Is Obama Showing His True Colors?

By Eduardo García Aguilar

Six months after taking office, and receiving high praise worldwide, the administration of Barack Obama—or the interests behind the curtain—are beginning to show their true colors with regard to foreign policy in Latin America. It is clear that the recent controversies in the region, such as the coup in Honduras and conversion of Colombia into multiple U.S. military bases, are part of a strategy that aims to change the tendency that had been gradually imposed throughout the Latin American continent as George W. Bush neglected his own backyard while bombing the other side of the Atlantic and torturing in Guantánamo.

With the exception of Colombia, voters throughout the continent have turned their backs on the old governing white oligarchies who, with their greed, have plunged hundreds of millions of people into misery throughout two centuries of supposed independence. Nearly the entire geopolitical map of the continent is governed by moderate leftist authorities of different shades and tendencies. They are determined, above all, to find ways to help the forgotten ones of the earth and to urgently alleviate the hunger and misery that plagues the region.

These governments are called “populist” by the white landowning oligarchs, as well as domestic and multi-national businesspeople. It goes without saying that it does not sit well with them that these governments take away their ancestral economic privileges, they limit runaway greed for acquiring land, and they make them pay their taxes, raise wages and guarantee their workers a minimum amount of dignity. On top of all this is the trauma for them to see their countries governed by natives, mulattoes, afro-descendants, mestizos, former workers, former priests, socialist women, and former armed subversives.

Without a doubt, democratic and republican strategists, behind the White House's Oval Office, have demanded that this tendency in Latin America be turned around 180 degrees. They are worried about the growing Chinese, Russian and Arab presence there, among other emerging forces from the Middle East and Asia, who have been able to take advantage of the change.

None of this would be much of a problem if the powerful forces from the corporate and multi-national right were to respect the tendency and accept the new rules of the game. This should be the case especially because these ambitious neoliberal forces were those who brought on the present worldwide economic catastrophe. They have destroyed countries, millions of families and small and medium-sized businesses. If instead of investing in the tendency favoring the agrarian and corporate forces of the far-right, the United States were to opt for solidifying a continental change with more social justice and a higher standard of living for hundreds of millions of workers, Latin America for the first time could see decades of stability without fear of uprisings or class violence. Social security that guarantees the bare necessities for workers, as well as welfare programs for the poor prevent violence, the emergence of armed groups, and the possibility of blind and bloody uprisings.

On the other hand, if Obama begins to use the pretext of narcotraffic and terrorism to awaken the beast by way of military coups, militarization of some countries in order to spark aggression with other countries, we would be opting for the danger of war breaking out in this suffering continent. In the end this would benefit the arms industry of West and the East. If a destabilization strategy from within Colombia is carried out against the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) and MERCOSUR member countries, we are running the risk of an increase in terror in the style of Colombia’s paramilitaries and those longing for the the days of the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone. Actions such as the bombing in Ecuador could happen in other places leading to the outbreak of war, misery and bloodshed in all corners of the continent. The two ridiculous arguments put forth to justify that Colombia become a military base of the empire in the most strategic point of the continent, narcotraffic and terrorism, are in need of some deliberate reconsideration and analysis. The only reason the narcotraffic exists is because there is an enormous demand in the empire and the rich first-world European countries. The root causes of the problem are right in the noses of the first world, at the resorts of the rich and powerful, where the young people born with silver spoons in their mouths freely do tons upon tons of drugs, and nobody says a word to them.

Has anything been done in the empire or in Europe to stem the demand? Why does our Colombian Incitatus want to fill the jails with Colombian pot smokers instead of demanding that the wealthy countries solve their own problem? There is an urgent need to talk about legalizing this plague so that the world may redirect its resources that have been squandered on war. As was done in the days of Prohibition, which brought upon the emergence of mafias and the Hollywood-style gangsters of the 40's portrayed by Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart, such resources need to go towards prevention.

With regard to terrorism, it appears that Incitatus merely keeps the concept handy in order to be used as a manic epithet against anything that does not align with his limited understanding. The Islamic terrorism that the U.S. and Europe have been fighting or the famous European terrorist groups of the 70's have nothing to do with the ancestral Colombian violence that historians and sociologists know has existed for a long time and the reasons for which any expert is aware of and knows by heart.

All signs point to the fact that Incitatus, the favored horse of Caligula that governs Colombia, will no longer be leading the country to an internal civil war, but to a number of external wars with bordering countries. He will turn this beautiful land into multiple military bases at the service of U.S. interests. In the end it will not be his children dying in the foxholes but the children of Colombia's poor that serve in the military, which we all know is an army of peasants. That man mentions patriotism on a daily basis, but he is the most unpatriotic person in history. He is giving the country away to the empire without asking for anything in return. He doesn't care at all that because of his crazed actions, 45 million of us in Colombia will be thrown into a continental war of incalculable consequences. Let's hope that Obama and his people aren't already showing their true colors, and that they stop this dangerous strategic drift, which will only bring pain for us all, before it's too late.