The Obama Effect, Latin-American Style

Obamania is switching hemispheres. Following his European tour, the United States’ president is going this week to pay Latin America a visit. From April 17th through April 19th, the Fifth Summit of the Americas will take place in Trinidad and Tobago, giving Obama the opportunity to speak to the heads of state of all continents. The sole exception will be Cuban President Raul Castro, whose nation was excluded from the Organization of American States in 1962.

Barack Obama is the object of enormous goodwill in Latin America. The region has a tradition of distrust towards the “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” establishment, which has historically been linked to political bullying and interference. The great wave of enthusiasm for the first mixed-race president of the U.S. is reminiscent of that which greeted the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, at the start of the 1960s.

Nonetheless, Obamania is not universal in Latin America. Certain sections of the ruling class and the oligarchy are cautious, even hostile, because Obama serves to remind them of their own ambiguities and failings.

The U.S. president will doubtless cross paths with Hugo Chavez, who announced at the beginning of November, that he looked forward to meeting “el negro Obama”. Those who are less than enthusiastic about the effervescent Venezuelan leader are already laughing up their sleeves. “Obama’s popularity makes Chavez’s life tougher,” as Andres Oppenheimer recently wrote in the Miami Herald. It is easier, after all, for a self-styled anti-imperialist to pour scorn on a pale-faced Texan like George Bush than on a mixed-race man whose wife is descended from slaves.

“Bolivarian” ideology, however, is not the only precept being overturned by Barack Obama. Latin America was shaped profoundly by the slave trade, and its indigenous population, when it has not simply been exterminated, is still a victim of contempt and discrimination. Obama, therefore, inevitably invites comparisons and soul-searching on the “racial question”.

In the global imagination, Latin America is seen as the continent par excellence of racial mixing, a “fusion” expressed both in its population and in its arts: in the “cosmic race”, a synthesis of indigenous, Hispanic and African cultures, imagined in the 1920s by the Mexican philosopher, José Vasconcelos; in the luxuriant paintings of the Cuban Wilfredo Lam; in the bewitching “Latin jazz” of Puerto Rican Tito Puente; or in the magical novels of the Brazilian, Jorge Amado.

However, despite this ode to racial mixing, and despite the victories of the indigenous Aymara Evo Morales in Bolivia, the Quechua-speaking Rafael Correa in Ecuador and the zambo (mixed African and indigenous descent) Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Latin America is still a continent whose structures of power and status fail to reflect the size of its “non-white” populations.

As Alain Rouquié notes in his book, Amérique Latine: Introduction à l’Extrême Occident (“Latin America: Introduction to the Far West”, published by Seuil): “The social epidermis of Latin America is so sensitive to colour that one Brazilian ethnologist uncovered almost 300 terms expressing the infinitesimal nuances of difference, from black to white, which locate the individual in the social hierarchy on the basis of an almost unquestioned internalisation of the Caucasian ideal. Social climbing always involves a whitening.”

In Brazil, almost half of the 192 million inhabitants are of African descent. However, despite the official discourse of “racial democracy” and the measures taken by President Lula, the virtual invisibility of black people in positions of power attests to their second-class status. In Cuba, the Afro-Latin population, which is such a strong presence in popular culture and revolutionary rhetoric, remains clearly under-represented at the levels of authority in the Communist Party, the government and the armed forces. In Colombia, there are more than 10 million Afro-Latinos, comprising 20 percent of the population, but according to Newsweek, only one black person in five has access to water or electricity (as opposed to 60 percent for the rest of the population), and infant mortality rates among Afro-Colombians are three times higher than among white people.

During the last 20 years, Afro-Colombians have been particularly affected by violence between the army, the guerrillas and the far right. They often have been forced off communal land by paramilitary groups in the pay of real estate speculators, drug farmers, or the producers of the palm oil on which the bio-fuel industry is based.

For several years, the fate of 150 million Afro-Latinos (in a total population of 540 million) has been on the inter-American agenda. Latino Black Power is on the rise everywhere, and is supported by influential groups in the U.S. (foundations, black organizations, human rights NGOs) with strong links to both Congress and the White House.

Under the Bush administration, on the initiative of Condoleezza Rice, a specific policy of support for Afro-Latinos was put in place, particularly under the aegis of development aid programs. That policy will probably be extended, for, as a report submitted to Congress in November pointed out, a number of people take the view that “their (Afro-Latinos’) demands for political representation, land rights. . . access to health and education programs. . . intersect with strategic U.S. goals for the region.”

The effects of this policy are being felt already. Afro-Colombian communities in the Choco region had been stripped of their land by palm oil producers. At the end of March, the Washington Post reported that pressure from the American Congress had led President Uribe to order nine palm oil producers to return the communities’ land to them.

Barack Obama, much to his credit, did not make his mixed-race heritage an electoral issue. Nonetheless, his victory has inspired all those in Latin America who support a non-racial democracy – a society that actively combats inequality between communities, because it is founded on respect for the dignity and liberty of all.