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LaRosa: Latin America isn't buying into our system
By Michael LaRosa
November 15, 2005

Bio info: Michael LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College with expertise in Latin American history.

Those who follow the politics and history of Latin America were not surprised when hundreds of protesters turned out in Argentina on Nov. 4 to denounce President Bush and U.S. policies in the region and the world.

Ostensibly, the protest organized in a Mar del Plata soccer stadium by Venezuela's leftist, populist/demagog president Hugo Chavez was intended to denounce U.S. support for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, a hemispherewide free-trade zone that has little if any chance of being implemented. But Latin Americans' discontent these days runs deeper than trade and is centered on several fundamental issues.

The United States has long advocated free trade in the hemisphere, and the 1994 NAFTA treaty between the United States, Mexico and Canada was the culmination of a spirit of trade integration in the Americas. But trade liberalization has hardly resulted in a happier, wealthier or more secure Latin America. The wealthy and well educated have done well, but the poor have done miserably.

Recent statistics from the United Nations show that a staggering 222 million people in Latin America (43 percent of the population) live in poverty. Of those, 96 million live in "extreme poverty." In Brazil, the average monthly wage is about $80.

And free trade is hardly free: The average annual subsidy paid to U.S. farmers in 2000 was $13,000, according to a report in The New York Times. How can farmers in Latin America compete against the power of the U.S. economy which supports inefficiency for political purposes, especially in the cotton- and sugar-growing regions of our own country?

Latin Americans have opted for moderate leftist leaders in part as a repudiation of the Washington-imposed trade and finance policies of the past two decades. Recently, the presidencies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Venezuela have all been won by left-leaning populists who have begun implementing social reform programs that mitigate against the impersonal free market.

Other reasons for Latin American discontent with U.S. polices go beyond trade. Many Latin Americans do not like our lecturing them about democracy, especially at a time when senior aides in the White House have been under investigation for improprieties. They question the certainty with which we export our style of democracy and believe we overestimate the strength of our own system, or the need for the rest of the world to adopt it.

Serious doubts remain regarding the formulation of U.S. policy in the run-up to the Iraq war, and many Latin American citizens do not believe that President Bush won the White House fairly in 2000.

A perception of hypocrisy also exists among many Latin Americans with regard to the U.S. position on human rights issues. They know that the United States supported some of the most notorious abusers of human rights in El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s and backed Chile's ruthless right-wing dictator, Augusto Pinochet. They also question our military aid program to Colombia (amounting to billions of dollars since 2000), as some of the ugliest human rights abuses in recent Latin American history have been attributed to groups linked to the Colombian military.

The photos out of Abu Ghraib prison and the current debate over treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay also are widely known in Latin America.

Many Latin Americans are tired of hearing U.S. officials lecture them on how to escape poverty. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, they -- along with the rest of the world -- saw that we have hardly alleviated poverty in the United States, and they know that during the past five years the Bush administration has had little to say on the topic. They also know that it is our country's trade policies that have helped widen the gap between the haves and have-nots in Latin America.

These are difficult days, indeed, for U.S. and Latin American relations: President Bush has no political capital to spend in the region and has preferred to invest his energies and priorities in the Middle East. The administration has been unable to engage Latin America on any issue, and that will likely continue for the remainder of the President's term.

Serious initiatives on immigration reform, debt reduction and trade have started to flow from south to north, as Latin American nations start looking at ways to solve problems on their own. They are unwilling, and unable, to wait for a new administration in Washington. Three years -- even in Latin time -- is a long time to wait.