Mision Verdad April 13th 2018
http://misionverdad.com/COLUMNISTAS/cumbre-de-las-americas-el-dato-poli…
The origin of the Americas Summit back in 1994 was an expression of the exact political coordinates of that event, affiliated to the network of Pan-American institutions, promoted in the region by the United States via its flagship, the Organization of American States (OAS).
That first summit held in Miami, when Bill Clinton was President, set out to be the first step in a regional consensus around the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), following the US unipolar triumph resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s
But, at the 2005 Americas Summit in Mar de Plata, Argentina, the FTAA was buried and, with the passing years, its influence has deteriorated so much that the Pan-American institutions lost much of their power as expressions of US influence in Latin America. So much so, that its trade strategy had to be relaunched via the Pacific Alliance, the free market platform promoted by Colombia Mexico, Peru and Chile.
In the context of this new reality, the 8th Americas Summit expressed the US intention of remaking a new structure of control in Latin America. The US needs to consolidate the removal of progressive governments in big countries like Brazil and Argentina. It also needs to protect its economic interests from the rise of China and Russia as a new influential alternative for investment and trade which, in the case of China, promises an inflow of US$750 billion, as even the US Southern Command acknowledges.
Latin America is witnessing fierce competition between global powers that, in other regions has taken dramatic and unpredictable turns, as has happened in Syria with the bombardments authorized by US President Donald Trump. Paradoxically, his absence from the Americas Summit resulted from his need to stay in the White House to monitor these new military events, that intimidate anyone aware of the dangerous moment facing he world powers at a time when they are in an international trial of strength.
In this context, the 8th Americas Summit has as as its keynote theme “democratic governance against corruption” which coincides with the Trump administration’s regional policy. Contrived as one of the region’s main problems, the corruption issue has now joined drugs and terrorism as pretexts in the story the US tells when it is intervening in Latin America with the objective of shaping political and institutional power in the region in the most effective way.
Based on this argument, the US has set up a series of judicial structures within Latin American countries as a means of controlling their political classes. Foremost among these are the obvious judicial-police network of Brazil’s Car Wash investigation that recently sentenced Lula, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, the Mission for the Fight Against Corruption in Honduras and the symbiotic relationship the US State and Justice Departments now have with Attorney Generals in the majority of Latin America’s republics. To that end, the US invested US$100 million in Guatemala alone, one third of total US State Department spending on justice programs up until 1999.
That is why the 8th Americas Summit has served as a space to advance that agenda towards a common regional commitment to carry out far reaching judicial reforms, which is one of the central objectives of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy. This aims to give greater autonomy to the region's judicial powers so they can become the new arbiters of internal politics in Latin American countries, just as the military were in the later decades of the 20th Century. The US has built this consensus by means of an aggressive cultural campaign and a series of operations that frames this poisonous brew in the service of US interests as something necessary to cure an “endemic disease”.
However, opinion is growing, even among the region’s right wing political classes, against this attempt to eliminate them as intermediaries. Despite its apparent good intentions, the struggle against corruption via institutions designed by the US government is finding serious opponents in the countries most advanced in that process, for example Guatemala, Brazil and Honduras, where Presidents Jimmy Morales, Michel Temer and Juan Orlando Hernández openly face off against the judicial caste investigating them for corruption.
The process also has other deep implications, using the US Justice Department investigations into the Odebrecht bribery network to facilitate the rise of “anti-corruption” political parties in countries,like the Dominican Republic, governed by political forces adverse to US policy. This is a variant of the same strategy, cynically seeking to stoke grass roots feeling among ordinary citizens so that Latin American society adopts the US anti-corruption agenda as its own, rendering Latin America a kind of opencast laboratory for this new interventionist format.
This is the context of the 8th Americas Summit in Peru, where rcently former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was removed for taking bribes from Odebrecht. That was a historical accident which uncovers the intimate, very human nerve among the region’s leaders touched by US policy on corruption. As US senator Marco Rubio put it “Kuczynski was someone the US government could manage and coerce, if necessary, so as to continue attacking Venezuela”, thus revealing the core of US government interaction with Latin America’s political classes: namely, extortion.
Another very important political given is that, even with this coercive format as the basis of its regional diplomacy, the US government has not been able to form a coalition completely aligned with its policy of permanent aggression against Venezuela. That is why, for the US government, the main advantage of this America’s Summit, with the lowest ever attendance by the region’s Presidents, is exactly the presentation to Latin American society of this new model of regional control. And that is why it is so revealing that the package in which this policy is being sold is “democratic governance against corruption”.