The Americanistas

(Image: eCMetrics)

I think it’s one of the first quantitative pieces of evidence showing the extent to which Afrodescendant populations in Latin America are viewing Obama’s election as a huge shift in the hemisphere’s racial history.

It’s in a poll that hasn’t received much attention. U.S.-based consulting company eCMetrics surveyed 1600 Latin American Internet surfers in the first two weeks of 2009 on their expectations regarding Barack Obama’s government. Besides revealing a predictable surge of optimism as they looked beyond the unpopular government of President Bush, it did serve up some interesting results.

For one, Brazilians, and especially mixed-race Brazilians, tended to view Obama’s racial background as more important than the fact that he was elected with a huge surge of voter participation.

Overall, 65% of Brazilians said the election was most significant because of the election of an African-American candidate. But among those Brazilians who identified themselves as being of African descent, that number was 72%.

In contrast, in Argentina and Mexico, countries with smaller Afrodescendant populations, the more significant result turned out to be not Obama’s breaking of racial barriers, but his election amidst unprecedented voter turnout (47% and 55% respectively).

A full rundown of the poll can be found here in Portuguese.

Lula in Mozambique in 2003 (Agencia Brasil)

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva was called the most popular politician on earth by U.S. President Barack Obama, who also has asked him to be the White House’s main intermediary in Latin America. In Brazil, Lula has approval ratings that oscillate around 80 percent. Last Sunday, Argentine newspaper La Nación published a lengthy interview with Lula, in which he reveals his vision for the world as it tries to emerge from the global downturn. Some quotes from the article:

In calling for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to adopt a more collaborative approach and cease dictating policy to borrowing countries, Lula called for an end to bean-counting and a reliance on political consensus to overcome global problems:

“The phase of the technocrats is over. The moment has come for politics.”

In detailing some major investments planned by the government (including via state-run oil company Petrobras) in order to build up Brazil’s internal market and weather some of the drop-off in foreign investment that will result from the financial crisis:

“Petrobras alone has planned investments of 178 billion dollars through 2013. We’ve just announced a plan to build a million homes.”

Why Brazil has decided to reduce its fiscal surplus, in order to invest more in stimulating the economy (Lula’s argument is that the crisis presents an unprecedented opportunity for governments to reshape their societies):

“In Brazil we even reduced the … surplus because we’re convinced that the moment has come for investments, to create jobs and generate a better distribution of income. It’s an exceptional moment to make political decisions. In the last few years, Brazil has earned the right to go into debt a little bit more because we’ve shrunk our public debt to 35% of Gross Domestic Product from 52%. We have the right to work with public debt to finance and create more public works in our country. I see this crisis as the great opportunity that’s showing us how to be more courageous, be more audacious, and prepare ourselves for the end of the crisis. Countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Argentina have greater opportunities to emerge from the crisis, as long as we do things right.”

On Central America and the Caribbean:

“I told President Obama that the Caribbean and Central American economies are all totally focused on the United States. So it’s necessary not only to be worried about the United States, but to also be concerned for those smaller countries.”

More on Brazil’s efforts to weather the crisis:

“In Brazil, because of the crisis, we have various infrastructure projects manned by two shifts of workers. Our worry now is to prevent a fall in society’s consumption habits, to create jobs and not pull back on social programs. That’s the miracle we have to achieve in Brazil.”

On his succession:

“There’s one thing I can say: it’ll be a privilege for this country if there’s a presidential campaign pitting Dilma Rousseff (from Lula’s own Worker’s Party) against José Serra (from the more centrist PSDB opposition party). If the candidates are Dilma, Serra and Ciro (Gomes, from the Brazilian Socialist Party or PSB) that would also be a luxury. Ditto if (Aécio) Neves is there. And that’s because I don’t see anyone from the right there. I see colleagues from the left, center-left, progressives. That’s a huge step forward for Brazil.”

On Marxism:

“I was never a Marxist. Never. That’s one affliction I never suffered from!”

On Bolivian President Evo Morales and his tug-of-war with Brazil over natural gas:

“When Evo Morales began to fight with Brazil, some in conservative spheres wanted me to hit back. I always treated him as a friend and partner. I knew the gas was his and I knew that one day he would learn some lessons and he himself would learn that there were different approaches that might be taken. That’s what’s happening: he’s a lot more mature, he was able to build a team.”

At the end of the interview, the La Nación journalist says he was shooed from the room by Lula’s handlers who explained that the Brazilian president was about to take a call from U.S. President Barack Obama. Lula said that once his second term ends in 2010, his plan is to continue working on Latin American issues and also on helping Africa.

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.

Mexican Police With Weapons Seized From Drug Smugglers

President Obama will make a stop in Mexico City today, the first presidential visit to the hemisphere’s largest metropolis since the early 1990s. He’ll meet with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and the topic will be what I’m calling the NAFTA black triangle: Mexico gives us drugs and cheap labor, while the States sends back loads of guns and assault weapons.

I’ve been listening to various interviews lately regarding the drug wars in Mexico. One was on 60 Minutes, in which Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pointedly did not rule out sending the U.S. military to the U.S.-Mexico border. Another was an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, with Alejandro Junco de La Vega, head of influential newspaper chain Grupo Reforma. He expressed deep concerns that the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans involved in the drug trade would permeate any number of civil institutions, not just the courts, local government and law enforcement, but also the business community, the media and electoral systems.

Regarded from a historical point of view, Mexico’s problem looks something like this: U.S. success in shutting down the Caribbean drug route (the “Miami Vice” and “Scarface” paradigm) has led much of that trade to re-route through Mexico. The Colombian cartels’ retrenchment and fragmentation in the face of intense U.S. and Colombian military pressure over the last two decades has created network-building opportunities for the Mexican cartels, whose operations have proliferated all over the hemisphere. Meanwhile, the exponentially growing volume of cross-border legal trade in the wake of the NAFTA agreement signed in 1994 means more opportunities to piggy-back black market cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Couple these trends with a low-income rural population that has continuously abandoned Mexico’s fields for cities in the last few decades, and you have all the ingredients for what’s being seen now: drug armies battling one another savagely for turf and profits.

Mayors, police chiefs, gadfly reporters– they’re not necessarily the real targets, but drug lords aren’t shy about removing them if they get in the way. President Calderon’s militarized war on the cartels only turns up the heat. Civilians caught in the crossfire suffer. With U.S. border states acting like open-air gun bazaars for the Mexican cartels, it’s no surprise Mexico’s diplomatic strategy in this mess is to displace some of the responsibility northwards. As Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said in a recent interview with the Arizona Republic: “For Mexico, the Number 1 priority is guns. The Number 2 priority is guns. The Number 3 priority is guns.”

But there’s another aspect to Mexico’s dilemma that isn’t noted. It’s immigration. If it’s linked to the drug wars it’s usually only by xenophobes who say illegal immigration provides channels for drug traffickers to enter the United States and wreak damage. However, I would make a different argument: it’s in part restrictive U.S. immigration policies that fuel Mexico’s drug wars. If illegal immigrant populations in the United States shelter Mexican criminals, it’s in part because inadequately narrow legal channels for immigration have created a massive shadow population of undocumented immigrants in the United States that today stands at 11.6 million, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The majority is Mexican.

If this population were brought out of the murk of illegality and somehow normalized, havens for drug traffickers would dry up, they’d have less places to hide, less of an underground network to move within. Also, the opportunity to immigrate legally to the United States as a guest worker, farm worker or special laborer within certain industries would provide a channel for hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to gain honest livelihoods. It would be an alternative to the drug economy. So here’s one partial solution to the border drug wars: open up the gates and allow more humans through. If that happens less drugs will flow northward and less guns southward. And perhaps less dead bodies will pile up in Mexico.