In her dining room, my home stay mother in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has a 10-year-old photo of four Latin American leaders interlocking hands — Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Luiz Lula of Brazil, and Evo Morales of Bolivia.
The photo captures an amazing moment in the 525-year history since Christopher Columbus initiated the pillaging of the New World. These four leaders were not only democratically elected, but represented a newfound independence on the continent that dismissed the marching orders of the United States and other colonial powers. Today only Morales remains in power. Kirchner and Chávez are dead, while Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff was ousted in what amounted to a legislative coup before the 2016 Olympics, and replaced by CIA stooge Michel Temer.
The crumbling of Latin American populism and the overall rightward shift of the continent has plunged Argentina into a political crisis not seen since its economic collapse in 2001. Work is hard to come by and more than 40 percent inflation is strangling the average citizen’s wallet. But to listen to the country’s right-wing businessman president, Macuro Macri, who gave a joint address to the legislature last week, his tenure has been a huge success.
“I don’t hate people,” Ana Laura Lobo, my study abroad group’s academic director said. “But I hate him.”
To give an idea to readers back in the United States how out of touch the Argentine president is, at the end of his speech a protester threw a bag of yerba mate at him, as he had driven mate prices up. Macri held up the bag and proclaimed “a gift.”
The situation is intensifying in Argentina’s capital, as mass protests are scheduled for this week, including the international women’s strike this Wednesday. Women face the direst of situations in Argentina, and some of their demands for the strike include equal pay, legal abortion and an end to Femicide, as extreme violence toward women is a huge epidemic in Argentina.
All of this is occurring amidst what my home stay sister calls a “new Operation Condor.” For those unfamiliar with Operation Condor, it was the installing of national security dictatorships across Latin America in the 60s and 70s. To crush dissent and opposition, these states engaged in systematic torture, assassination and forced disappearances. The death toll in Argentina alone stands at 30,000 according to the National Security Archive.
Unsurprisingly, this happened with the guidance and insistence of the U.S. government. Now known through declassified transcripts, when the Argentine military launched a coup in 1976, then Sec. of State Henry Kissinger was told to expect “probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long” and to wait before backing the new military junta, yet Kissinger replied it was “in our interest” and that “they need a little encouragement from us.”
Just as it was then, installing right-wing, pro-business governments in Latin America is in the best “interest” of the U.S. The U.S. has become so isolated from its own backyard, its planners had to make a concession to maintain its earliest foreign policy strategy, the Monroe Doctrine.
Thus, President Barack Obama’s thawing of relations with Cuba. This is only a stop-gap measure, as surely there is a plan to restore pro-U.S. cohesion on the continent. Thankfully resistance is strong here in Argentina and will not disappear anytime soon, much to the chagrin of U.S. officials.
luwrobin@umail.iu.edu
