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Political-Economic Factors in U.S. Foreign Policy : The Colombia Plan, the Mérida
Initiative, and the Obama Administration
Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos and Silvina María Romano
Latin American Perspectives 2011 38: 93
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X11406208
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Political-Economic Factors
in U.S. Foreign Policy
The Colombia Plan, the Mérida Initiative,
and the Obama Administration
by
Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos and Silvina María Romano
Translated by Mariana Ortega Breña
U.S. policy in Latin America, even when couched in the openly diplomatic discourse
used by the Obama administration, is based on military presence and serves the economic
interests of the United States and allied Latin American elites. In order to secure the
free-market context that ensures U.S. access to Latin America’s strategic resources, U.S.
administrations have focused on issues such as security and the fight against narcoinsurgency and terrorism, encouraging and directly supporting Latin American regimes
in which increased military presence in the government is purported to guarantee internal stability during a time of increasing violence. In reality, what they foster is a complex
balance between stability and instability that maintains the region’s overall dependence
and, therefore, its status as a source of U.S. wealth and power.
Keywords:
U.S. Latin American policy, Colombia Plan, Mérida Initiative, Obama
administration, Military
This article looks at the political-economic factors that are central to U.S.
foreign policy—the role played by mechanisms of capital accumulation, particularly those related to the securing of peripheral markets involved in the
creation of metropolitan production surplus, capital export (to the periphery),
and surplus transfer (to the center). While we do not posit that these factors
control everything, we do argue that the groups in power have plentiful and
often contradictory interests that tend toward military solutions. For this reason, we have focused on the fact that the aim of the interference, pressure, and
stabilization-destabilization policies employed by the United States in strategic regions is strongly linked to political-economic factors and the associated
cronyism. Their implementation is linked to reigning interests and contradictions, and it is these that decide which strategy is the most desirable. This is,
of course, a tense process that is hardly ever fully agreed upon or fully planned,
although it does reflect a set of common goals. Republican and Democratic
administrations have historically had the same general interests and are able
to negotiate conflicts over concrete benefits.
Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos is an economist with a Ph.D. from the Autonomous University of
Barcelona and a researcher at the Center of Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Humanities
of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Silvina María Romano received her Ph.D.
from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, and is a postdoctoral fellow of the
Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technical Research. Mariana Ortega Breña is a
freelance translator based in Canberra, Australia.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 178, Vol. 38 No. 4, July 2011 93-108
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X11406208
© 2011 Latin American Perspectives
93
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
The Colombia Plan and the Mérida Initiative are paradigmatic but not isolated cases of U.S. interference in Latin America. With the purpose of guaranteeing its “national security” (that is, its socioeconomic and geopolitical
interests), the United States promotes ad hoc mechanisms of internal order
throughout the region. This not only contributes to historical processes of
despoliation, plundering, exploitation, and the transfer of wealth in Latin
America but also leads to the reorganization of internal power relations
between civilian and military groups in the nations in which such programs
are implemented. It also promotes the criminalization of poverty and the repression of the social protest movements that result from deep holes in the social
fabric. The current official language, with its concerns about terrorism and
“narco-insurgency,” emerges in a context characterized by increasing violence.
As the Colombian case has shown and as is becoming evident in the
Mexican one, this leads to authoritarian systems with increasing military and
paramilitary power, human rights violations, and increased U.S. interference
under the guise of help, cooperation, or the defense of its interests and investments in the region. The United States has, in fact, considered open military
intervention in the case of Mexico; the briefing paper INSCOM SCG 90-01
considers an eventual deployment of U.S. troops if the Mexican government
should be in danger of being overthrown, threatening “economic and social
chaos” (Petrich, 1996). As Joseph W. Westphal, undersecretary of the army,
recently declared (only to withdraw his statement later), the possibility of a
direct U.S. intervention in Mexico remains, given narco-insurgency in the border area (Brooks, 2011).
The current economic, political, and security model implemented by the
United States establishes the conditions for indirect but substantial interference on behalf of U.S. interests and the interests of its Mexican associates. This
context does not require open intervention, and at the same time it helps
destabilize the nation, in which disorder (general chaos) has been latent for
years. Because Mexico and other Latin American nations tend to promote
policies that benefit the interests of certain internal and foreign power groups
(nations such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have alternative
approaches),1 their states are increasingly required to use force to ensure internal order, given the general unrest caused by such policies. This strategy is
complex and dangerous, since it links a multiplicity of apparently opposed
legal and illegal actors who nevertheless receive benefits in the form of increased
power or wealth. In the meantime, the exploitation of the people and of the
nations’ and the region’s resources deepens.
STABILIZATION-DESTABILIZATION AS
“THE NEW ALLIANCE OF THE AMERICAS”
In May 2008, before he became president, Barack Obama told Miami’s Latin
American community that a “new alliance of the Americas” was needed to
create new bonds between the United States and its neighbors, reinforcing
diplomacy and mechanisms for development assistance (Obama, 2008).
This proposed new alliance was to be centered on diplomacy, defense, and
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95
development and in fact revived some of the premises implemented during
the John F. Kennedy administration. This has been pointed out on numerous
occasions by Hillary Clinton (2010a; 2010b; and 2010c), who, arguing for a
new foreign policy based on “intelligent power,” has said that “a U.S. ambassador in 2010 is thus responsible not only for managing civilians from
the State Department and USAID but also for operating as the CEO of a
multiagency mission. . . . It is time to move beyond the past and to recognize
diplomacy and development as national security priorities and smart investments in the United States’ future stability” (2010c: 15, 24).
While the Obama administration intends to reinforce diplomatic relations
in response to the open militarization carried out by the George W. Bush government (2001–2009), this diplomatic agenda is still linked to security and
military power. In this sense, despite the change in discourse, the practice
remains the same. Jonas (1979: 139) has described the myth regarding U.S. aid
“to Latin America (and the world) . . . as a political weapon to achieve
American goals. As well as military and political intervention, [aid] has been
implemented to carry out US strategy. Economic aid has become an essential
instrument for US strategy.” In this context, the Colombia Plan and its successor, the Patriot Plan, as well as the Mérida Initiative, are not goals in themselves but tools for protecting U.S. and related interests. This process is part of
a complex and dangerous dynamic of stabilization-destabilization in which
participating Latin American governments play an essential role.
THE COLOMBIA PLAN AND THE MÉRIDA INITIATIVE:
COOPERATION, BUSINESS, AND TERRITORIAL CONTROL
From the beginning, the Colombia Plan focused on the “transformation” and
“modernization” of the Colombian armed and police forces in order to fight
the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas (Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia—FARC) and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National
Liberation Army—ELN) and maintain control of strategic territories. The Patriot
Plan set out new goals regarding the control of Colombian territory and
increased potential access to neighboring countries, placing 14,000–17,000
men in the jungle area, particularly in the southern (Ecuador) and eastern
(Venezuela) border regions. These rapid-deployment contingents are part of a
low-profile strategy promoted by the United States as part of what the Pentagon
calls a “new military architecture” (Delgado, 2010a). A free-trade agreement
between the United States and Colombia has been in the works since 2006 and
would allow for the deepening of (certainly asymmetrical) commercial relations
in a more secure environment for general investment.2
In Mexico, the “war against drugs” assumed a military character even before
Ronald Reagan issued the National Security Doctrine; by 1977, 10,000 soldiers
were stationed in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango. This
approach has become increasingly common, and it is not surprising that the
modernization of the armed forces contemplated by the Mérida Initiative is
intended to fight not just drug trafficking or organized crime but also “terrorism”
and “narco-insurgency.” However, this fact has been useful for covering the
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
dirty war—extrajudicial executions and paramilitary activities that target not
only participants in drug trafficking and other criminal organizations but also
the local population. The statements of the former Mexican foreign secretary
Jorge Castañeda are clear about this.3
The U.S. doctrine of counterinsurgency, especially in Latin America, was an
essential component of the National Security Doctrine of the 1960s. It defined
“insurgency” as “the “systematic use of violence to overthrow or undermine the
established political and social order” and excluded from it “military coups
d’état, endemic banditry, and spontaneous disorder” (U.S. Department of
State, 1964–1968).4 This definition is important because it allows the criminalization of social resistance and the occupation of high-priority territory. While
it cannot be said that the Mérida Initiative is designed to ensure social control,
it certainly contributes to it. The 23,000 deaths associated with antidrug operations in Mexico include innocent victims (Finnegan, 2010), and the nation is
becoming the world’s most dangerous for human rights activists, social movements, and journalists. Assassinations of opposition leaders fighting environmental degradation and natural-resource extraction are increasing.5
In this context modernization of the armed and security forces is important
because of the considerable amounts of public resources spent on defense and
security by Latin American countries as a result of initiatives such as the
Colombia Plan, the Patriot Plan, and the Mérida Initiative. In Mexico, the percentage increase in defense and security expenditures between 2000 and 2008
was 125 percent, while in Colombia it was 340 percent (see Table 1). It can
therefore be argued that one of the goals of the Colombia Plan, the Patriot
Plan, and the Mérida Initiative has been to generate this kind of spending by
each nation-state, where a lot of the money is destined for the purchase and
maintenance of weapons (the latter often much more expensive than the
weapons themselves). The amount assigned by the United States to these programs is estimated at some US$2.8 billion for the Colombia Plan/Patriot Plan
between 2002 and 2008 and US$1.3 billion since 2008 for the Mérida Initiative
(Seelke, Wyler, and Beittel, 2010).6 This is, of course, a very small sum compared with the aforementioned increase in public spending, but this presumed
cooperation allows the United States to impose a series of conditions both
through guidelines involving transfer of technologies and through special
courses taught by the U.S. Army involving foreign purchases for national armed
forces.7 Roberto Badillo Martínez, representative of the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional for the Mexican state of Veracruz, has reported that during President
Vicente Fox’s administration the U.S. government offered the Mexican army
P3-Orion maritime surveillance aircraft to detect drug trafficking operations.
The offer was rejected because it entailed the presence of a Pentagon official on each flight, a common condition in the transfer and operation of
“sophisticated” equipment provided by the United States (some of which was
considered obsolete by the Department of Defense) (Rodríguez, 2010: 288–289).
That said, although the amount of money devoted to the Mérida Initiative is
still minimal, plans include the sale of diverse equipment to practically all
Mexican government agencies (U.S. Congress, 2008).
The euphemisms at work in the weapons trade and the perpetuation of an
ad hoc “stable-unstable” context can be clearly seen in the words of Colombia’s
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97
TABLE 1
Defense and Security Spending in Mexico and Colombia (US$millions)
Year
Mexico
% GDP
Colombia
% GDP
1992
1995
1996
1998
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
2.2
2.9
3.5
3.5
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
–
3,252
4,228
4,429
4,445
4,429
–
0.62
0.76
0.74
0.68
0.60
2005
2006
2007
2008
4,638
5,254
6,395
7,478
Beginning of Merida Initiative
0.58
0.60
0.72
0.65
423
1,127
1,640
2,232
Beginning of Colombia Plan
2,744
3,060
3,807
3,765
4,026
4,992
Beginning of Patriot Plan
6,275
6,707
9,290
10,489
3.9
3.7
4.1
4.2
4.2
4.2
4.1
4.0
4.0
4.6
Sources: Gobierno de Colombia (2010) and Benítez Manaut, Rodríguez Sumano, and Rodríguez Luna
(2009: 64).
National Planning Department: “Security stimulates investment, and this, along
with social responsibility, allows us to overcome poverty and build equality”
(Escuela Superior de Guerra, 2009). From this point of view, a secure order is
“democratic” and capable of guaranteeing market stability (Loveman, 2006). It
is market security that matters, not the security of the people. The Mexican case
is similar, as the aim of creating a better army is simplistically reduced to more
resources.
Given all this, it can be argued that the U.S. government uses the Colombia
Plan/Patriot Plan and the Mérida Initiative to increase its capacity for intervention by means other than significant funding for these programs, all of which
help it maintain its low profile in the region. U.S. interference in internal and
8
security issues is most evident in the advising and training of personnel,
the
implementation of joint land, sea, and air operations, and the increase in the
number of contractors serving various areas in the effort to secure internal order
and control over prioritized territories. In this way the war against “narcoterrorism” becomes more complex and leads to internal instability due to the
presence of police, secret services, the army, air force and navy, private security,
paramilitary groups, and other foreign actors such as advisers, security and
antinarcotics attachés, and undercover-operations personnel. Armed groups
that do not answer directly to the state are, to a large extent, outside of the rule
of law. However, since 2007 there have been rumors that the U.S.-owned
Sycoleman Corporation was hiring U.S. mercenaries to operate a center for
aerial espionage in Veracruz, and in 2009 Mexican newspapers revealed that
“solutions” under consideration by the Mérida Initiative might be carried out
by Pentagon military contractors such as Blackwater, Jax Desmond, and Triple
Canopy (Milenio, 2009). This has not been officially corroborated.
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
CALDERÓN’S “WAR”: TOWARD A STATE OF EXCEPTION?
Judging from the Colombian experience, the new Mexican agenda suggests
the rearrangement or emergence of power groups close to the military and
security that are linked both to the government and to other power groups not
all of which are legal. The defense of the United States from Mexican territory
and its guaranteed investments in the country, combined with a war on narcoinsurgency, has enabled such groups to gain significant influence in Mexican
political life, especially with regard to the internal order. In particular, the
number of military personnel in local, state, and federal police forces has
increased considerably. Felipe Calderón’s questionable presidential win led to
a speedy and unprecedented rapprochement between the government and
the military as well as key alliances with the military high command and antidrug and low-intensity-warfare specialists.9
One of the most successful measures in the increasingly evident shift from
civil to military power was the handing over to the military of the operational
management of the Federal Police, which was consolidated in 2009 with the
(presidential) appointment of General Javier del Real de Magallanes10 as
undersecretary of strategy and police intelligence (an office that includes command of the Federal Police, part of the Ministry of Public Safety). As Rodríguez
(2010: 54) points out, this means that the military is in direct control not only
of the ministry’s anticrime operations but also of its activities alongside other
federal bureaus and state and municipal governments across the nation. With
Del Real de Magallanes in this post, the military high command now has
nearly 83,000 men assigned to security tasks. Military control of the ministry
is noticeable. Almost half of the ministry’s 2009 budget went to the Federal
Police, as did 75 percent of its available posts (Rodríguez, 2010: 54). Furthermore,
in about two-thirds of the nation’s states retired generals (such as Sergio
López Esquer in Veracruz and Eugenio Hidalgo Eddy in Aguascalientes) are
in charge of state and municipal offices of public safety (Rodríguez, 2010).
The situation grows more complex when we take into account Calderón’s
sending to the Congress an initiative to reform the National Security Law in
April 2009. This initiative would grant the president the power to declare a
“threat to internal security” and consequently deploy the armed forces without congressional authorization. It would also increase the army’s power and
authority over intelligence operations beyond state and local security forces.
The proposal is currently frozen in the legislative network, but there is pressure to get it approved in 2011. Its passage would endanger not only the federal pact but also the preservation of human rights. It would open up the
possibility of social unrest’s being treated the same as organized crime, threatening the potential suspension of constitutional rights at any time.
This is more than a remote possibility, since it has already been discussed
among power elites—and not just in Mexico. On October 19, 2009, Director of
National Intelligence Dennis Blair and Mexican Defense Minister Guillermo
Galván Galván bemoaned the lack of a legal basis for the domestic deployment of soldiers in the fight against drug trafficking (Embassy Mexico, 2009b).
Galván went on to point to the Constitution’s Article 29, which might allow
the president to declare a state of exception for specific areas in crisis, as a
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99
positive thing, giving the army a wider range for legal maneuvering (Embassy
Mexico, 2009b). If we are to believe it is genuine, a leaked communiqué from
the U.S. embassy casually describes a hypothetical scenario in Ciudad Juárez11
in which Galván “envisions a potentially broader role for the military (at the
expense, perhaps, of cooperation with other institutions)” (Embassy Mexico,
2009b). Given that a state of exception would have to be approved by the
Congress, the U.S. embassy in Mexico suggests supporting negotiation of a
reform of the National Security Law and does not reject the possibility of the
declaration of a state of exception despite its political cost.
Considering such “binational dialogue,” the already delicate nature of the
issue is compounded by cooperation initiatives involving security and the fight
against drug trafficking in these two nations because, by definition, “assisting
militaries to address illicit drug production and trafficking is encouraging
them to take on an internal security role” (Withers, Santos, and Isacson, 2010:
18–19). This could entail increased covert U.S. interference in Mexico with
regard to the design, implementation, and management of the country’s internal security—a very serious matter because in some cases paramilitary groups
are directly or indirectly linked to U.S. military training and, as the Colombian
case demonstrates, with the local power groups. The Clinton administration
promoted certain military aid programs to counteract the first wave of cartels
and drug traffickers in Mexico, including an ambitious training program
directed at the Mexican special air force at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare
Center and School at Fort Bragg. Some of these trainees are now thought to
have become members of the Zetas, one of the most feared criminal organizations in the country (Withers, Santos, and Isacson, 2010: 19–20).
The Mexican case is hardly exceptional in Latin America. According to the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in 2001 three out of four
Latin American countries receiving U.S. military and intelligence assistance
had serious human rights violations (Center for Public Integrity, 2001). It is no
accident that, according to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission,
complaints against soldiers have increased 500 percent; in 2009 alone, some
1,800 complaints were registered, most of them from the states in which most
of the antidrug army contingents are stationed (Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa,
Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Michoacán).
CONTINUITIES IN THE REGIONALIZATION OF THE WAR
ON NARCO-TERRORISM AND THE MILITARIZATION OF
INTERNAL ORDER IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
From the beginning, one of the main goals of the Colombia Plan was “to prevent the flow of illegal drugs to the United States, as well as helping Colombia
in the promotion of peace and economic development because that would
contribute to the security of the Andean region” (Clinton, 2000). This regionalization was evident in the way the Colombia Plan and the Patriot Plan were
implemented and the creation, in 2005, of the Andean Regional Initiative, all
based on the idea of avoiding a potential domino effect with regard to drug
trafficking (Pizarro and Gaitán, 2006: 67). The Andean Regional Initiative’s
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
main objective is the control of the border areas not only of Colombia and its
neighbors—particularly Venezuela (one of the United States’ main oil providers and ruled by a government that clearly opposes the war on narco-terrorism)—but also of the other South American countries. This is not a mere result
of U.S. imposition. Instead, it is the Colombian elite, acting as the pawn of the
Northern power, that has allowed such interference, which has led to serious
disagreements with neighbors and the spread of conflict across the region
(Palomo, 2010). The regionalization of the war against narco-terrorism has
taken place under pressure from the United States, which has sought to maintain bilateral economic and security relations in order to neutralize the possibility of a genuinely multilateral agenda (Bonilla, 2006). U.S. military
presence on the borders of South American nations has been possible through
this type of agreement, a setup that is reminiscent of certain national security
strategies used in the 1960s and 1970s during the war on “insurgencies” across
Latin American borders (Calloni, 2007).12
During his April 2010 visit to South America, U.S. Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates recommended that Peruvian forces “restructure and focus on
internal challenges” (quoted in Salas, 2010). As a result, the military can now
“use force when facing a hostile group if a state of emergency has been
declared and also help police reestablish order during upsurges of violence or
aid in antidrug or antiterrorist operations . . . when the police do not have the
capacity to ensure internal order” (Perú 21, 2010).13 Having formalized the
possibility of such a “state of exception” (Agamben, 2004), the Peruvian president also accepted a U.S. offer to train Peruvian forces while sidelining any
discussion regarding interventionism, sovereignty, and self-determination.
“In all human and universal issues I do not make a point of sovereignties and
patriotism,” he said. “If the United States wants to train troops here, since they
have helicopters and satellite and communications trainers here, they are
welcome” (AFP, 2010).
Peru has signed a North American Free Trade Agreement–like agreement
with the United States that contemplates the privatization of the nation’s main
assets, leading to the dismantling of domestic industry and the internal market (Saxe-Fernández, 2002). The primary sources of interest in Peru are oil and
minerals. This is why there is pressure to open up 72 percent of the Peruvian
Amazon to concessions involving prospecting and extraction. The United
States has interests across the whole Amazonian area, where around 180 oil/
gas concession blocks covering some 688,000 square kilometers are already in
the hands of 35 multinationals (Finer et al., 2008). Peru alone has 48 active
blocks and 16 awaiting the opening of bidding. Of these 64 all but 8 were put
up for auction in 2004, just as the negotiations for bilateral free-trade agreements between the United States and the Andean region began (Peru and
Colombia signed). The social resistance to this development, which is construed as threatening to the internal order (e.g., the deplorable Bagua massacre),
reflects the fact that 20 of these blocks overlap with 11 protected areas and
58 involve indigenous lands (Finer et al., 2008).
Hillary Clinton told the Organization of American States in June 2010 that
the fundamental U.S. concerns regarding Latin America involved drug trafficking, gang prevention, and response to natural disasters. The territorialization
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101
of the internal security agenda plays a fundamental role in this inasmuch as it
paves the way for the operation of the “invisible hand of the market” and is
being spatially expanded through the regionalization of the war on narcoterrorism. The U.S. government’s comparison between Mexico and Colombia
is not haphazard: “These drug cartels are showing more and more indices of
insurgencies. . . . Mexico is looking more and more like Colombia looked
20 years ago, where the narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of the
country. . . . We need a much more vigorous U.S. presence in Central America
to help countries improve their law enforcement capacity to fight drug traffickers” (Clinton, quoted in Booth, 2010). Concrete actions are being taken to
fulfill this need. The U.S. Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, for example, organized a workshop to advise Honduran police and army forces, as well
as Congress members and government officials, on the planning of national
security strategies (El Heraldo, 2010). The seriousness of U.S. interference in
internal affairs through this type of “advising” is compounded by the fact that
the Honduran government receiving these internal security “suggestions” is
the product of a technical coup d’état against a constitutional president.
Another example is the case of El Salvador, which passed an anti-gang law in
September 2010 to justify the presence of the troops for maintaining internal
order in terms of the “low-intensity violence” perpetrated by organized crime
(Diálogo, 2010).
HEMISPHERIC AND INTERNAL SECURITY,
PLATFORMS FOR THE CONTROL OF NATURAL RESOURCES,
AND THE REALIZATION AND TRANSFER OF SURPLUS VALUE
As far as the central nations are concerned, Latin America is a strategic
reserve of natural resources. This is particularly important for the United States
given the increasing dependence on raw materials and energy (Delgado, 2010b)
that was already clear by the mid-twentieth century. As then–Undersecretary of
State William Clayton put it, “Due to the serious consumption of our natural
resources during the war, we must now import many minerals and metals.. . .
We are now clearly net importers of practically all important minerals and
metals excepting two: coal and oil. And who knows for how long we may continue without importing oil” (Kolko, 1972: 13).
The link between security/stability and access to natural resources was evidenced during the first decades of the cold war, when one of the key goals in
the U.S. security agenda was access to Latin America’s “strategic resources.”
The internal security of the countries that possessed these resources was
instrumental to this goal because exports had to be placed on the international
market: “The principal strategic military objectives of the United States in
Latin America are: a) the continued and increasing production and delivery of
essential strategic materials; b) while allowing scope for normal political change,
the maintenance within each nation of political stability and of internal security to ensure protection of the installations upon which the production and
delivery of strategic materials depend” (U.S. Department of State, 1949–1950).
Years later, Henry Kissinger (1974) would add, “The world is increasingly
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
dependent on mineral supplies from developing countries, and if rapid population growth frustrates their prospects for economic development and social
progress, the resulting instability may undermine the conditions for expanded
output and sustained flows of such resources.”
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this has become a particularly
serious issue, especially since the United States’ resource consumption has
increased. This is why the U.S. political-economic agenda has to be tied to its
diplomatic and military one. Independent analysis of these two agendas limits
a comprehensive assessment of the complex expansionist strategy of U.S.
monopoly capitalism and its effects on Latin America. U.S. dependence on oil
imports increased from 28 percent in 1973 to almost 55 percent in 2003 and is
expected to reach 70 percent in 2025. According to 2007 data, the country’s
main providers are Canada (19 percent), Saudi Arabia (15 percent), Mexico
(14 percent), and Venezuela (12 percent). Between them, Canada and Latin
America provide 50 percent of the nearly 10 million daily barrels imported by
the United States. An idea of the oil transfer rate is provided by Mexico, which
has transferred over 80 percent of the oil it exports to the United States.
It is the same with minerals. The United States requires 25,000 pounds
(11.3 metric tons) of new (nonrecycled) nonfuel minerals per capita annually,
and the demand is growing. In 1980 the United States was completely dependent on imports for 4 minerals, and for 16 others it imported from 30 percent
to 99 percent of its needs. By 1992 these figures were 8 and 22 respectively, and
by 2009 they were 19 and 26.14 Because of this the Pentagon has declared a
need for a national stockpile strategy. This concern was already present in the
1979 Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act, which stated that “apart
from U.S. materials suppliers, only Canadian and Mexican suppliers could be
considered reliable” (CANDS, 2008: 28). Here the securitization or geopoliticization of neighbors’ resources is a matter of U.S. law. (In 1991, the language was changed to include Caribbean nations as reliable providers [CANDS,
2008: 29].)
Latin America possesses a number of minerals that are very important to
the global economy. Forty-six percent of the world’s bauxite reserves (estimated at between 55 and 75 billion metric tons) are found in South America
(24 percent) and the Caribbean (22 percent). Chile has nearly 360 million metric tons of copper, between 35 percent and 40 percent of the world’s zinc
reserve base; Peru and Mexico have 120 million and 40 million metric tons,
respectively. An estimated 35 percent of the zinc world’s reserve base15 (168
million metric tons) is on the American continent. Cuba has the largest nickel
reserve base in the continent and the world, with some 23 million metric tons.
It is followed by Canada, with 15 million tons, Brazil, with 8.3 million tons,
and Colombia, with 2.7 million tons (Delgado, 2010b).
The growing transfer of resources is evidenced by 2010 U.S. Department of
Commerce data listing oil, gas, and minerals as the country’s three major
imports (Yorgason and Farello, 2010). Thus, the nation’s greatest trade deficit
is with its main raw-material and manufacture suppliers—China, the OPEC
nations, and Mexico. Latin America is not only a strategic reserve of natural
resources; it also plays a key role in the realization and transfer of surplus
value through direct foreign investment, technology transfers, debt payments,
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and the “security” business. While foreign debt continues to weigh on Latin
America (Toussaint and Millet, 2009),16 the United States and other core countries maintain important capital flows for speculation and acquisition of the
main assets of Latin American nations, from oil and mineral deposits to ports
and airports, roads, trains, etc. This is why the United States has a growing
rate of income receipts from U.S.-owned assets abroad.
By the end of the first quarter of 2010, U.S.-owned assets abroad had increased
to some US$300 billion while U.S. direct investment abroad rose to US$105
billion (Yorgason and Farello, 2010: 3–4). Latin America is one of the world’s
main recipients of the world’s direct foreign investment and an important
market for the manufactured goods of the core countries, which benefit from
bilateral free-trade agreements. In practice, this has resulted in an expansion
of prevailing asymmetries and an increase in the transfer of Latin American
resources and surpluses. The region receives 25 percent of the direct foreign
investment destined for peripheral countries, an average of more than US$20
billion per year from 1991 to 1995, some US$91 billion in 2004–2008, and a
record US$128 billion in 2009 alone (CEPAL, 2009: 26). This investment generates an overwhelming surplus transfer. In 2007, the sales of Latin America’s
60 largest nonfinancial corporations were almost four times the total direct
foreign investment for that year (América Economía, 2010). The dispossession
and exploitation of the Latin American people and environment are on the
rise, and it is the “need” to guarantee this state of things that underlies the U.S.
military and security agenda and that of other core countries.
CONCLUSIONS
The geo-economic interests of the United States are linked to geopolitical
ones, and in order to preserve them it is necessary to maintain the current (and
historical) scenario of dependency. These interests have the support of local
elites that, to an extent, guarantee a beneficial internal situation (hence the
importance of the internal order). Internal and external control is needed to
neutralize potential independent Latin American alternatives (e.g., the Alianza
Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América [Bolivarian Alliance for the
Peoples of Our America—ALBA]) and maintain a “balance” between stability
and instability. Military spending is highly profitable both in maintaining
hegemony and in doing business through the sale of equipment, weapons, and
technical and training services to the armies of friendly governments. The armies
themselves are acquiring more and more power with regard to the maintenance of internal order, which has been profoundly and structurally altered
because of the sui generis Latin American capitalism that fosters criminal
activity on the one hand and social movements on the other. All of this is taking place in an increasingly violent context characterized by human rights
violations and the use of fear as a mechanism of social atomization—a process
that, history shows, can lead to fascism (see Neumann, 1943; Reich, 1980).
What is more, and in relation to the above, the United States is training soldiers in Colombia to “fight” in Afghanistan (Weinberg, 2007). Both the CIA and
the U.S. Army Special Operation Forces are training Afghan paramilitaries
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under the supervision/approval of NATO, and according to U.S. officials they
have “contributed to stability and increased security” (Dozier and Goldman,
2010). This should be seen as a stabilization-destabilization scheme that operates not only at the national-regional level in Latin America but also at a
worldwide level in that it is a U.S. strategy for ensuring “the New American
Century” (New American Century Project, 1997). It is because of all this, in
our opinion, that the Obama administration has maintained important continuities in relation to policies of previous governments while couching them in
a discourse that suggests a contrary position, one that stresses the importance
of dialogue and peaceful interaction. This discursive stance has been mostly
disseminated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and it has allowed the
United States to continue and, under a low-profile strategy, even deepen solutions meant to stabilize-destabilize key regions through tactics such as securitization, militarization, and paramilitarization. The implications are widening,
especially if we consider the consequences of the internal security doctrine for
Latin America and the periphery in general. In short, we are confronting a
process that obstructs but at the same time forces us to construct peaceful and
alternative social national projects. These should be genuinely independent
and socially and environmentally fair and harmonious on a national as well
as a regional scale. The social wealth exists, and we hope that the strength and
capacity to articulate it can grow.
NOTES
1. The Evo Morales (Bolivia, 2006–2010), Hugo Chávez (Venezuela, 1999–2007, 2007–2013),
and Rafael Correa (Ecuador, 2007–2011) administrations broke with the neoliberal pattern established in Latin America in the 1990s and led to political discourses that sought to increase state
participation in resource management and redistribution of wealth and to important institutional reforms focused on historically excluded majorities. There are substantial differences in
the way these changes have been implemented in each country (literacy programs, preventive
health care, school lunches, etc.), but the common thread is that the base resources come from
the extraction and export of hydrocarbons. The Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra
América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—ALBA) includes Cuba and seeks
to promote a different type of regional integration based on people’s needs and exchange rather
than free trade. These recent experiences join Cuban resistance in defiance of U.S. expansionism.
These governments promote people’s right to self-determination and unity and solidarity across
Latin America, opposing U.S. direct and indirect intervention. The Unión de Naciones
Suramericanas (Union of South American Nations—UNASUR), for example, is an alternative to
the Organization of American States in the field of security.
2. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, exports could increase to US$12
billion (Reuters, 2011).
3. During the 2009 International Drug Policy Reform Conference held in New Mexico,
Castañeda said that “Mexico is seeing an increased amount of what appear to be executions
between cartels when, in truth, these executions have been carried out by the army, which
blames them on the drug dealers. . . . In Mexico we have our own ‘false positives’ [recruitment
of people who are murdered by the army and passed off as guerrilla combat casualties]. After
all, a dead narco does not mean much” (Rodríguez, 2010: 112–113).
4. This was the definition of “insurgency” during the first years of the Alliance for Progress
implemented by the Kennedy administration as a “change” in U.S./Latin American relations.
5. According to the Mexico’s Network for the Defense of Human Rights, on February 8, 2011,
Malena and Elías Reyes, siblings of the activist Josefina Reyes, were forcibly “disappeared”
(levantados). Reyes had received threats because of her antimilitarization activities, and Rubén
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105
Reyes, another sibling, had been murdered some months earlier. http://www.reddh.org. Days
later, their dead bodies were discovered. Mariano Abarca Roblero was assassinated on
November 27, 2009, in Chicomuselo, Chiapas, in relation to mining activities. Alberta Cariño
Trujillo (alias Bety Cariño) and the Finnish activist Jyri Jaakkola were murdered on April 27,
2010, in Copala, Oaxaca, by the paramilitary group UBISORT; both were human rights activists,
and Cariño opposed mining activities in the state.
6. The amounts are US$400 million for 2008, US$720 million for 2009, and US$210 million
for early 2010 (Seelke, Wyler, and Beittel, 2010: 6).
7. Brigadier General Juan Manuel Castillo Segura was among the Mexican army personnel
who took this course in January 2003 (Rodríguez, 2010: 74).
8. The U.S. embassy in Mexico City reports a total of 5,000 Mexican soldiers, including members of the special forces, who have been trained under U.S. financing. The yearly numbers of
trainees between 1996 and August 2009 have been 440, 236, 693, 1,271, 282, 225, 207, 162, 185, 187,
177, and 517. While the embassy acknowledges only that one of its former trainees became a
member of the Zetas (the infantry lieutenant Rogelio López Villafana), it does not refute the possibility that others may have also joined the ranks of organized crime (Embassy Mexico, 2009a).
9. Among them Division General Carlos Demetrio Gaytán Ochoa.
10. A military attaché in Central America toward the end of the 1970s and during early 1980,
he also served as an aide in the military and as aerial attaché in Guatemala and Honduras from
1977 to 1979, adjunct military and aerial attaché in El Salvador and Costa Rica from 1983 to 1984,
and military and aerial attaché in Nicaragua from 1984 to 1985 (Rodríguez, 2010: 56)
11. The document states that “the GOM [Government of Mexico] could elect to apply the
article in a zone of perceived crisis, such as Ciudad Juarez, for the period of one year. The decree
could potentially suspend rights guaranteed in the first chapter of the Constitution, including
freedom of expression, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of passage, or some
tenets of legal due process.”
12. One of the most “successful” transborder operations, Operation Condor, took place during the 1970s. The purpose was to annihilate “subversion” through the arrest, torture, and forced
disappearance of “insurgents” and “subversives” across South America. It was a joint operation
carried out by the South American national armies aided by the CIA (McSherry, 2005).
13. Gates’s suggestion unfortunately recalls U.S. military recommendations to Latin American
forces during the Alliance for Progress: “Existing military policies and programs for the security
of Latin America will have to be modified to meet the shifting nature of the security problem,
giving priority to the internal security threat and new emphasis to military programs contributing to economic development and the strengthening of representative government, while at the
same time, maintaining an effective strategy to secure the Western Hemisphere against external
attack” (U.S. Department of State, 1961–1963).
14. Of the 63 minerals on which the United States depends, 45 are found in the Western
Hemisphere: 28 come from Latin America and the rest from Canada. These are (in descending
order of percentage of imports and U.S. domestic consumption): bauxite and alumina (Jamaica
and Brazil), fluorspan and graphite (Mexico), mica (sheet) (Brazil), niobium (Brazil), strontium
(Mexico), tantalum (Brazil), antimony and bismuth (Mexico), tin (Peru and Bolivia), rhenium
(Chile), stone (Brazil), zinc (Peru and Mexico), silver (Mexico, Peru, and Chile), tungsten
(Bolivia), ammonia or nitrogen (fixed) (Trinidad and Tobago), silicon (ferrosilicon) (Venezuela),
copper (Chile, Peru, and México), gypsum (Mexico), salt (Chile, Mexico, and Peru), aluminum
(Brazil and Venezuela), iron and steel (Mexico), sulfur (Mexico and Venezuela), pumice and lime
(Mexico), and crushed stone (Mexico and Bahamas) (Delgado, 2010b).
15. The global estimate is up to 1.9 billion tons, including deposits yet to be discovered.
16. Between 1982 and 1996, Latin America had paid US$739 billion, more than twice what it
owed in 1992 (around US$300 billion), but it still owed US$607 billion. From 1985 to 2004 its debt
increased from US$672 billion to US$1,459 billion.
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