Financial Times: U.S. Losing Control in Latin America

In a wide-ranging editorial earlier this week, London's Financial Times, expressed deep concerns over the waning influence of the U.S. and the growing influence of Hugo Chavez in Latin America.  The article provides a fascinating window into the international financial communities' sober assessment of the floundering corporate agenda in Latin America -- an analysis not altogether different from our own. After briefly celebrating the victory of CAFTA, and the consolidation of George W. Bush's alliance with brutal regime of Colombia's Alvaro Uribe, the Financial Times expresses grave concern that "there is much to do and little indication yet that the administration has devised a strategy to cope with the growing influence of Venezuela's radical nationalist president, Hugo Chávez."

The editor's concede that, on a regional basis, coca eradication efforts have failed as decreases in cultivation in Colombia have led to increased cultivation in Peru and Bolivia -- just as the CIA predicted it would in a September, 2000 report uncovered by Narco News's Jeremy Bigwood.  They also express concern that the future of Plan Colombia may be threatened by growing Congressional concerns in the U.S. against the blatant hypocrisy of Colombia's new paramilitary law which allows death squad leaders implicated in drug trafficking to get off with a slap on the wrist, hold on to their wealth, maintain their terror networks, and escape extradition by making vague confessions and accepting light prison sentences.

But the editors of the Financial Times are of course concerned first and foremost about the growing regional influence of Venezuela.  They write that:

Above all, the US needs to respond seriously to the rise of Mr Chávez. At home, the president has built support on a series of popular social programmes, funded with the proceeds of high oil prices. Abroad, Mr Chávez has been throwing money around. In the past few weeks he has bought up chunks of Argentine debt and despatched cheap oil to a dozen needy Caribbean countries. Ecuador could also be set to benefit from Venezuelan largesse, if a bond sale goes through as expected. And during a visit this week Mr Chávez will offer shipbuilding contracts to Argentina and funds for Uruguay's state-owned airline.

Interestingly, however they go beyond the usual rhetoric of panicing about Hugo Chávez spreading revolution throughout Latin America, and in fact chide the Bush administration for exagerrating Chávez's role in the recent uprisings in Bolivia:

So far Washington has tended to focus on links between Mr Chávez and radical groups in the region, such as those led by Evo Morales, the leftwing indigenous leader who could become Bolivia's next president later this year. This exaggerates Mr Chávez's capacity for political meddling and underestimates the extent to which high oil prices give him the possibility to build softer forms of power and influence in the region.

The Financial Times is more or less conceding that Chávez is threatening corporate interests not by exporting revolution in the traditional sense, but by undermining U.S. hegemenony by leveraging economic power to strengthen Latin American solidarity.  The editors' conclude, of course, that this is a horrible development and that the U.S. needs to find new strategies to thwart Venezuela and reassert its hegemony -- but there is something oddly gratifying about having one of the established organs of the global financial community more or less concede most of the points that we Authentic Journalists have been putting forward in recent months.