EcoLogics

A number of commentators have noted over the past months that Obama’s political practice now flatly contradicts the hopeful rhetoric of his campaign speeches. It seems that the Bush-Cheney skulduggery has been replaced by a rather more astute modus operandi, one that involves a continued use of lofty Obama oratory even as Obama allows his lieutenants to engage in policies that are more and more difficult to distinguish from those of the Bush administration.

So it is, for example, that the Wall Street finance barons are once again getting their way thanks to the intervention of Timothy F. Geithner; that Steven Chu has performed extraordinary u-turns vis-à-vis coal-fired power stations and hydrogen cars; and that there is still no guarantee that the Guantánamo prison will actually be closed down. While political realists will claim that there have been pragmatic reasons for each of the mentioned volte faces, the fact is that the Obama administration has shown a remarkable willingness to accommodate many of the very policies that it denounced during the election.

As if the mentioned policy u-turns were not enough, this week the Obama administration has shown that is it even willing to return to the bad old days of ‘banana republic’ diplomacy in Latin America.  In June, the Honduran oligarchy decided that the democratically elected, and increasingly left-wing President Manuel Zelaya had gone too far in the direction of addressing the country’s age old inequalities. In the manner of a García-Márquez novel, they whisked him out of the country whilst he was still in pyjamas, and instituted one of their own as interim president.

As noted by Mark Weisbrot in The Guardian, it is extraordinary that Obama administration’s first statement did no more than call for ‘all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter’. When the strength of the response of other nations became clear, Hillary Clinton issued a somewhat stronger statement that stopped short of calling the coup a coup, and didn’t say anything about Zelaya returning to the presidency. It was only on Monday afternoon that Obama finally said ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras.’ Even so, during a press conference later that day, Clinton herself still refused to confirm that ‘restoring the constitutional order’ in Honduras meant returning Zelaya.

What critical observers on this side of the Atlantic failed to comment on was that Obama made his statement in the course of a press conference with Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s arch neo-liberal, and far-right wing president. Anyone who wants to find out what Uribe has been up to over the last decade or so should read the letter that Human Rights Watch sent to President Obama on the eve of his meeting with Uribe. In one particularly telling paragraph, the HRW letter says that

In recent years Uribe has said trade unionists are “a bunch of criminals dressed up as trade unionists.”  He has railed against his country’s own Supreme Court, which has spearheaded ground-breaking investigations of paramilitary infiltration in the Colombian government (the “parapolitics” investigations), accusing its members of representing “terrorism.”  He has claimed that opposition politicians are “terrorists in business suits.”  And he has accused assistant Supreme Court justice Ivan Velásquez, who is in charge of coordinating the “parapolitics” investigations, of trying to frame him for murder by offering illegal or inappropriate benefits to an imprisoned paramilitary to testify against Uribe (an investigation by the Attorney General’s office later found that, in fact, Velásquez was the one who the paramilitary and others were framing).  After Velásquez was cleared, last year, Semana magazine revealed that senior Uribe advisors held a meeting in the Presidential Palace with another paramilitary leader to discuss supposed evidence against Velásquez (which also turned out to be false).

In this context, all credit goes to the pre-election Obama for criticizing Colombia’s appalling human rights record. In a speech given to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia on April 2nd, 2008, Obama said that he would ‘oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements’.

Alas, now it appears that this stance is also set for an Obama u-turn thanks to a remarkable new development in the region. This year, the U.S.’s agreement with Ecuador to use the military base in Manta expires. The base is located on the Pacific coast just south of Colombia, and is nominally used by U.S. AWACS E-3 and P3 Orions for the purpose of cocaine trade interdiction. Critics of the growing American military presence in the region suspect that the base has also been used to spy on governments in the area and to help Colombia with its anti-guerilla operations.

The Manta base acquired a new notoriety after March 1, 2008, when Alvaro Uribe launched, some say at the very least with U.S. logistical support, an attack on a FARC guerrilla camp across the border in Ecuador. Some commentators at the time went further and suggested that some or all of the planes were actually flown by U.S. pilots who took off from the Manta base. Whatever the case, Uribe’s attack was such a flagrant violation of international law that it drew condemnation from everyone except the Bush government. Correa called back his ambassador in Bogotá and relations between the two countries reached their lowest point in living memory. The conflict rumbles on; an Ecuadorian judge has just issued an international arrest warrant for the former Colombian Defence Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, one of Uribe’s key lieutenants and political allies, and a member of one of Colombia’s most powerful families.

Unsurprisingly, the Correa government vowed ‘never again to repeat a policy of entreguismo [literally ‘giving-up-ism’], of giving up part of the national territory’. There will be no renewal of the Manta agreement with the U.S., and the U.S. has accepted that its last flight from the base in Manta will be in July. Where, then, will the U.S. spy planes and ships be relocated? No prizes for guessing the answer. The Colombian magazine Cambio has reported that a deal has been hammered out that will allow the U.S. to establish bases in no less than five Colombian sites: most probably the Palanquero airbase near Bogotá, but also the Alberto Pouwels airbase on the Caribbean coast; the Apiay base in the country’s eastern plains near the Venezuelan border; and two naval ports in Bahía Málaga and in Cartagena, on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts respectively. So instead of having one relatively isolated base in Ecuador, the U.S. will now perhaps have five quite sizable bases scattered strategically across all of Colombia. Not bad for a president who got himself elected by promising to bring to an end the Bush-Cheney administration’s war-mongering.

We do not know yet what quid pro quo Uribe has extracted for this deal, which is unlikely to be supported by a majority of Colombians.  There is, however, already evidence that a deal is in the offing: in his remarks after the meeting with Uribe, Obama was quoted as saying

We discussed, most prominently, the interests of both countries in moving forward on a free trade agreement. This is something that has been discussed for quite some time. I have instructed Ambassador Kirk, our United States Trade Representative, to begin working closely with President Uribe’s team on how we can proceed on a free trade agreement. There are obvious difficulties involved in the process and there remains work to do, but I’m confident that ultimately we can strike a deal that is good for the people of Colombia and good for the people of the United States. […] I commended President Uribe on the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia and dealing with the killings of labor leaders there, and obviously we’ve seen a downward trajectory in the deaths of labor unions and we’ve seen improvements when it comes to prosecution of those who are carrying out these blatant human rights offenses.

The sudden improvement suggested by Obama flies in the face of the letter sent to him by Human Rights Watch. But then again, similar contradictions are now routinely appearing in Obama’s public statements, which conjure one reality even as Obama aides act on another.

Obama may also maintain or even increase the vast amounts of aid that the U.S. already gives to Colombia’s military. All of this officially, of course, in the name of interrupting the flow of drugs from Latin America to the U.S. In fact, the key U.S. priority has been, and under Obama seems likely to continue to be to wage something akin to a post-cold war by proxy. And not just by proxy: the new bases will make it even easier for Obama to wield a new big stick against the U.S.’s most vocal critics in the region: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. The location of the bases will mean that U.S. combat aircraft could be minutes away from key civilian and military targets in each of the mentioned countries. Even if the U.S. never sends its bombers, there can be little doubt that the U.S. military will be quite happy to lend a logistical hand in the way that they appear to have done during the attack on the guerrilla base in Ecuador.

The military and political advisers behind any deal with Colombia probably hope that the American military presence in Colombia will counteract the resurgence of left-wing politics in the region. In fact, it is more likely that the policy will revive lingering anti-U.S. sentiment by showing that U.S. policy in the region remains unchanged, despite all the Obama promises. It will also trigger a new regional arms race as the threatened countries scramble to update their air defence systems. Hugo Chávez has already spent vast sums updating Venezuela’s U.S.-made military hardware, and the new bases will be a boon to the Russian and European arms makers that have replaced Boeing and other U.S. merchants of death.

Years after the U.S. finally removed the notorious ‘School of the Americas’ from the Panama Canal, it does not seem unlikely that the bases may yet even serve as training sites for the coups that may be organised by the U.S., or which the U.S. will ‘actively condone’ by way of statements of the kind issued by Hillary Clinton vis-á-vis the coup in Honduras. When it comes to Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary appear to have the full backing of even the most democratic of U.S. presidents.

Given these developments, Obama’s famous slogan  of ‘Yes we can…’ now seems like both a distant, and an extraordinarily ironic memory.