George W. Bush, soon to become the 43rd president of the United States, will take over his office bogged down by history.
Just as the administration of Bush senior bequeathed Bill Clinton a difficult American military mission in Somalia, the Clinton administration is leaving behind the commitment of American special forces in Colombia to the new Bush administration.
In addition, Bush may find it difficult to explain the embarrassing role played by the CIA in the Pinochet affair in Chile.
In Mexico, the newly inaugurated Fox administration has a leftist foreign secretary, Jorge Castenada. Castenada who was a main opponent of NAFTA in the 1990s, may also challenge Bush's foreign policy in Latin America.
Yet a potentially bigger challenge in the US' backyard may come from Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.
Bush may have felt uncomfortable about Chavez before was even elected.
The Washington Post predicted recently that the new president would need a well-thought-out strategy toward Chavez (Nov. 2, 2000, A p28). According to the latest issue of the Inter-American Dialogue report, Chavez may constitute "the most difficult test" of US policy. While the US should maintain a cordial relationship with his government, it "should not hesitate to oppose Venezuelan government actions that violate [international] norms and US interests, but the US has nothing to gain from aggressively confronting Venezuela. This will likely provoke [President Chavez] to further challenge US policy" (Washington Post, Dec. 14, 2000).
That's so not only because Chavez is Latin America's new strongman, but also because he controls the biggest oil reserves outside the Middle East. In fact, the US imports more petroleum from Venezuela than from all Persian Gulf states combined. What's worse, it seems that Chavez intends to spread his brand of leftist anti-Americanism throughout the region.
According to Vilma Petrash, a sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela, Chavez "has been clever enough to present himself as heir-apparent to Simon Bolivar, and as the new Latin liberator (Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 2, 1999, 1).
In fact, at age 23, along with five other soldiers, he established clandestinely a movement that he called "the Bolivarian People's Army of Venezuela."
He has never hidden his aspirations to have influence well beyond Venezuela's borders. Chavez wants to realize the dream of uniting Latin America, or, at least, countries in the northern Andes held by Simon Bolivar previously.
That is why he objects to a world order dominated by the US. According to Richard Gott, author of In the Shadow of the Liberator: The Impact of Hugo Chavez on Venezuela and Latin America, Chavez is a pragmatic utopian. His aim is to destroy the Washington-inspired, neo-liberal economic "fundamentalism" that has entrapped Latin America in a US-dominated system of dependence (Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2000, p119).
Chavez has been conducting the kind of anti-American foreign policy that Che Guevara might have smiled at.
In his 10-nation tour after the presidential campaign, he traveled to Iraq to visit Saddam Hussein on Aug. 10 from Iran -- so as to avoid breaking an international air embargo.
Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Chavez immediately asserted Venezuela's right to pursue its own foreign relations agenda.
In late September, he turned the OPEC summit into a platform to sound off against the West.
Evidence shows that he has flirted with the leftist opposition in Bolivia and with Colombia's drug-peddling guerrillas.
Meanwhile, he has used oil to buy influence in Central America and the Caribbean. Recently, he signed a deal to supply 12 countries there with cheap energy. Chavez became a challenge for Washington's foreign policy also because of his close friendship with Fidel Castro. Chavez is an admirer of Castro -- who sees "Chavez as a possible successor to his role as a Latin America's most visible leftist" Los Angeles Times, Oct. 30, 2000).
On Oct. 29, in a marathon radio program that ranged from baseball to an off-key presidential duet, Castro and Chavez defended the friendship between their governments and promised to jointly represent Latin American interests abroad.
The two leaders denounced the Spanish colonialism of the past and a present colonialism they attribute to a "unipolar" world economy dominated by the US. They demanded that Latin Americans work together to confront that order.
"I have confidence in you," Castro told Chavez, "at this moment, in this country, you have no substitute." Castro ended a five-day visit to Venezuela on Oct. 30 with the signing of an oil assistance pact.
Chavez follows in the tradition of the great Latin American radical nationalists: Juan Peron of Argentina, Juan Velasco of Peru, Omar Torrijos of Panama, and, of course, the ever-resilient Fidel Castro.
As an army lieutenant colonel, Chavez led an unsuccessful 1992 coup attempt and was imprisoned for two years. Since his election in 1998, he has deepened ties with Cuba and overhauled political institutions in this oil-rich but poverty-stricken country of 24 million people. His leftist coalition closed down the Congress and Supreme Court, abolished the 1961 constitution, and renamed the country the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela." Today, two traditional political parties that had ruled Venezuela for 40 years, Democratic Action and the Christian Democrats, are marginal actors with little presence outside state and local levels.
Many in Washington are indeed certain that Bush will be a weak president because of the disputed election.
Chavez, along with his ideological mentor, Castro, may so poison Bush's chalice that Democrats are already looking toward retaking Congress in the midterm election of 2002.
If Latin America's democracies fail and its economies collapse, popular frustration will create openings for Chavez and his imitators. Thus, the US needs to constrain its unilateral impulses and make constructive and creative policy aiming at reinforcing democracy and the rule of law in Latin America and the Caribbean, enhancing the region's economic growth and social equity, and accelerating regional integration.
Antonio Hsiang (向駿) is an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute for Latin American Studies, Tamkang University.
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