Same Difference: Obama's Militarized Status Quo

In April, President Obama made his hemispheric debut at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. “I’m here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration,” he told his counterparts, to applause. He later added that his administration would condemn “any efforts at violent overthrows of democratically elected governments, wherever it happens in the hemisphere.” Since then, however, Obama’s honeymoon with Latin America has definitively ended—largely because of his administration’s efforts to prevent the reinstatement of Manuel Zelaya to the presidency of Honduras, following the military coup in June, and its granting of legitimacy to the coup government. We might have expected as much from Bush, whose well-known support for the Venezuelan coup in 2002 did little to make him popular in Latin America. Why has the Obama administration’s Latin America policy proved so continuous with its predecessor’s? This Report approaches the question of continuities by examining the institutional and ideological obstacles to progressive policies, as well as the political and economic bases of such tragically failed policies as Plan Colombia.

January/February
2010
Volume: 
43
Number: 
1

Taking Note

Updates

Amanda Kistler
On August 31, a tribunal in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, sentenced former military commissioner Felipe Cusanero Coj to 150 years in prison. Cusanero’s conviction for surreptitiously kidnapping and murdering six Guatemalan citizens in the early 1980s, keeping their whereabouts and fate concealed, marks the first time in Guatemalan history that a court has found a member of the military guilty of a crime against humanity.
Yarimar Bonilla and Rafael A. Boglio Martínez
On October 15 a one-day general strike paralyzed Puerto Rico’s political and economic capital of San Juan. About 200,000 demonstrators, according to organizers, poured into the streets to protest the economic and labor policies implemented by the conservative administration of Governor Luis Fortuño. Launched in response to the administration’s decision to lay off more than 17,000 government workers in September, the strike culminated a series of protests held since the spring against the governor’s recovery plan for the struggling island economy.

Report

Suzanna Reiss
In its first year, the Obama administration has embraced and even extended its predecessors’ militaristic counter-narcotics policies in the Americas. In doing so, it has also adopted the basic tenets and priorities that have shaped U.S. drug control policies for decades. Until the administration pays attention to the structural origins of the drug war, as well as the profound international dependencies upon which it has always rested, it will be fated to continue pursuing a destructive, and failed, policy.
John Lindsay-Poland
The Pentagon, responding to new political constraints—the harvest of decades of grassroots movements—is retreating in Latin America. The number of places where the U.S. military can freely operate is shrinking in the region. But the military’s strategic vision has changed little. It has adapted to the new regional scenario by consolidating its assets in Colombia, still the Pentagon’s primary strategic partner in Latin America.
Joseph Nevins
Since assuming the presidency, Obama has offered few specifics on how he views immigration reform. But more important than his words, his Senate voting record, and the policies and practices carried out by his administration, show that Obama falls within the broad center of a political spectrum that is remarkably narrow on matters of immigration and boundary enforcement. With few exceptions—Obama not being one of them—both sides of the proverbial aisle now embrace a “security first” position that prioritizes strengthening the enforcement apparatus above all else.
Alexander Main
Although no evidence has yet emerged of direct U.S. involvement in the coup, the Obama administration’s reaction to it has greatly disappointed Latin American leaders, all of whom have explicitly and consistently condemned the coup since it took place. Many of them have also, unlike the United States, refused to recognize the November 29 presidential election, which occurred in a context of political repression and far-reaching media censorship.

Reviews

Aurora Camacho de Schmidt
Tracing Aleida: The Story of a Search (2007), a documentary film by Christiane Burkhard, 88 mins., distributed by Icarus films
Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances, by Aimee Carrillo Rowe; Speaking From the Body: Latinas on Health and Culture, edited by Angie Chabram-Dernersesian and Adela de la Torre; Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, edited by Jane S. Jaquette
Liza Keanuenueokalani Williams
Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America by Dennis Merrill, University of North Carolina Press (2009), 352 pp., $22.50 (paperback)

MALA

Julie Hollar
After years of criticism and months of campaigning by media activists, Lou Dobbs finally made his exit from CNN on the November 11 edition of his TV show. Helping to oust Dobbs from CNN was a victory, but campaigners’ biggest success was in raising awareness about anti-immigrant hate speech and its connection to violence, and the role media play in propagating both.