{"id":1150,"date":"2006-05-11T14:23:30","date_gmt":"2006-05-11T22:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/peru\/2006\/05\/11\/boston-globe-anger-toward-us-boosts-latin-americas-leftist-leaders\/"},"modified":"2006-05-11T14:23:30","modified_gmt":"2006-05-11T22:23:30","slug":"boston-globe-anger-toward-us-boosts-latin-americas-leftist-leaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/peru\/2006\/05\/11\/boston-globe-anger-toward-us-boosts-latin-americas-leftist-leaders\/","title":{"rendered":"Boston Globe: Anger toward US boosts Latin America’s leftist leaders"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nAnger toward US boosts Latin America’s leftist leaders
\nDelahunt says dialogue needed
\nBy Susan Milligan, Globe Staff
\nThe Boston Globe<\/a>
\nMay 11, 2006<\/strong>
\nCARACAS — The graffiti splashed all over the Venezuelan capital leaves no room for misinterpretation of people’s view of the US president: ”Bush: Killer.”
\nThat slogan, spray-painted on numerous buildings in Caracas, reflects a sentiment that is spreading throughout Latin America. The anger is a boon for the growing ranks of leftist leaders in the region. Some are challenging US government policies on immigration and Iraq, while others, openly hostile to the Bush administration, are exploiting long-simmering resentment of American dominance to solidify their own power.
\nDemocrats and Latin America specialists now are pushing the Bush administration to engage Latin Americans of all political stripes much more actively. In one such initiative, Representative William D. Delahunt, Democrat of Quincy, is planning to bring Venezuelan President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez’s supporters and opposition leaders to Nantucket again this summer to get the two sides talking.
\nDelahunt helped foster the first round of ”Grupo de Boston” (Boston Group) meetings for Venezuelan politicians in 2002 and 2003, but the project foundered when the opposition boycotted Venezuelan elections last year.
\nThe revived Nantucket gathering this summer is meant to get the two sides ”out of the sandbox” of the heated Venezuelan political environment and into a secluded arena where they can combine whale-watching and baseball with serious political discussions, said Delahunt, who helped spearhead the effort in 2002. Several officials have already indicated a willingness to attend.
\n”Particularly as these relationships [between the United States and Venezuela] deteriorate, it’s one of the remaining avenues of dialogue left, other than simply the strident rhetoric that emanates from Washington and Caracas,” he said.
\nThe Bush administration says that it is committed to maintaining relationships with all democratically elected Latin American leaders, and that it is trying to improve relations through trade initiatives, cultural and educational exchanges, humanitarian efforts, and support for human rights and democracy in the region.
\nBut those efforts have been frustrated in part by anti-American rhetoric and actions in the region, current and former US officials said. The US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, was recently pelted with eggs and fruit when he tried to deliver a gift of baseball equipment to poor children in Caracas, an episode US officials believe was orchestrated by the Ch\u00e1vez government.
\nSome critics say the Bush administration has ignored Latin America, particularly since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, when attention shifted to the Middle East. And instead of doing more to ease the poverty and underdevelopment that have given rise to populist leaders in the region, some Latin America specialists say, the administration has become obsessed with personalities like Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and those who cooperate with him, such as Ch\u00e1vez, a frequent and bellicose Bush critic.
\n”The problem with US policy is that the only thing that has any oxygen left is going after Ch\u00e1vez,” said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based group that studies Latin America policy. ”Ch\u00e1vez didn’t invent the problems of anti-Americanism . . . and going after Ch\u00e1vez won’t help. It probably gives him a bigger platform that ever,” Hakim said.
\nThe Venezuelan president was elected democratically, but is criticized by Human Rights Watch, a prominent rights group, for consolidating power and stacking the judiciary with sympathetic judges. Ch\u00e1vez also flaunts his close ties to Castro.
\nThe Bush administration ”sees everything through the prism of Castro,” said Delahunt, who is becoming the Democrats’ leading voice on Latin America and who could take over the House subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere if the Democrats gain control of the House this fall. Delahunt, whom Ch\u00e1vez described in a recent interview with the Globe as ”an excellent friend,” twice helped negotiate deals to bring cut-rate Venezuelan heating oil to Massachusetts and has spent extensive time in Haiti, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela.
\nBut while the unelected Castro remains the United States’ major irritant in Latin America, voters in the rest of the region are putting left-leaning presidents into power through open and democratic elections. Ch\u00e1vez, who frequently needles the Bush administration by calling the president a ”crazy man” and ”Mr. Dangerous,” heads into a December reelection campaign with approval ratings of 70 percent to 82 percent, according to recent polls by Latin American organizations.
\nBolivia’s newly elected president, Evo Morales, recently nationalized the country’s gas industry. The US government has met with Bolivian representatives to express concern but has not taken other action.
\nIn Peru, two leftist candidates — one of whom has talked about nationalizing local industries — are in a runoff election for president next month.
\nCh\u00e1vez says he has a personal gripe with the Bush administration, which he accuses of assisting a failed coup against the Venezuelan leader in 2002, a charge the State Department denies. ”Finally, my Indian blood just boiled. I said, from now on, I decided that the US government, for the most part, is the aggressor against Venezuela,” Ch\u00e1vez said in an interview in Caracas. And he said he is not alone in that view.
\n”Our people started to see the truth about the matter. That is why you see the graffiti against Bush — not just in Caracas, in the whole world. There is a global protest against Bush,” Ch\u00e1vez said.
\nLatin America specialists distinguish between firebrands like Morales and Ch\u00e1vez and their more democratic and open-market-minded neighbors. But even these more moderate left-leaning leaders in the region have made it clear that they are unhappy with some US policies.
\nPolls of Latin Americans indicate that anti-American feeling — and certainly anti-Bush sentiment — extends beyond the fiery rhetoric of some Latin American presidents.
\nIn a poll last year by Zogby International, a worldwide polling firm based in upstate New York, 81 percent of Latin American citizens gave a negative job approval assessment of Bush, and 86 percent said they disapproved of US management of world conflicts. Nearly half of those interviewed in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina said the United States needed to establish fairer trade policy with Latin America. Several Latin American leaders have complained that US protectionism is interfering with their efforts to market agricultural products in the United States.
\nRepresentative James P. McGovern, Democrat of Worcester, said he often saw pictures of former President John F. Kennedy hanging in the homes of even the very poor when he visited El Salvador in the 1980’s. But on a visit there in December, McGovern saw the walls of San Salvador splashed with ”Imperialist Bush” and ”Stop the Murders.”
\nRoger Noriega, former assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, said the Latin American leaders are encouraging and creating an anti-American sentiment to garner popular support. ”There’s a certain amount of glee when they see someone plucking Uncle Sam’s beard,” said Noriega, who recently left the Bush administration and is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
\nPeter DeShazo, former US ambassador to several Latin American countries, said the United States should support democratic movements in the region and keep an open dialogue with leaders, but wondered how much progress the United States could make with Ch\u00e1vez.
\n”The question is, to what extent can there still be engagement” with Venezuela ”given the very negative environment that is the product of Ch\u00e1vez’s rhetoric?” DeShazo said.
\nDelahunt, though, is aggressively seeking to bring opposing sides together in Venezuela, and to keep open a dialogue with Chavez, whom he has privately urged to tone down his anti-American rhetoric.
\n”We obviously have to advocate for our national interests. We have to speak the truth and be transparent,” Delahunt said. But ”we have to listen, not lecture,” he added, accusing the administration of demonizing Ch\u00e1vez. ”If Ch\u00e1vez had been treated with respect from early on, the relationship would be very different from what it is now.”
\nDelahunt hopes the summer talks will reignite conversations between the two sides and get everyone to the polls in December. Another boycott by Ch\u00e1vez’s opposition would only encourage the Venezuelan leader to further consolidate power, Latin American specialists say.
\nFour political officials, including two Ch\u00e1vez supporters and two opponents who had served in the National Assembly, said after a joint meeting with Delahunt in Caracas on May 1 that they would be willing to come back to Massachusetts and talk.
\nNoriega, the onetime architect of the Bush administration policy toward Latin America, called the Grupo de Boston effort ”a waste of time. There is a dictatorship taking place there,” and the United States should respond by supporting the opposition as well as human rights leaders, Noriega said. ”I just hope there are still some ways to find solutions to this in a democratic way.”
\nBut politicians on both sides said in recent interviews in Caracas that they were encouraged by the decision to meet again in Nantucket. ”We can start the dialogue with two different visions . . . to institute conflict resolution,” said Pedro Di\u00e1z Blum, a Ch\u00e1vez opponent and former member of the National Assembly.
\n\u00a9 Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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