Condoleezza Rice's desperate trip south to Brazil to Colombia to Chile to El Salvador comes up a cropper as the U.S. backed Mexican candidate Derbez withdraws.
Things have been going better and better for the forces of democracy in the region of Simon Bolivar's dreams. Ecuador, the OAS and López Obrador in Mexico are showing U.S. weakness as well as Latin American strengths.
Condoleezza, entering Latin America last week, with the budget to bribe and the might to blackmail, went searching for just one more vote to impose Mexico's Derbez as the new OAS chief. The victory was supposed to be consummated while she was down here, to emboss her image as an effective foreign minister. Had Lucio still been in power in Ecuador, he would have offered the easiest pickins. But by the time Condi's jet touched down in Bogotá, Lucio's head was bouncing somewhere alongside the Amazon, and Ecuador had slipped through her fingers.
(link in There's Moreville)
It's a slow and incremental tectonic shift that is taking place in the South. As such it is hard for the U.S. to get a grip on a way to stop it. When it was a Chile by itself going socialist in the 70's it was easy to send in the CIA to do a 9/11.
When all the major economies were tied within World Bank nooses, it was hard to steer independent courses or lend hands in opposing Washington. But now that Brazil is becoming it's own powerhouse, and Argentina regularly thumbs it's nose at repaying debts that demand privitizing and overtaxing the poor, and Venezuela has oil leverage to further support its neighbors, they can begin to institute policies and alliances that run counter to U.S. designs.
I offer this excellent article by Al Giordano on the recent goings on in his "somewhere in América".
Here is one more clip from that article:
Democracy Triple Play: Ecuador to Mexico to the OAS
The Smackdown of Condoleezza's Agenda Came on the Week of Her Latin American Tour
The press spin after Condoleezza's messy defeat in the Organization of American States last week was Orwellian: A Voice of America story went so far as to say that it was Rice who engineered the withdrawal of Derbez and the victory of Insulza, with vague, unsupported claims that she got concessions from Insulza regarding OAS's stance toward Venezuela. This, after months of first throwing up a candidate from El Salvador against Insulza and, when that failed, backing Mexico's Derbez. An AP story headlined that Rice was "pleased" with the result. Why make such a claim unless it is necessary to paint a pasty, smiley face over a resounding wound? The intentional simulation of the Commercial Media about events in Latin America continues to astound in its level of transparent stupidity.
And so, after this stormy week that was in April in América of 2005, the hemisphere welcomes José Miguel Insulza as the man who may turn out to be the OAS's first truly independent secretary general. Time will tell.