north, including unfair trade
agreements, support for dictators, climate change, drug consumption and the
export of gangs. Instead, immigrants have been used and abused as a source of
cheap labor, and vilified according to the political winds. President Obama was
the deporter-in-chief;
President Trump has been caging children,
building walls, and shutting off avenues for people to seek asylum. A Good
Neighbor policy would dismantle ICE and the cruel deportation centers; it would
provide the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States a path to
citizenship; and it would respect the international right of people to seek
asylum.
Recognition of Latin America's
cultural contributions. President Trump’s blatant disrespect towards Latin
Americans and immigrants, including his call for building a wall “paid for by
Mexico,” has intensified racist attitudes among his base. A new Latin America
policy would not only counter racism but would uplift the region’s exceptional
cultural richness. The recent controversy surrounding
the extensive commercial promotion of the novel “American Dirt,” written by a
U.S. author about the Mexican immigration experience, is an example of the underestimation
of talent south of the border. The contributions of the continent’s indigenous
population should also be appreciated and justly compensated, such as the
centuries-old medicinal cures that are often exploited by U.S.-based
pharmaceutical companies.
According to the Pew
Research Center, in the two years prior to Trump’s assumption of the
presidency, the percentage of Latin Americans who viewed the United States
favorably dropped from 66% to 47%. These percentages continued their
precipitous decline under the Trump presidency. A few economic concessions are
not going to turn the trend around.
With the possibility of a change
in the White House, CODEPINK, the Center for Economic and Policy Research
(CEPR), and other progressive organizations are drafting a letter to
presidential candidate Joe Biden that begins: “We hope that your administration
will adopt a New Good Neighbor Policy” based on the “principles of
non-intervention and non-interference, mutual respect and acceptance of our
differences.”
An all-encompassing expression of
goodwill in the form of a New Good Neighbor Policy will meet resistance from
vested economic and military interests, as well as those persuaded by racist
arguments. But the vast majority of people in the United States have nothing to
lose by it and, in fact, have much to gain. Universal threats, such as
coronavirus and the climate crisis, have taught us the limits of borders and
should act as incentives to construct a Good Neighbor Policy for the 21st
Century based on those principles of non-intervention and mutual respect.
Medea Benjamin,
co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the
author of the new book, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the
Islamic Republic of Iran. Her previous books include: Kingdom of
the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection; Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control; Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from
the Heart, and (with Jodie Evans) Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide). Follow her on Twitter: @medeabenjamin
Steve
Ellner has taught economic history at the Universidad de Oriente in
Venezuela since 1977. His most recent book is his edited Latin
America's Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power in the
Twenty-First Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
posted by Steve Ellner @ 11:24 AM
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