Plundered Latins fighting back

After 150 years of being subjected to American imperialism, gunboat diplomacy and exploitation, Latin American countries are rearing up to tell Yanqui to stay home.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spearheads that drive for independence, emboldening Latins to surge to the Left. He set the example by pronouncing Venezuela socialist.

Chavismo and populism forever! He called Bush 43 the devil (he was) and urged Americans to read social critic Noam Chomsky (they should).

Examples of the new Latin America defiance of Uncle Sam:

• President Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, nationalized the tin, gas and oil industries. He is trying to stem capitalist greed. He vows to close the “open veins of Latin America,” a reference to the title of a book by Eduardo Galeano.

• In Chile, President Bacheter waves the banner of socialism. She often reminds Chileans of the right-wing coup in 1973 that toppled Allende, a golpe engineered by the United States.

• In Paraguay, Lugo won the presidency, exorcising the ghost of Stroessner and his 35-year dictatorship. A former Catholic bishop, Lugo is now the bishop of the poor and the downtrodden.

• In Brazil, President da Silva is a former metalworker who battles for the working class.

• In Ecuador, President Correa has kicked the Yanks off their air base at Manta.

• In Salvador, Funes is the country’s first leftist president.

• In Nicaragua, the president is Ortega of Sandinista fame.

• In Honduras, the army overthrew leftist President Zelaya, particularly angering Argentinians, Brazilians and Chileans with their bitter memories of human rights abuses by the military in 1960 and 1970.

• In Cuba, de facto president Fidel Castro got an abrazo from the Organization of American States. The OAS voted to lift the ban on Cuban membership. (Cuba was expelled in 1962 because its Marx-Leninism was deemed incompatible.)

The U.N. General Assembly passed resolution after resolution for 17 years condemning the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, rightly called the embargo “the dumbest policy on the face of the earth.”

Despite the lingering dumb policy, most Latin American nations are now declaring for people over profits, for equality over gross injustice.

But the United States strenuously objects. It hates socialism and deplores the unhinging of its hegemony. As Daphne Eviatar writes in The Nation: it is “as if representing the interests of the majority were inherently deserving of scorn.”

America historically has supported right-wing Latin dictators. It gave the despicable Pinochet regime in Chile $290 million in 1976. It endorsed Cuban dictator Batista who got enormously rich from the Mafioso in Havana.

Washington has railed at Cuba for 60 years, always “winning” the argument by uttering the dread word communism. No democrat defends dictatorship. But democratic socialism is a worthy goal.

President Teddy Roosevelt boasted that he had seized the canal from Panama. President Taft proclaimed: “The whole hemisphere will be ours soon…by virtue of our superiority of race and morality.”

Does history record a more arrogant statement to support colonialism and imperialism?

In 1935 after a 33-year career in the Marines, Gen. Smedley Butler admitted the plunder of Latin America:

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business and Wall Street…I was a racketeer for capitalism…I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba profitable for National City Bank…I helped save the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. I helped make Honduras safe for American fruit companies.”

Or, as Galeano puts it: “the Imperium sends forth its Marines to save its monopolists’ dollars.” No wonder the United States has been the biggest enemy of Latin America.

It stole half of Mexico under the banner of manifest destiny. It seized Cuba, Puerto Rico Rico and the Philippines, making them colonies while building an empire. President McKinley hailed the seizure as ushering in “civilization and humanity.”

The United States role in Cuba is shameless. The Platt Amendment permitted U.S. intervention. It sealed the theft of Guantánmo.

Galeano writes passionately in “Veins” of how the great wealth of Latin nations has been appropriated by capitalist imperialists: gold, silver, sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, cotton and bananas.

United Fruit, an American corporation now called Chiquita, ravaged Central and South America. Emily Biuso in The Nation recently tells how: strong arming, destroying natural habitat to build banana plantations, enslaving the local people in low-wage and suppressing labor movements.

“Any attempt by the workers to assert their rights was met with harsh consequences,” Galeano writes.

But Latin America, now blessedly under new management, will no longer tolerate gringo dominance.