BY MEDEA BENJAMIN - STEVE ELLNER
CounterPunch
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.
The Trump administration
dusted off the 19th century Monroe Doctrine that subjugates the nations of the
region to U.S. interests. The Biden administration, instead of reversing
course, followed suit, with disastrous results for the region and a migration
crisis that threatens Biden’s re-election.
It has left most of Trump’s
sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba intact and has tightened those against
Nicaragua.
U.S. policy towards
Venezuela has been a fiasco. Try as it might, both Trump and Biden were unable
to depose President Maduro and found themselves stuck with a self-proclaimed
president, Juan Guaidó. U.S. support for Guaidó backfired as he was held responsibile for massive corruption involving Venezuelan assets abroad that were turned over
to him. Now Washington is openly siding with presidential hopeful María Corina
Machado, who has a long history of engagement in violent disruptions and has
called on the U.S. to invade her country. The Venezuelan people have paid a
heavy price for the debacle, which has included crippling economic sanctions
and coup attempts. The U.S. has also paid a price in terms of its prestige
internationally.
This is only one example of
a string of disastrous policies toward Latin America.
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 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, from
the 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 control the U.S. market for those drugs through responsible
reforms and to prevent the sale of U.S.-made weapons to drug cartels.
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.
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. 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 Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua 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
ofthese 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.
Massive protests against
neoliberal policies erupted throughout Latin America shortly prior to the
pandemic and 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; President Biden is better than his predecessor when it comes to
rhetoric, but not so much action-wise. 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,” intensified racist attitudes among his base which has continued
ever since. A new Latin America policy would not only counter racism but would
uplift the region’s exceptional cultural richness. The 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.
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 is
cofounder of CODEPINK
for Peace and the human rights group Global Exchange. She is
the author of 10 books, including five books on Latin America. Steve
Ellner is an Associate Managing Editor of Latin
American Perspectives. His edited Latin American Extractivism:
Dependency, Resource Nationalism and Resistance in Broad Perspective (Rowman
and Littlefield) will be released later this year.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/01/redefining-us-latin-american-relations/
