No joy for Bush in: Latin America tour

by Gerry Foley / April 2007 issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

Even the British business magazine The Economist, a staunch admirer of U.S. imperialism, had to note George Bush’s hyped-up visits to five Latin American countries that ended on March 14 had produced few results for his regime or the economic interests he represents. In its March 16 issue, it noted: "In Guatemala, the mood was soured by the arrest in Massachusetts this month of hundreds of illegal workers, many of them Guatemalan. Oscar Berger, the president, told Mr. Bush that deportations of illegal migrants should end.

"Mr. Bush said he hoped an immigration reform bill can be approved in the Senate by August. Until then, the American plan to fence out illegal immigrants will cast a shadow over what ought to be a warm friendship between Mr. Bush and Felipe Calderón, Mexico's new conservative president. ‘The United States has a lot to do to regain respect in Latin America,’ Mr. Calderón bluntly remarked." And Calderón is one of the most craven and most right-wing presidents in Latin America.

Bush’s domestic political tactics were thus a stumbling bloc to his international diplomatic tactics. The Argentine Trotskyist newspaper La Verdad Obrera speculated that Bush’s tour was probably designed for U.S. public opinion, to try to reassure the American people that the U.S. still has allies in Latin America. In that respect, it seems to have been as unproductive as it was in promoting the interests of the U.S. rulers in the region.

The question of the treatment of Latin American immigrants in the United States—now the punching bag of the U.S. capitalists who want to keep them in the position of being helpless victims of exploitation and of Bush’s bigoted, xenophobic electoral base—appeared as the Achilles heel of his charm offensive.

The Latin American bourgeois rulers do have a certain economic interest in defending the rights of immigrants from their countries to the United States, since immigrants’ sending money back to their relatives has become a major source of U.S. dollars, perhaps even the largest source, in Mexico. They also have a political interest. However supine they may be toward their imperialist masters, they cannot afford to be seen as accomplices in the humiliation and terrorizing of working people who come from their countries.

Bush made the greatest effort to court Ignacio ("Lula") da Silva, the president of Brazil, who was put in office by a massive revolt against U.S.-backed economic policies and has been friendly to some extent toward Hugo Chavez, an outspoken denouncer of U.S. imperialism. In office, Lula has moved deeper and deeper into collaboration with capitalists and U.S. imperialism.

To lure Lula, Bush held out the perspective of collaboration in the development of an industry to develop agriculture-based ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. But he would not even promise to seek a reduction of U.S. tariffs on Brazilian sugar cane, which is a cheaper raw material for ethanol than corn produced in the United States.

The diversion of vast amounts of corn to produce ethanol has become a huge boon to U.S. agricultural interests. Yet ethanol production is mainly a propaganda ploy. It takes half as much energy per unit to produce as it supplies and it is a serious waste of a potential food resource.

The perspective of ethanol replacing gasoline is being waved around as an attempt to try to show that the U.S. rulers intend to reduce dependence on petroleum. In fact, they are hardly likely to do anything serious in that regard while they are reaping in such enormous profits from oil.

Even the Latin American capitalist press was notably unenthusiastic about Bush’s tour and the language he adopted in attempt to show that he was sensitive to Latin America’s problems. Verdad Obrera (March 15) described the press coverage as "lukewarm to cold."

The Economist indulged in a number of unsupported assertions to denigrate Hugo Chavez’s counter-tour to Bush’s. Its basic argument was that Chavez did not succeed in getting any Latin American governments to join an anti-imperialist bloc under his leadership. But that is hardly news. A huge social explosion would be necessary for that to happen, against the background of which a diplomatic break with the U.S. would be only an aftershock.

The Economist did make a point of saying that Chavez has been more generous in his aid than the U.S. That certainly increases his popularity among the Latin American peoples in particular. But governmental aid is only a tiny part of the economic chains by which U.S. imperialism holds Latin America.

In its March 15 issue, La Verdad Obrera wrote: "Chavez raised his voice against Bush from the platform in the Ferro stadium that Kirchner [president of Argentina] had prepared for him. His speech reached millions through TV and confirmed the high level of popularity that the president of Venezuela has in Argentina and the rest of the continent. Chavez has won his popularity by denunciations of U.S. imperialism and by identifying, as he did in the Ferro stadium, with the anti-imperialist epics of the continent, from Sandino to Che Guevara, this time mixing it with praise of Juan Domingo Perón.

"In this way, Chavez is profiting from the discrediting of the U.S. government with the masses and the lukewarmness, if not outright capitulation, of the rest of the so-called progressive Latin American presidents."

Even supporters of Kirchner (a "lukewarm" populist), such as the pollster Artemio Lopez of the semiofficial Argentine consulting agency Equis, recognize that Chavez is "the Latin American leader who has best managed to build an image of a social redeemer."

In opposition to the U.S. rulers’ evocations of the so-called iron laws of the market, which of course favor them, Chavez raises the perspective of socialism, although in vague terms. The Venezuelan president’s line obviously appeals to the Latin American masses who are radicalizing in response to the plundering of their countries and the assaults on their minimum standards of living in the name of the laws of capitalism.

At the same time, however, Chavez projects the idea of a bloc of Latin American bourgeois governments against U.S. imperialism, which passes over the need for socialism. This might have some immediate tactical advantages but is utopian as a strategy. La Verdad Obrera noted that he did not say a word about the fact that supposedly progressive Latin American governments, such as the Brazilian one, are maintaining troops in Haiti and doing the dirty work of American imperialism to repress the Haitian people.