Conrad Black: China's Expanding Influence Rekindles US Engagement In Latin America

Authored by Conrad Black via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Venezuela has followed a sharply sloping descent from being the most prosperous country in Latin America 50 years ago, based on its ample oil resources, to a catastrophic condition today. With the election of Marxist Hugo Chavez in 1999, and the succession of Nicolas Maduro as president in 2013 after Chavez’s death, approximately 20 percent of the population of Venezuela (8 million people) has fled the country and its GDP has declined by about 70 percent. It is by many yardsticks the most chronically under-performing country in the world.

Maduro is closely associated with the crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, and he is routinely declared by the U.S. government to be leading a narco-terrorist state whose chief occupation is trafficking slaves and the most dangerous narcotics into the United States and other countries in the Americas. The American contention is that Maduro’s conduct has been unconstitutional and he has no basis in popular support, and he is not in fact the legitimate head of the Venezuelan state. His principal occupation is held to be as an importer and exporter of narcotics and a trafficker in human lives of extraordinary barbarity. The United States has announced a reward of $50 million for the capture of Maduro, and it recognizes Venezuela’s president to be the opposition leader María Machado, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, having with difficulty escaped from Venezuela.

For much of Latin American history, the U.S. government was largely influenced in its policy towards Latin American countries by the perceived corporate economic interest of the United States. The flamboyant and partially unbalanced Marine General Smedley Butler claimed that the U.S. Marine Corps in Latin America was, for many decades, deployed at the whim of the United Fruit Company to extract the maximum possible profit from the countries where it operated. There was some truth in this, and a number of Latin American leftist politicians, particularly Juan Peron in Argentina and Victoriano Huerta, Pancho Villa, and to some extent Plutarco Elias Calles in Mexico, opposed the United States with socialistic measures, including nationalization of foreign economic assets.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the United States to what he called the Good Neighbor Policy, which was sincere and widely appreciated. He took a relatively relaxed view of Mexican nationalization of the oil industry—mainly from Americans, provided a modest compensation was paid—and relations between the United States and Latin America were reasonably composed in the early post-war years, especially after Peron was overthrown as president of Argentina in 1955.

The rise of the Latin American communists, in particular Fidel Castro, who seized control in Havana in 1959, introduced a new era of competition in Latin America between the U.S. interest and the international communist challengers. President Kennedy founded the Alliance for Progress, and it did make some progress. Castro’s celebrated sidekick, Che Guevara, was killed by Bolivian authorities while attempting to promote land reform in 1967. And the dapper communist Salvador Allende was accused by Congress and the Supreme Court of Chile of radically violating the constitution, and died in the coup conducted by the commander of the Chilean army, General Augusto Pinochet, who stepped down as president of Chile after 17 years in 1990.

The end of the Cold War in 1991, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of international communism, was a heavy blow to the Latin American left, and for some decades the United States was effectively uninterested in Latin American politics, no matter how hostile to the United States some of the region’s countries became. The United States viewed Chavez in Venezuela, the semi-communist Bolivian Eva Morales, the returning Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the communist Chilean president Gabriel Boric, and Brazil’s veteran leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with indifference.

With the rise of China as a meddlesome country and the emphasis on strategic minerals and other vital supplies, including oil, the United States has snapped out of its torpor about what it considers to be the profoundly boring and frequently juvenile political antics of Latin America. It has been encouraged in this by the victory of the tremendously colorful libertarian capitalist Javier Milei as president of Argentina. The young president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has also attracted its interest, as has the new conservative president of Chile, José Kast, and as did the immediate former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.

The United States has made it clear that it will not tolerate the installation of foreign military bases in Latin America, nor a policy that withholds from Washington access to any natural resources it considers to be essential. The Organization of American States (OAS) has often had a leftist majority, but the United States itself has made it clear that it does not consider ostensible Latin American political leaders who are in fact chiefly preoccupied in their vocations as narco-terrorists and slave traffickers to be worthy of any protections set up for them by international organizations. The U.S. government demonstrated when they seized the president of Panama, Manuel Noriega, in 1989 and ultimately imprisoned him as an industrial-level narcotics importer into the United States, that they weren’t much interested in what the OAS thought about it.

The United States has tired of attempting to see the Latin American countries in a nation-building role, although the current administration is strongly supporting President Milei in Argentina now. But the U.S. government under both major parties has made clear that those South American political leaders who antagonize the United States by joining forces with the chief terrorist and narcotics organizations can count on rather unsportsmanlike responses from Washington.

In the current circumstances between the United States and Venezuela, there can be little doubt that President Trump will intervene to assist the majority of Venezuelans who are opposed to the government, and will continue to treat the regime as a criminal enterprise. Maduro is unlikely to last long and will not be much lamented, least of all in Venezuela.