By Roger Harris and Roger Stoll, Task Force Board members

In 2018, National Security Advisor John Bolton invoked the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, claiming all territory south of the Rio Grande as the US “backyard”; in 2019, the dispossessed revolted against this barbarism of imperialism and neoliberalism.

The Andean Nations: US sanctions against Venezuela began in 2004 and now constitute a total blockade. In 2017- 2018, sanctions took 40,000 lives. In January obscure Venezuelan politician Juan Guaidó, acting under White House tutelage, declared himself Venezuela’s president and was recognized by the US and a handful of allied nations. Yet the coup failed. Massive popular demonstrations rallied in support of the Maduro government. In October, center-left President despite US ire, the legitimate government of Nicolás Maduro was voted onto the UN Human Rights Council.

In Washington, North American solidarity activists dubbed “Embassy Protectors” blocked an embassy takeover by Guaidó’s collaborators. With the permission of the Venezuelan government and in defense of international law, they protected the embassy for 37 days, until expelled by the US Secret Service. For their good work, Margaret Flowers, Kevin Zeese, Adrienne Pine and David Paul are being tried on bogus charges. They face stiff penalties. Journalist Max Blumenthal, who covered the events, was also arrested months later on a fictitious assault charge.

Colombia receives more US military aid than any country in the hemisphere. It leads the world in cocaine production and extra-judicial killings of journalists, union leaders and environmentalists. The government has repeatedly broken the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC. Death squads targeted former FARC militants, and some of them have returned to the guerrilla struggle. But rightist President Iván Duque‟s party suffered defeats in October’s regional and municipal elections. Left-leaning Claudia López became the first woman and first lesbian mayor of Bogotá.

On entering office in 2017, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno turned sharply to the right, betraying his own party. He had been vice president under leftist Rafael Correa who campaigned for him. Moreno jailed his own vice president and put out an arrest warrant for Correa (now in exile). Moreno delivered Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange from asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy into the hands of the British police. He took Ecuador out of ALBA, the regional organization founded by Venezuela and Cuba, recognized the US puppet “President” Guaidó, and put a US airbase on the Galápagos. He forgave $4.5 billion of corporate debt, then took a $10 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, requiring austerity measures. The indigenous CONAIE organization led mass protests, forcing Moreno to rescind some of the measures and temporarily flee the capital.

In April 2019, Peru’s former President Alan García shot himself before he could be arrested for corruption. Former presidents Alberto Fujimori and Alejandro Toledo also faced prison. Former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, ex-US citizen and ex-IMF official, resigned in the face of corruption and election fraud allegations. The current moderate-right President Martín Vizcarra dissolved Congress; Congress impeached the executive. While elites squabbled, mass anti-corruption protests decried the dysfunctionality of decadent neoliberalism.

Bolivia boasted the hemisphere’s greatest economic growth and greatest reduction in poverty. Tragically, despite — or because of — this success, a US backed military coup ousted President Evo Morales in November after he won re-election the month before, followed by the illegal government launching a wave of repression against the indigenous and poor, killing many.

The Southern Cone: Brazil has the largest economy in Latin America. It’s the “B” of the BRICS (with Russia, India, China, and South Africa) which forms a counter-weight to US imperialism. Jair Bolsonaro is president solely because of the 2016 parliamentary coup ousting leftist President Dilma Roussef and the fraudulent imprisonment of allied predecessor, Lula Ignacio da Silva, who would have run and beaten Bolsonaro in the presidential race.

Bolsonaro dismantled social welfare programs, cut government jobs, lavished favors on multinational corporations, and blamed everyone for the Amazon fires except his anti-environmental policies. Inevitably, the popular sectors rose. Lula is now out of prison. The struggle continues.

Chileans launched a general strike against austerity. Over a million in the streets chanted “neoliberalism was born in Chile and will die here.” Police killed two dozen and jailed or disappeared thousands. Right-wing billionaire President Sebastián Piñera suspended the rule of law with a “state of exception,” under the constitution fashioned by former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Despite the repression, the people remain in the streets.

Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri imposed textbook neoliberal economics to make payments on its $56 billion IMF loan and the economy failed spectacularly, with 55% inflation, food shortages and capital flight. Even the middle class joined the uprisings of the dispossessed.

In October, center-left President Alberto Fernández and Vice-President Cristina Fernández were elected. They will take Argentina out of the regional anti-Venezuela Lima Group, tipping the hemispheric balance of power leftward.

Daniel Martínez, presidential candidate of Uruguay’s ruling center-left party, Frente Amplio (FA), won a plurality in the October election but lost the runoff, ending FA‟s fifteen years in office.

The Caribbean: The 1959 Cuban Revolution ousted US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and in 1961 declared itself socialist. Under President Kennedy, the US invaded Cuba but failed to overthrow its government. Kennedy then imposed an embargo (now a blockade), intending to starve the Cuban people into renouncing their own government and submitting to US domination.

US regime-change operations against Cuba were always bipartisan projects, and the blockade continues to be tightened. Yet Cubans show no sign of capitulating. In April, President Miguel Diaz Canel presided over ratification of the new constitution, in a strikingly democratic process involving virtually every Cuban adult, including 780,000 suggestions, 9,600 proposals and 133,000 community meetings.

Puerto Rico and Cuba were seized by the US in the 1898 Spanish American war; Puerto Rico remains a poverty-ridden colony. Hurricane Maria worsened its plight. Mass protest and a general strike forced governor Ricardo Roselló to resign.

In Haiti, a determined social movement brought Jean-Bertrand Aristide briefly to the presidency after three decades of brutal US-backed Duvalier dictatorships. A US-authored coup ousted and exiled Aristide in 2004. Since then, US-backed presidents have imposed socio-economic conditions even less humane than under the dictatorships.

After the 2010 earthquake, billions in disaster relief and Venezuelan Petrocaribe funds nearly all disappeared into the pockets of corrupt politicians. Protests continued, calling for a new republic of justice and democracy, with the chant: chavire chodyè a (“overturn the cauldron”). For months the people of Haiti have been in perpetual protest against the hated US-sponsored President Jovenel Moïse.

Central America: In Honduras, protests have continued against the corrupt, narco-state of US-backed President Juan Orlando Hernández, unindicted coconspirator in his brother’s US cocaine smuggling conviction. One sign of hope is the release from prison of political activist Edwin Espinal, aided by an international solidarity campaign.

In Guatemala, the dispossessed rose in protest against the rightist, neoliberal rule of President Jimmy Morales. Tens of thousands marched on Guatemala City, including the indigenous Xinkas. Scars remain from the US-authored dirty wars of the 1980s, which targeted the indigenous, taking 200,000 lives.

El Salvador, another victim of US dirty wars, saw the first hundred days of President Nayib Bukele‟s administration bring a shift to the US-favored neoliberal right, away from the politics of the previous FMLN administration. Bukele seeks to privatize public health, water and utility services. He’s slashed public employee jobs and closed the Cuban-sponsored vision clinics of Misión Milagro which treated those who couldn’t otherwise afford it.

Invariably the US corporate press ignores US imperial practices that produce the repression, violence and inhumane governance that drive the asylum seekers out of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In contrast, 2019 was a year of hope and recovery in leftist governed Nicaragua, which successfully repelled a violent US regime-change operation in 2018. Unlike their Central American neighbors, few Nicaraguans left for the US, instead staying to rebuild their country.

North America: Mexico is the second largest economy in Latin America. After decades of right-wing rule and serial election theft, left-of-center Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) became president last December. His MORENA party swept local and regional offices with a broad social program addressing poverty, inequality and corruption. AMLO dissented from the anti-Venezuelan Lima Group and gave political asylum to Bolivian president Evo Morales.

Trump issued AMLO an ultimatum: stop Central American asylum-seekers from reaching the US southern border or face tariffs that will wreck the Mexican economy. Earlier, carefully phrased threats issued from the US-dominated IMF, warned AMLO not to resist neoliberal privatization. As nineteenth century Mexican President Porfirio Díaz lamented: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.”

A New Year’s message: 2019 brought a hard right turn to Brazil and Ecuador and now the Bolivia coup, yet the resistance to imperialist neoliberalism grew. Regime-change operations failed in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. US-preferred candidates suffered losses in Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia (hence the coup). The US was weakened by Russia and especially China, now the second largest trading partner with Latin America and the Caribbean. Neoliberalism is not dead but dying.

Addressing the 120-nation Non Aligned Movement (one-third of which are sanctioned by Washington), Cuban President Díaz-Canel urged: “There are more of us. Let us do more.”

Source: Task Force on the Americas, November 28, 2019