"You Scare Us:

Bush Is Giving Latin America the Willies"

Carlos Fuentes, Los Angeles Times

[Carlos Fuentes is the author, most recently, of "Contra
Bush," which will be translated into seven languages.]

LONDON — The United States is strong. Latin America is
weak. This is the basic truth that shapes their
relationship. There is no irrational animosity toward
the U.S. in Latin America. There is a measure of
suspicion balanced by enormous admiration for the
culture of Herman Melville to Walt Whitman to William
Faulkner, of Hollywood and jazz, of Eugene O'Neill to
Arthur Miller. Nor is there envy of the United States.
Latin America is deeply aware of its cultural values.
Our personality is not assailed by gringo fashions. We
absorb and adapt to the cultures of the world,
including that of the U.S.The problem lies in foreign policy. Too often, the
United States is seen as a benevolent Dr. Jekyll at
home and a malevolent Mr. Hyde abroad. The wars against
Mexico (1846-1848) and Spain (1898), Teddy Roosevelt's
"big stick," Woodrow Wilson's well-intentioned but
counterproductive intervention in Mexico during its
revolution, incessant and arrogant meddling in Central
America. Not an easy menu to swallow. One moment shines
through, however: Franklin Roosevelt's "good neighbor"
policy, his decision to win Latin American support
during World War II through negotiation rather than
confrontation.

And after that war, a limpid admiration for the
Roosevelt and Truman policies of international
cooperation through organizations based on the rule of
law. "We all have to recognize," Harry Truman said in
1945, "[that] no matter how great our
strength — we must deny ourselves the license to
do always as we please." The United Nations was a
creation of U.S. diplomacy. Its principles were clearly
stated and universally accepted. Even when the U.S.
violated them in practice during the Cold War, the
principles were never renounced.

This brings us to what Latin Americans find so shocking
about the Bush administration. Instead of
multilateralism, unilateralism. Instead of diplomacy
and negotiation and a search for consensus and the use
of force only as a last resort, the barbaric principle
of preventive war.

U.S. support for brutal dictatorships in Chile,
Argentina and Uruguay in the name of anti-communism
caused great suffering. The overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz
in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile. The Central
American wars in the 1980s and their high body counts.
These Latin American grievances were balanced by a
perception that the U.S. never formally renounced the
principles of international law and the hope that it
would reaffirm them again.

What is alarming about the Bush administration is its
formal denunciation of the basic rules of international
intercourse. With us or against us, President Bush
declares starkly and simplistically. The U.S. acts
according to its own interests, "not those of an
illusory international community," asserts national
security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Is it strange that many Latin Americans should see in
these statements an aggressive denial of the only
leverage we have in dealing with Washington: the rule
of law, the balance obtained through diplomatic
negotiation?

Not only out of self-interest, but also as participants
in the global society, many Latin Americans worry that
U.S. unilateralism is incompatible with the
multilateralist nature of globalization. This was the
warning issued by former Mexican President Ernesto
Zedillo at last year's Harvard commencement. Add
Chilean President Ricardo Lagos' perception that the
world community is postponing the urgent global agenda
of creating an adequate social-program fund,
strengthening human rights and overcoming the chasms
between haves and have-nots. And top it with former
Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's plea to
the French National Assembly: Fight vigorously against
terror but also against the underlying causes of
terror: hunger, ignorance, inequality and distorted
perceptions of other cultures.

Fortunately, these composite voices of Latin American
statesmen found a powerful echo in North America, when
former President Clinton warned that you do not defeat
terror if you do not figure out how to work with an
interdependent world.

These voices, these warnings, these hopes have been
disowned by the Bush administration. "With us or
against us," Bush has said. It hardly matters.
Offensive as these words are to the international
community, I believe that Latin America, in particular,
will not forget the outright deceptions of the Bush
era: the shifting rationales for an unnecessary war and
a disastrous postwar occupation; the absence of weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq; the targeting of one
tyrant (Saddam Hussein) among many (Kim Jong II, Robert
Mugabe, Moammar Kadafi); the utter lack of foresight
that an occupied Iraq would rise against the foreign
occupiers and try to fashion its own political future
out of its complex religious, tribal and cultural
realities, all of them ignored by the neoconservatives
in Washington.

But while not forgetting these mistakes and deceptions,
we would put the accent on the restoration of the rule
of law, the thrust of cooperation and the attention due
to 3 billion human beings living in poverty, ignorance
and illness. When Bush and his bellicose minions are
gone, these problems will still be around. We in Latin
America should try to bring them forward as the real
agenda for this troubling century.