The day before President Barack Obama arrived in San Salvador on March 21, thousands of union members and campesinos marched to the U.S. Embassy. Over the loudspeaker an organizer proclaimed, “The global economic crisis, climate change, narco-trafficking, insecurity, and the food crisis have their origin in the economic model imposed on our people by the great world powers, primarily the United States.” Outside of Obama’s press conference the next day, hundreds of Salvadorans carried photos of family members who had been killed and disappeared during the country’s civil war, in which U.S.-backed government forces brutally repressed the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Marching alongside them, Hondurans bore crosses on their backs in memory of the hundreds of activists killed since the June 2009 coup against President Manuel Zelaya.
Days earlier in Chile, demonstrators denounced a proposed U.S. nuclear energy agreement and called on the United States to acknowledge its role in the 1973 CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende. Mobilizations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, forced Obama’s press conference with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff indoors, as protesters chanted, “Go home, Obama! The petroleum is ours!” Throughout the hemisphere, people waited to hear whether Obama would demonstrate the new era of “mutual interest and mutual respect” with Latin America that he had promised during his campaign. What they heard instead was mostly más de lo mismo—more of the same, dressed up in a language of “partnership” and cooperation.
Before Obama had embarked on his five-day trip to Latin America, he made clear that the primary motivation for the trip was to increase U.S. exports to the region and, in doing so, create new U.S. jobs. His goal, in this “fiercely competitive world,” was to ensure that Latin American countries would import most of their goods from the United States, not from China, the European Union, or other countries in the region. This was especially apparent during Obama’s visit to Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, where China has just overtaken the United States as the number one trading partner. Brazil, with an economic growth rate of 7.5% in 2010, is also the world leader in ethanol production and home to the recently discovered deep-water oil reserves estimated by some to be larger than the combined reserves of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
While culturally significant—the first African American U.S. president visiting Brazil’s first woman president—Obama’s visit was overshadowed by his authorization of the Libya bombing. Meanwhile, as one columnist for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo pointed out, Obama lacked “deliverables” or “concrete results.” Obama failed, for example, to announce support for Brazil’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And for all of his rhetoric about increasing trade, Obama did not offer to reduce the U.S. tariff on Brazilian ethanol. Obama did, however, offer billion-dollar funds to help Brazilian businesses purchase U.S. products and to support the development of offshore oil rigs. ”We want to be one of your best customers,” he said, referring to the oil.
In Chile, Obama and President Sebastián Piñera initiated talks on launching a nuclear power program in the earthquake-prone country—even as the ongoing disaster at Japan’s Fukushima plant was unfolding. Obama gave a speech from Chile’s La Moneda presidential palace in which he embraced hemispheric cooperation. He quoted Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, applauded the heroism of the Chilean miners rescued in October, and reminded listeners that “we are all Americans.” He also praised Chile on its leadership in the transition “from dictatorship to democracy,” but failed to apologize for the U.S. support for that very dictatorship. While Obama applauded Chile’s geothermal energy program, as well as Brazil’s biofuel industry, as an example of “alternative energy,” his support for off-shore oil rigs is more of the status quo.
In El Salvador, the gulf between the reality and the rhetoric of a “new era” was perhaps most palpable and painful. Obama made a highly celebrated visit to the tomb of revered martyr Monseñor Óscar Romero, who was murdered in 1980 by Salvadoran soldiers trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. However, Obama also announced $200 million for a security initiative to combat narco-trafficking in Central America. Many fear the move could increase human rights violations, as in Mexico, where more than 36,000 people have been killed since 2006 in the “war on drugs.” Before the trip, William Brownfield, assistant secretary for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, announced the plan to transform Central America into a “security corridor” between Colombia and Mexico, even though two other security aid packages, the Merida Initiative in Mexico and Plan Colombia, have increased the profitability of the drug trade and driven cartels into Central America.
Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes’s joint statements with Obama did reflect a significant shift from the “crackdown” only approach of Mexico’s Felipe Calderón or Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos. Funes emphasized that state investments in job creation and programs for drug rehabilitation and prevention were the only way to stem the proliferation of organized crime and migration. “We cannot continue offering our youngsters only two choices, go to the United States to find employment . . . or to fall into the hands of the criminal gangs,” Funes said. In rhetorical shift, Obama said that Central American governments—and not the United States—would design and implement programs for the new Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI).
Although Obama agreed with Funes that an economic solution is needed, the policies he promoted were largely a continuation of the last 20 years of neo-liberalism. He focused almost exclusively, for example, on fostering foreign investment as the path to development—even as the Canadian mining corporation Pacific Rim is suing El Salvador under a provision of CAFTA for more than $100 million in alleged “lost profits,” after it was denied mining permits to operate near the Lempa River, one the country’s primary sources of drinking water. Pacific Rim is the very type of foreign investor that Obama hailed as El Salvador’s potential savior.
As during his trip to Brazil, Obama’s new economic assistance for El Salvador—including the yet-to-be-defined Building Remittance Investment for Development Growth and Entrepreneurship (BRIDGE) and Partnership for Growth programs—seem intended to continue a vicious cycle of exploitation and dependence, cementing U.S. economic access to countries that are getting better offers elsewhere, including China and other Latin American nations.
Perhaps Obama’s praise for Funes’s “pragmatism” was meant to assure him that support will be provided as long as corporate interests remain the priority. As recently as the coup in Honduras, the Obama administration showed that it would not defend Central American presidents who strayed too far to the left, for example, by joining the Venezuela-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas. FMLN-governed municipalities in El Salvador have been participating in ALBA initiatives with Venezuela for several years, and some co-operation with Cuba has now reached the national level through the FMLN-led Ministries of Health and Education. But maintaining U.S. support is a huge priority for any Salvadoran president, since 2.5 million Salvadorans, or about one third of the population, live in the United States.
Ultimately, Obama’s meeting with El Salvador’s first progressive president is significant not only for El Salvador, but also for the hemisphere. Movements that continue to resist the neoliberal agenda have shifted the terrain, forcing the United States to contend with some of the very political forces, like the FMLN, that it spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat in the 1980s. Social movements, progressive presidents, and global economic changes too, have pushed Obama to talk about “common prosperity”—even if real cooperation is still a long way off.
Alexis Stoumbelis and Lisa Fuller work with the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador (CISPES) in Washington. Michael Fox is Associate Editor of NACLA.
