CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA:
BREAKING WITH THE PAST, LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
It
was José María Torres Caicedo, a Colombian writer, who in 1856 popularised the
term “Latin America” which for many readers is synonymous with the Spanish
language. But it is not necessarily
the Spanish language that dominates the region; after all, the language of South
America’s largest country and biggest economy, Brazil, is Portuguese.
Brazil’s neighbour, Suriname, is Dutch-speaking and whose other
immediate neighbours do not have Spanish as the official language either,
namely, Guiana (French) and Guyana (English).
It is not just the United States of America that can claim the title of
melting pot.
Even
if Spanish is the official language of 18 republics in Central and South America
(including the Caribbean) remember that there are the region’s indigenous
languages with each one of them spoken by millions of people.
Quechua is common in the former Inca empire (Perú, Bolivia and Ecuador
– in the latter case it is called Quichua); Guaraní is the common tongue of
Paraguayans and in Guatemala and parts of southern Mexico a number of Mayan
languages are spoken. Mexico alone
can claim over 50 Indian languages, including Náhuatl which was spoken by the
Aztecs (more correctly called the Mexica).
The
French immediately warmed to the expression “Latin America” when it was
first used because it distinguished the region from the US at a time when France
was trying to establish its own sphere of influence.
This eagerness would lead to the disastrous attempt by Louis Napoleon to
install Maximilian, a Habsburg prince, as emperor of Mexico.
Brazil can relate to France’s 19th-century motives and when
reflecting on doctrines of American exceptionalism, one should also think of
Brazil; many Brazilians don’t even feel part of Latin America.
This sense of separateness and proud independence has led Brazil to
believe that it is entitled to a permanent seat on the United Nations Security
Council. To have been selected to
host the Olympic Games in 2016 is a triumph that Brazilians will speak about for
many years to come.
The
North American Free Trade Agreement signed by Mexico and the US is not seen by
Brazil as a unifying step for all of the Americas; quite the opposite and it
prefers to encourage unity within South America itself.
That is why back in 2000, when Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the
Brazilian president, he hosted the first summit of South American presidents.
The inspiration for this was Simón Bolívar, South America’s iconic
figure of the 19th century, who fought and conquered the Spanish.
Subsequently, in November, 2004, when 11 South American countries
(including Guyana and Suriname) met in Cusco, the former Inca capital in Perú,
a South American Community of Nations was proclaimed.
The ultimate goal is to have both a common passport and currency and
whether or not this European Union ideal is achieved is not the issue:
it is this declared desire for an independent identity, encouraged by
Brazil, that is significant.
Brazil
is a natural driving force behind the initiative and its unique position has
several strands – besides the fact that, unlike anywhere else in South
America, it was a constitutional monarchy for the first seven decades after its
independence. The country, as I say,
is the largest on the continent and both its language and geography (the
forbidding boundaries being the Amazon rainforest, the Pantanal swamps and the
powerful Paraná river) serve to reinforce this isolation. It
has, however, a dark (literally) past. It
is thought that out of approximately 8 million Africans who survived the passage
to the Americas, well over 3 million were shipped to Brazil in the four
centuries to 1850 – much more, in fact, than the number shipped to the US.
Slavery was not abolished until 1888 (the same year as it was in Cuba)
and it was that decision, with its purest of intentions, that would lead to the
end of the Brazilian monarchy.
The
Awkward Squad
“No
nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation”.
US President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s sentiment is certainly one shared
by Brazil. Reports last year caused
a stir outside the country, especially in the US, after Brazil’s central bank
and aides to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that Brazil and
China will move towards using their own currencies, rather than the US dollar,
in future trade transactions. There
are several reasons why the greenback’s prominence should be questioned, a
status that was established from the remnants of the Bretton Woods system
created after the Second World War. Today
the dollar isn’t fixed to gold and the US is no longer the world’s largest
creditor; there are those who argue that it is an empire that can only maintain
the upper hand by military, rather than economic, strength.
Consequently,
Brazil’s attendance at meetings in Yekaterinburg in Russia last June, along
with the leaders of the six-nation Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, an
alliance which includes Russia and China, should not come as any surprise.
The intention of the gathering was to discuss mutual aid which would lead
to trade between the countries being conducted in their own currencies;
pointedly, US officials who had wanted to attend as observers were not allowed
to. The latest figures available
(2007) at the time of writing show that China’s annual trade with Brazil was
US$ 29.7
billion. In 2008, however, China’s
total trade with Latin America increased by a significant 40% and reached US$143
billion.
According
to Jorge G. Castañeda, a former Foreign Minister of Mexico, and Stephen Haber,
a professor of political science at Stanford University in the US, Latin America
(despite pockets of resistance) is entering a phase of unprecedented political
and economic stability which is amply illustrated by the degree of progress
being made in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico,
Panama, Peru and Uruguay. In
varying, but nonetheless positive, degrees these countries have pursued good
macroeconomic policies that have effectively fought inflation; they have opened
their markets and encouraged investments.
The
resulting, and significant, shift towards more economic opportunity, social
mobility and political democracy has gone unnoticed in some quarters.
In other words, these countries have broken with the past, whereas the
opposite applies in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela where
they are still living in the past and have not been able, so far, to break with
it. Not only that, this awkward
squad of countries also fosters an elevated level of hostility towards the US.
The argument goes that since the 1950s, and until the election of Barack
Obama, every US president since Dwight Eisenhower – other than Jimmy Carter
– has interfered, in one way or another, in the domestic affairs of one or
more countries in the region.
So
how should one interpret last year’s coup against the Honduran president,
Manuel Zelaya, who was unceremoniously removed from office last June?
Importantly, it should be understood that the Honduran coup did not
originate in a military barracks but was the direct result of a court order
issued by a competent judge of the country’s Supreme Court.
President Zelaya, a member of the axis of “21st-century socialists”
headed by the president of Venezuela, warmed quickly to the idea of extending
his presidential mandate, just as Hugo Chávez has done;
President Chávez, however, did so by first holding a Constituent
Assembly and changing the constitution. Mr.
Zelaya, on the other hand, and whose ambitions were not shared by parliament,
the Supreme Court and even his own Liberal Party, decided to start the ball
rolling by holding a referendum to test the waters.
The army refused to distribute the ballot boxes and subsequently the head
of the armed forces, General Romeo Vásquez, was sacked by the president and
resignations followed from the Defence Minister and the heads of the army,
marines and air force. The Supreme
Court had already declared the referendum illegal but the president chose to
ignore this.
Perhaps
if the president had not been arrested the conflict could have escalated into
widespread bloody civil turmoil; that would have been terribly damaging, not
just to Honduras, but to the region as a whole.
By the time this article is published I would expect most of the dust to
have settled and fresh presidential elections either planned or already held.
In my opinion it is not taking sides to say that the coup is hardly a
return to the 1980s with its spate of civil wars across Central America. Just
as the US Supreme Court determined the fate of a presidency in December, 2000,
arising, in part, from considerations of judicial power, so the gavel, and not
the grenade, was used in Honduras to defend that country’s constitution.
Geopolitics
in Central America and the northern Andes point to Panama – where presidential
elections in the middle of last year proceeded, as they have done for almost
twenty years, without incident – as Washington’s new Central American
listening post, replacing, ironically, Honduras which, back in the 1980s, had
played this role during the civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
Certainly, relations between Panama and the US on all levels have
improved since Theodore Roosevelt requested a legal justification for his
acquisition of the canal in Panama from his Attorney General, Philander C. Knox.
“Oh, Mr. President”, came the response, “do not let so great an
achievement suffer from any taint of legality”.
It
would appear that in Panama resentment has been replaced by reality which,
sadly, is not the case in those few Latin American countries still locked in the
past. Panama’s regional political
prominence, as well as its infrastructure (the most developed in Central
America), suggests that its regional banking centre will continue to develop and
although its government is reluctant to dilute the country’s prized banking
secrecy, it will not choose isolation to become the North Korea of offshore
banking. Above all else, as with
their canal, reality will always trump resentment for Panamanians.