Thread: Popular tide against Bush

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Popular tide against Bush


June 28, 2005

All of the positive spin by Bush administration officials and Latin and Caribbean leaders that came out of the OAS meeting in Fort Lauderdale last month failed to conceal the growing estrangement between the United States and its southern neighbors.

The reasons go way beyond the fact that President Bush -- preoccupied with terrorism, Iraq and the Middle East -- has paid little attention to the region. The deeper sources of the alienation are political and ideological.

There is no elegant or gentle way to say it: The vast majority of the population of Latin America detests George W. Bush. Polls repeatedly have shown astronomical levels of rejection for the administration and its policies, with negative numbers that are exceeded only in the Muslim countries.

It is a fallacy to attribute this to a reflexive anti-Americanism. Latin American attitudes regarding American presidents have ranged from affection (Kennedy) to open dislike (Nixon), and opinions have varied depending on country, ideology and social class. Yet no American president in living memory has evoked such intense and broad public antagonism as the current one.

The Iraq war and, more generally, the unilateralism of the current administration, is the main factor. Latin Americans see the willingness of Bush to wage "preventive" wars in the absence of United Nations approval as a mirror of their own history of U.S. interventions and invasions, gunboat diplomacy writ on a planetary scale.

In a region run for the first time by mostly democratic governments, such popular sentiments matter far more than before. They place a limit on the ability of Latin leaders and governments to acquiesce to American proposals and policies -- even when they want to go along.

The new willingness of Latin American governments to stand up to the United States also reflects an ideological divergence evident in the unprecedented rise to power of the left in many countries of the region. At a time when, in the United States, a hard-edged right dominates both the executive and legislative branches of government, two of the three heavyweight nations in Latin America -- Brazil and Argentina -- are run by presidents from the left. In the third (Mexico), a left-leaning candidate is likely to be elected next year.

The OAS is a good example of this new reality. Latin American rejection of the administration's latest proposal, a Declaration of Florida presented at the June OAS meeting, came as no surprise. It might seem paradoxical that Latin America in the post-dictatorship era would reject a plan sold as a democracy-promotion measure. But Latin Americans interpreted the U.S. proposal as an attempt to use the OAS as a tool for U.S. meddling in Venezuela and other countries of the region. The setback is only one of a recent series of defeats for the United States at the OAS. Earlier this year, for instance, the Bush administration failed to get its first two candidates elected secretary general and had to resort to spinning the election of a Chilean socialist as a victory.

Hawks in the United States like to play up the role of Washington's avowed adversaries, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, in the region's turn to the left. In fact, how the Bush administration has behaved toward its friends is more important in how Latin Americans see this country than anything that Castro or Chávez do or say.

For years, Argentina faithfully followed the United States to the point that an Argentinean official once remarked relations between the two countries were so close they were "carnal." But, when Argentina faced an economic meltdown and needed help, Washington left it to fend for itself and unravel.

More recently, Mexico's Vicente Fox tried hard to be Bush's one true-blue amigo among the big players in the region. The Mexican president even embarrassed himself in the eyes of his people when he was caught on tape trying to plead with, manipulate and flatter Fidel Castro into leaving early from an international meeting in Mexico just to avoid annoying George W. Bush. What Vicente Fox wanted from Washington in return was just one thing: a more liberal immigration policy. What he got, the Real ID law targeting immigrants and more massive deportations, was worse than nothing. While Bush has made some righteous noises about immigration, the president has been unwilling to spend any political capital on the issue. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Fox's popularity has sunk, in part as the result of his failure to deliver on immigration.

These lessons are not lost on Latin Americans. The time is past when the region moved in lockstep with the United States and the OAS was a U.S. rubber stamp. In Fort Lauderdale last month, the Latin Americans made all the right noises about democracy and good relations, but they declared their independence by refusing to do the bidding of the United States. For the truth is that today, politically and ideologically, George W. Bush's America and the nations south of the border are very far apart.

George Bush and his American Citizens are also poles apart.

RR