Note: Latin American Integration is a serious threat to the US neoliberal development model and has already stopped one massive corporate “trade” agreement, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). The latter part of this article explores the current threat that Integration poses to US interests in the region, in particular the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and Trade in Services Agreeement (TiSA). While left governments in Latin America may challenge US imperialism, they are far from perfect and continue to organize their economies around extraction and the exploitation of indigenous peoples. Neoliberal “trade” deals like the TPP, TTIP, and TiSA will make it difficult for Latin America to break free from these historical chains–Mackenzie McDonald Wilkins.
Latin America’s integration: its dynamics and politics
Since its rather humble beginnings, Latin America’s regional integration has made substantial progress towards establishing Simon Bolivar’s dream of La Patria Grande in the contemporary context. Its first tentative steps were meetings between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro in Havana that began in December 1994 before the former was elected to the presidency of Venezuela. This relation turned out to be strategic since building a united Latin America free from US domination has been a central objective of the Cuban Revolution since 1959.As a result of these meetings between Fidel and Hugo, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) was established on 14 December 2004 around a Cuba-Venezuela agreement to exchange 96,000 barrels of oil per day for 20,000 health workers, most of them medical doctors. Both leaders conceived ALBA as an alternative to ALCA (FTAA) advocated by George W. Bush. At its inception in 2004 ALBA had only two members: Cuba and Venezuela. By 2005, Argentina and Brazil had elected left-wing governments who together with Venezuela and other administrations in the region managed to sink the ALCA project at the Summit of the Americas held in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 2005.
ALBA is the most radical manifestation of the integration process and it is made up of eleven countries: Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada; additionally, Surinam and Haiti have been granted special status. ALBA is based on the idea of regional integration based on the principles of solidarity, social justice, complementarity, and cooperation aimed at transforming geopolitical relations in the western hemisphere.
ALBA is also a political and economic alliance organised to defend the national sovereignty of its members, and the identity of the peoples who are part of it. ALBA’s historic precedents are to be found in the thought and actions of leading intellectuals and revolutionaries from the past such as Bolívar, Martí, Sandino, Che Guevara, Tupac Amaru, Tupac Katari, Miguel Hidalgo and many other historic leaders over the centuries who have contributed to the idea of Nuestra America (Our America).
ALBA is inimical to US hegemony in the crucial region of Central America and the Caribbean and its consolidation has proved to be contagious in less radical members of the community of states that make up Latin America. Hence powerful forces that wish to uphold the status quo and erase such a challenge have struck back with customary vigour but with substantially less effectiveness than in the past. In 2009 these forces, embedded in key bodies of the US state apparatus, engineered the coup d’état in Honduras, then a member of ALBA, in order to weaken it and to stop its growth both organizationally as well as in its political influence in the continent and internationally.
Honduras, under the leadership of radical landowner Manuel Zelaya, joined ALBA and made moves to hold a referendum to change the constitution but it also announced that it would turn the US military base of Soto Cano near Tegucigalpa into a modern, civilian and commercial airport. This was not tolerated and Zelaya was overthrown on 29 June 2009 with grave negative consequences for democracy and human rights in that country. The human rights situation in Honduras is at present extremely worrying and the overall situation can be characterised as grave. Pro US forces did manage to stop Honduras from achieving its full sovereignty and the development of a new, alternative Honduras. However, they failed in their objective of eliminating ALBA.
Chavez’ tireless campaign to unify and integrate Latin America led to the establishment of key bodies and institutions such as Telesur, Banco del Sur, Codesur, PetroCaribe, PetroSur, PetroAmerica, Mision Milagro, the Yo Si Puedo literacy programme, Radio Sur, Banco del ALBA, the Fondo ALBA-Caribe, and so forth, has given tangible form to the objective of an integrated and politically unified Latin America.
ALBA, always in a leadership role, has begun commercial transactions in the SUCRE (Unified System for Regional Compensation), a virtual currency, and has set up a Chamber of Payments Compensation. ALBA-Health, ALBA-Food, ALBA-Education, ALBA-Culture, figure among other tangible examples of integration. It should be borne in mind that, despite its pioneering and radical nature, ALBA, with the notable exception of Venezuela, mainly operates in countries with small economies, which reduces its potential.
UNASUR is actively constructing its own integration architecture that will soon include a Human Rights Commission which is likely to be counterposed to the usually biased OAS (Organization of American States) Human Rights bodies, but especially to the annual US State Department Human Rights Report usually deployed to discredit governments around the world (including in Latin America) –both, approved by Washington, often utilized as an excuse to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign countries by wielding the threat of sanctions.
CELAC, UNASUR and ALBA play an active and weighty role both in the conflicts caused by US plans of destabilization against progressive governments in the region, and the defense of their sovereignty. They all in different ways support the peace process in Colombia. Additionally, in 2014 CELAC declared Latin America a Zone of Peace, thus opening the possibility a substantial drive towards demilitarizing the region of US forces, especially in the Caribbean and Central America.
Many governments in Latin America have come to the conclusion that they have a chance to eradicate poverty, reduce the existing gross inequalities, expand and consolidate democracy, develop a participating and conscious citizenry, grow economically, and strengthen national sovereignty only if they do it collectively. In this regard the ongoing process of regional integration is central.
This is the chief reason the US is seeking to develop the pro-market and neoliberal Pacific Alliance based in countries along the Pacific coast such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile, but which lacks the strength visible in the integration process of the rest of the continent and as a project is severely limited by the structural economic decline of the United States, which, apart from military bases, offers very little else.
Impressive steps have also been taken to eliminate racism, bigotry, gender and sex discrimination, and intolerance towards sexual diversity. In all these regards Latin America shows not only that another world is possible but is being built right now.
The region, however, confronts a US that despite some promises and gestures from President Barack Obama in seeking to normalize relations with Cuba and Venezuela, includes many broadly unaccountable and unelected US bodies which continue with a Cold War-like policy of intervention and interference in the internal affairs of many Latin American nations. Many such destabilization plans involve the large-scale illegal funding by the NED, USAID, IRI, NDI, and many other more secretive US outfits of extreme right-wing and violent groups.
Since 1998, these US bodies, sometimes with the overt support of the White House, and in cahoots with extreme right wing currents in those nations, have conducted coup d’états in Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Ecuador, and are or have been, arguably, involved in destabilization plans in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and so on. Such coups succeeded only in Honduras and Paraguay. Had it not been for the politics of Latin America’s regional integration, there would be many more ousted governments.
Dr. Francisco Dominguez is the Head of the Latin American Studies Research Group at Middlesex University. He is a specialist on Latin America’s political economy, especially Venezuela and Cuba, about which he has written and published extensively. He is co-editor of Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America (Zed Books 2013).