The Americanistas

With his designated successor Dilma Rousseff facing health problems ahead of 2010 presidential elections, and the lukewarm support of a key allied party (PMDB), the rumor in Brazil is that two-term president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Worker’s Party is mulling a third term. (The Brazilian Constitution would need to be changed for this to happen).

One cartoonist, Amarildo, from Rio daily O Globo, is having a field day with this. In the first, the cartoonist has shown Lula in bed with his wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva, but Lula has somehow magically morphed into Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He says to his wife, “Marisa, I swear I’m not thinking of a third term!” Marisa responds, “Sure joker, You get a strange look on your face every time you talk about it!”

Strange face indeed …

Some in Brazil thought it was inappropriate to show Chávez in bed with Lula’s wife.

The next cartoon, published today, is clearer, and shows Lula musing not about one more term, but two more terms. Lula’s reading a newspaper article saying that life expectancy for Brazilian males is 73 years. He thinks, “I’m 64 years old, 9 years to go for 73. Sweet! I have enough time for two more terms!”

clipped from oglobo.globo.com clipped from oglobo.globo.com

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez famously gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America at the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The spectacle surrounding the gift catapulted Galeano’s book to the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Galeano later thanked Chávez for giving his anti-colonial diatribe an Oprah-book-club-like boost. The Uruguayan writer joked that Dracula and himself shared the honor of creating the vampire genre.

When asked if Obama would read the book, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied, “I think it’s in Spanish, so that might be a tad on the difficult side.”

Obama effectively closed that chapter at the recent White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The event is a Washington tradition begun in the 1920s. Every U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the event. The dinner is part comedy roast, fund raiser and tribute. The press likes to call it the moment the president becomes “Comedian-in-Chief.”

About 10 minutes into his monologue, Obama began a joke saying he was fulfilling his campaign promise of turning around U.S. relations with the world, citing meetings with the Japanese and British prime ministers. Obama continued, “But as I said during the campaign, we can’t just talk to our friends. As hard as it is, we also have to talk to our enemies, and I’ve begun to do exactly that. Take a look at the monitor there.”

The jumbo-tron cut to a picture of Obama sitting in the Oval Office with a man dressed as a pirate. (Not sure if the costume was modeled on Captain Hook or Captain Morgan.) The audience laughed.

Obama then added, “Now, let me be clear, just because he handed me a copy of Peter Pan does not mean that I’m going to read it — (laughter) — but it’s good diplomatic practice to just accept these gifts.”

Too bad. Obama would have gained a lot of insights from Galeano’s book.

The full joke sequence can be viewed here (put the cursor at about 3:57):

If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones. It’s interesting that Republican guru Newt Gingrich has gone on an instant media tour to denounce Obama’s handshake with Hugo Chávez. Gingrich has a history of blocking inquiries into the sanguinary actions of right-wing Latin American dictatorships. It appears dictatorships only earn Gingrich’s P.R. help if they’re right wing and former White House allies.

Not only that, but it appears he’s all for celebrating democracy and its results (Chávez can be accused of many things, but not of failing to win elections), but only as long as the results are to his liking.

In the mid-1990s, Rep. Gingrich tried to limit inquiries into the U.S. role in funding and feeding intelligence to Guatemala’s murderous military dictatorship, which was behind the deaths of dozens of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans during that country’s Civil War.

After Obama’s inauguration, Gingrich eagerly jumped on the Obama bandwagon, writing that the ceremony sent a powerful message to dictators everywhere:

The message sent by the Obama inauguration, Gingrich wrote, “was aimed straight at the heart of all the dictators, theocrats, oligarchs and military strongmen who rationalize their tyranny with the excuse that their people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy: In the course of a single generation, the son of an immigrant from a poor country in Africa rose in America to be the leader of the free world.

Well apparently Gingrich believes Venezuela’s people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy. They’ve voted for Hugo Chávez in 1998, 2000, and 2006. When criticizing Obama for engaging Chávez, Republicans should be ready to defend their own woeful records on human rights abroad. Chávez has been undemocratic in his handling of many issues within Venezuela, and his record on basic freedoms is at least shaky, but he’s no Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Wary engagement: it’s the new paradigm in Washington D.C. for relations with Latin America’s more combative governments. As was to be expected, President Obama’s already trying to fend off criticisms for his amiable interactions with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez at the just-concluded Summit of the Americas. On Sunday, he answered criticisms while still in Trinidad, acknowledging Chávez anti-U.S. rhetoric was certainly inflammatory, and Chávez’s meddling in regional affairs sometimes worrisome. However, Obama said there was more to gain by engaging with Chávez, especially considering he posed no military threat and was in fact an investor in the U.S. economy through Venezuela’s ownership of Citgo.

Today, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s book: The Open Veins of Latin America, a book that’s one of Chávez’s favorites and he often quotes from. I wonder if Obama will flip through it, at least. It’s definitely a classic of 1960s-style leftist scholarship, forcefully written, a kind of encyclopedic account of how Europe and the United States treated Latin America as a big commodity piñata to be plundered at will. And how the United States and Europe (especially the English) manipulated the region’s politics and wielded a big stick in order to whack at will at this piñata.

If a bit outdated and too willing to turn a blind eye to Latin America’s own faults, the book is still worth reading. At the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Obama criticized Latin Americans for being too willing to point the finger north whenever they need an explanation for their problems, so that flaw in the book would probably not agree with the States’ first black president. Here’s a sample few sentences:

“In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism, but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence…underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it.”

In other words, Latin America’s underdevelopment subsidizes rich countries’ overdevelopment. I think that recent dramatic reductions in poverty in Brazil and Mexico show that whatever the history of plunder, it’s not beyond Latin American governments to act against inequality and poverty. When they take decisive action to reduce economic inequality (with cash reward programs like Bolsa Familia in Brazil and Oportunidades in Mexico), it is possible for capitalism and social democracies to develop side by side. It’s too bad so much of the Summit of the Americas spotlight has been gobbled up by the thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba, and the warm handshakes exchanged between Obama and Chávez. Not that this diplomatic dance isn’t interesting, but if Obama were to point to these social welfare programs as models for how Latin America can move forward without divisiveness or class polarization, then other governments might emulate these programs, which redistribute wealth with accountability and transparency. To receive payments under these programs families in Mexico and Brazil must keep their children enrolled in school and take them for regular health checks and immunizations.

  

The logos of regional blocs in the hemisphere, clockwise from top-left: UNASUR, SICA, NAFTA (only economic), CARICOM.

Ahead of this weekend’s hemispheric Summit in Trinidad, President Barack Obama has offered to meet with Latin American and Caribbean leaders on a bloc-by-bloc basis, the AP reports.

Obama called Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who is acting president of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), to arrange a meeting with South American leaders. Bachelet and Obama are scheduled to talk by phone this morning to set the agenda for the talks.

The Obama administration made a similar invitation to the Central American Integration System (SICA), which is currently led by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a harsh U.S. critic. The U.S. President is already scheduled (tentatively) to sit down with leaders from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) tomorrow night after the Summit’s opening plenary. Bilateral U.S. issues with Mexico, it seems, are being dealt with in a pre-Summit meeting between the two presidents.

Breaking up the meetings in this way – though Obama will presumably have at least some bilateral meetings – makes sense: The three regions will have distinct agendas with the U.S. president.

The Caribbean leaders will ask for more economic assistance and for Washington to stop trying to block (on behalf of U.S.-based fruit companies)  the preferential access Caribbean nations have to European markets.

The Central Americans will request more economic assistance and urge Obama to press forward with a thorough immigration reform. They might also ask the President to further beef up military spending to help fight the spillover effects of Mexico’s narco wars. (Central America is also a key transshipment point for U.S.-bound South American cocaine that makes its way through Mexico.) Central American countries generally had very close ties to the Bush administration (with the exception of Ortega’s Nicaragua), so this meeting won’t be so much about reconciliation as it will be about setting a renewed sub-regional agenda.

In South America, the scenario is quite different. The region is home to nearly all of the governments that have swung to the left in recent years, including vocal U.S. critics such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. All three leaders have expelled U.S. officials in recent years, while Bolivia and Venezuela have practically severed diplomatic ties with Washington.

The South America meeting will be Obama’s largest challenge. Besides the economic crisis, new financing initiatives, and lingering trade disputes (e.g. Doha, Colombia’s FTA), leaders will likely bring up the Cuba issue. All South American governments have called on Washington to change its Cuba policy, and those that stand to make the loudest pitch are Bolivia, Venezuela, maybe Ecuador, and possibly Paraguay. The leaders of these four countries are currently meeting in Caracas, under the auspices of Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas initiative, which includes Cuba, to set a common strategy for the Trinidad Summit.

Before making the case for Cuba, however, the region’s more radical left-leaning leaders will first try to feel out Obama’s intentions on improving U.S. relations with their own countries. This will be a delicate dance: In the eyes of these leaders, all of whom felt grossly insulted by the Bush administration, it should be Barack Obama that tries to woo them, not the other way around.

If Obama manages to restore ties with both Bolivia and Venezuela, this will be a big step forward. On that front, the U.S. administration seems to count on the welcome support of Brazil, which is increasingly  positioning itself as a regional interlocutor. No foreign leaders have hit it off so well with Obama as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

If Obama can strike the right notes with South American leaders in Trinidad and if he does more “listening than lecturing,” as he himself once said, U.S.-Latin America relations could enter a promising new stage.