Updated: Latin America - The Path Away from U.S. Domination

Washington rumbles with suppressed outrage over Latin America’s latest professions of its sovereignty – Bolivia’s nationalization of its oil and natural gas reserves, and Ecuador and Venezuela’s voiding of their energy contracts. At the same time, Bolivia’s newly inaugurated president, Evo Morales, is a prime candidate to join Washington’s pantheon of Latin American bad boys, presently represented by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. Meanwhile, the region’s new populist leadership, also known as the “Pink Tide,” extends its colors across South America and is poised to leap to much of the rest of Latin America. Ostensibly, the “pink tide,” consists of left-leaning South American governments seeking a third way to register their political legitimation to their citizens, as well as their autonomy regarding such foreign policy issues as Iraq.

Meanwhile, Washington’s surprisingly lame regional policy has spurred disbelief even among the hemisphere’s most ardent pro-U.S. governments, like El Salvador and Chile. Some specialists maintain that while the region’s oncoming economic enfranchisement can be understood from a number of perspectives, perhaps the most forthcoming analyses places the roots of the new movement in the bedding soil of Washington’s egregiously failed regional policy.

Throughout the Cold War’s gestation, Democratic as well as Republican presidents have not hesitated to call for U.S. intervention in Latin America, however persistently malignant such excursions turned out to be. These have ranged from coup-making in Guatemala and Chile, to the fostering of civil wars in Central America, with all of these intrusions later proving to be irrelevant, or at least insufficient to protect genuine, even narrowly defined, U.S. national interests. Even more so, they proved to be counter-productive or destructive. As a result, much of the region has become estranged from Washington’s leadership, a legacy now apparent in the difficulties currently being encountered by U.S. policymakers in the areas of trade, drugs and security. No wonder that a series of recent polls undertaken throughout Latin America regarding the Iraq war, and the popularity of the Bush administration, an average of 85% of respondents have voiced their opposition.
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