Bienvenido, Señor Bush, Justin Vogler

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

On 15 February 2001, George Bush broke with tradition and chose Mexico for his first presidential foreign trip. During the "cowboy-boot summit", the former Texas governor and then Mexican president Vicente Fox heralded the start of a "special relationship" between their two countries. It was widely predicted that Bush - hounded for his ignorance of world affairs during the 2000 campaign but rewarded by some Hispanic voters for his brave attempts at speaking Spanish - would make United States relations with Latin America his diplomatic priority. Yet in a harbinger of things to come, President Fox's website recorded how "the only cloud [over an otherwise auspicious presidential meeting] came from news that shortly before Bush and Fox took the stage, U.S. and British aircraft bombed targets in Iraq".

Less than a year later, the World Trade Centre had been reduced to rubble, US post-cold-war foreign policy rebranded as the "war on terror" and Bush's tequila sunrise forgotten. By March 2003, when both Mexico and Chile opposed the invasion of Iraq from the United Nations Security Council, the White House realised it couldn't count even on its staunchest Latino allies. After that, to the chagrin of the region's liberal right, but to the relief of many others, Latin America dropped right off George Bush's foreign-policy agenda.

Until now, that is. Bush, with just twenty-two months of his presidency remaining, is embarking on a major tour of the region from 8-14 March 2007. White House press secretary Tony Snow declares that the trip will "highlight our common agenda to advance freedom, prosperity and social justice and deliver the benefits of democracy". Bush will be talking alternative energy and trade in Brazil, drugs and terrorism in Colombia, and friendship and partnership in Guatemala and Mexico. More prosaically, the scheduled thirty-six-hour stop-off in Uruguay was, Snow said, simply "reciprocity" for President Tabaré Vázquez's visit to Washington in May 2006.

Justin Vogler works as a freelance journalist based in Chile, teaches political science in the socioeconomics department of Valparaiso University and is studying for a PhD at the department of peace studies at Bradford University, England. He has spent twelve years travelling and working on development projects in southeast Asia and Latin America and is a regular contributor to the English-language daily, the Santiago Times

Also by Justin Vogler in openDemocracy:

"Michelle Bachelet's triumph"
(January 2006)

"Small-country power: Chile and the Iraq war" (January 2006)

"Latin America: woman's hour" (March 2006)

"Ollanta Humala: a Peruvian gamble"
(April 2006)

"Mapuche: the other Chile" (June 2006)

"South America: towards union or disintegration" (July 2006)

"Democratising globalisation: Joseph Stiglitz interviewed"
(25 September 2006)

"Augusto Pinochet: chronicle of a death foretold"
(9 December 2006)

Those he will meet...

The choice of Brazil as Bush's first port of call is seen by some analyst as part of an ongoing campaign to drive a wedge between the "sensible" Latin American left, personified apparently by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the region's "irresponsible populist left" à la Hugo Chávez (for an analysis of this supposed dichotomy, see Jorge Castañeda, "Latin America's Left Turn", Foreign Affairs, May-June 2006). There have been repeated calls for Brasilia to exercise more forceful leadership in the region and help "contain" Hugo Chávez's influence.

But if Bush seeks to bolster Brazil's regional leadership, his visits to Uruguay and Colombia are a strange way of showing it. Montevideo has been quietly negotiating a bilateral free-trade agreement with Washington and it looked at one stage as if a deal would be signed by Bush during his lightning stopover. This would have been a minor coup for Bush but a disaster for Lula.

After the grandiose scheme for a Free Trade Area of the Americas was scuppered in the Mar Del Plata summit in November 2005 - where the Mercosur trade bloc's five members (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela) held firm in demanding better access to the US's agricultural market in return for opening their markets to American services - Washington has been notching up bilateral trade deals with the smaller south American states one by one. Chile had already yielded in 2003, and in 2006 Peru and Colombia followed suit. Winning Uruguay over would have been a major blow to Lula's stated aim of strengthening Mercosur.

As it happens, the Brazilian president appears to have outmanoeuvred Bush. In a visit to Montevideo on 26 February, less than two weeks before the American president's own scheduled arrival, he agreed a number of trade concessions in return for a firm and public commitment from Tabaré Vazquez that he would not sign up with Washington.

Much as he might like to, Lula stands no chance of neutralising Bush's influence in Colombia in the same way. The best he can hope for is that Bush's visit won't signal a significant rise in the already huge amount of US military aid pouring into the conflict-torn country as part of the inappropriately named "Plan Colombia". What especially worries Brasilia is that attempts to flush out the motley assortment of drug cartels, paramilitaries and leftwing guerrillas from southern Colombia will simply force them all to move their operations to the vast Amazon basin on the Brazilian side of the border.

But Bogotá is perhaps the only south American capital where Bush will be genuinely welcomed. Colombia was alone in the region in supporting the Iraq war. President Álvaro Uribe not only welcomed the invasion in 2003, he even expressed his desire that the US send a comparable force to Colombia to "put a decisive end to the (country's) problems".

Bush can expect a moderately warm reception in the central American state of Guatemala, where his stopover is recognition of the country's unfailing support of everything the Bush administration does. Mexico, meanwhile, needs to be thanked for somehow having managed to avoid electing a leftwing president (in the person of Andrés Manuel López Obrador) in July 2006.

...and those he won't

Looking at some of the countries Bush won't be visiting may give a better idea of his standing in the region. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez responded to news of Bush's tour by announcing his own sortie first to Argentina then Bolivia. That the timing clashed with Bush's trip was, Chávez assured journalists, pure coincidence. His "long-planned trip" had been kept secret for "security reasons".

There is little doubt that Argentina's president, Néstor Kirchner, will prefer playing host to Chávez than to Bush. The Argentinean daily Clarín cited one diplomat explaining why Buenos Aires had been left off Bush's itinerary: "Bush has no desire to meet Néstor Kirchner after what happened in Mar del Plata. Nor has Kirchner any desire to receive Bush, much less in the middle of an election campaign."

No one actually knows whether Kirchner or his wife Cristina Fernández will be standing in Argentina's presidential election on 28 October 2007. The fact that both are keen to avoid a photo op with George W Bush shows how much has changed since the 1990s when the then-president Carlos Menem boasted of his "carnal relations" with Washington.

Nor will Bush visit Chile. Although regarded as a bastion of pro-American liberalism, Santiago has recently had several run-ins with the White House. Opposition to the Iraq war, the successful candidacy of the Chilean socialist José Miguel Insulza to the presidency of the Organisation of American States, and President Michelle Bachelet's determination to maintain good relations with Hugo Chávez have all incurred Washington's wrath. One senior Chilean foreign-ministry official told me recently that it was a "huge relief" that Bush wasn't coming. "Everything we've tried to do in the last year has boiled down to a 'with Bush and against Chávez' or a 'with Chávez and against Bush' game; it's gruelling and utterly time-wasting", he confided wearily.

Peru's Alan García seems to be more in favour with Washington. He apparently received a warm phone-call from Bush excusing himself for not visiting Lima this time round but promising to be there for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in November 2008. García is the only south American leader who has volunteered to represent the mythical "sensible left" and openly confront Hugo Chávez. His carefully engineered clash with the Venezuelan leader during his 2006 election campaign not only earned him brownie points in Washington, it also helped him garner the rightwing votes he needed to win the presidency.

But beyond the calculations of those that do and those that don't want to be photographed with President Bush, and "our common agenda to advance freedom, prosperity and social justice and deliver the benefits of democracy", what can be expected from this seven-day hop between Latin America's capitals?

Well, thousands of police will have their weekend leave cancelled in preparation for the inevitable protests. Some speechwriters will have to come up with novel ways of packaging freedom, prosperity, social justice and democracy into easily recyclable quotes. Hugo Chávez's escapades will grab more headlines than anything Bush is likely to say. And Air Force One and its six escort fighters will spew hundreds of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Above all - and galling as it is for moderate states like Chile and Uruguay who would like to engage constructively and maturely with Washington - Bush's Latin American trip will be an exercise in trying to work out who is genuinely pleased to see him and finding ways of sowing division amongst those who are not. True, such Machiavellian reckoning has been standard fare in American hemispheric dealings at least since Roosevelt's 1904 corollary to the 1823 Monroe doctrine, effectively sanctioning "international police power" to suppress "chronic wrongdoing" in the region. Bush's failure isn't that he has broken with tradition in his treatment of America's backyard; it is that he hasn't.

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Bienvenido, Señor Bush, Justin Vogler