As Latin America Goes, So Goes...

Greg Grandin's recent recent writing on an Obama policy for Latin America transcends any such political 'presentism' or hero-worship, and instead offers a vital and occasionally horrifying crystal ball in which to peer. As staging ground for some of the most hateful, inexcusable adventures in government, empire, and murder, Grandin argues that the region has always worked as a sort of laboratory for new technologies of capitalist government that would eventually extend outward (c.f., Friedman's neoliberalism in Chile.) But at the moment, Grandin wonders if the Right's racial and ideological compulsions haven't taken them to a place of temporary hysterical inefficacy.

The Right's decay as an intellectual force is nowhere more evident than in the fits it throws in the face of the Left's—or China's—advances in Latin America. The self-confidant vitality with which Jeane Kirkpatrick used Latin America to skewer the Carter administration has been replaced with the tinny, desperate shrill of despair. "Who lost Latin America?" asks the Center for Security Policy's Frank Gaffney—of pretty much everyone he meets. The region, he says, is now a "magnet for Islamist terrorists and a breeding ground for hostile political movements… The key leader is Chávez, the billionaire dictator of Venezuela who has declared a Latino jihad against the United States."

So far Obama seems to kind of a Clinton revivalist, economically speaking. Will his administration take us to a place in which Third Way, capitalist cosmopolitanism makes it's second historical appearance (in the 1990s as tragedy, in 2009 as farce?) Will we see a batch of new trade agreements? Continued, contrived saber-rattling at Chavez? something like peace talks in Colombia? micro-credit for nominally socialist democracies? A less austere, more paternalistic disposition from the IMF/World Bank? Historic summit conferences, at least?