The Chosen

Some years ago, already away from politics and upon reentry to academia (a setting more conducive to sincerity, in his words), Fernando Enrique Cardoso was asked which Latin American countries were truly viable. His response was Mexico, Brazil and Chile, for certain. Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia if they make serious structural reforms. Central America survives through its connection to the United States; the rest are non-functional. I have the impression that Peru joined the group of survivors. Now Obama has announced his next visit to South America. Or more accurately, his next visit to Brazil and Chile. The spokesman for the National Security Council of the White House, Mike Hammer, clarified that the trip “will provide an opportunity to highlight the president’s commitment to key leaders in the continent.”

Imagine Madam Cristina Kirchner’s foul mood on learning she is not considered by the White House to be one of the key leaders in the region. Obama, with narrow political logic, decided that those being called are not many, but the chosen are very few indeed. Brazil was the first Latin American country chosen by Obama for regional dialogue. Certainly, Lula gave him more than a headache, because the gringos never understood his pretensions toward worldwide power, let alone the conceptual knot of Brazilian foreign policy toward the region, expressed in this equation: “Add Brazil by subtracting the United States.” And when his representatives in Brasilia were writing to the State Department that Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales were those who instigated Lula to take an anti-U.S. position, they were declaring a total ignorance of reality. It was completely the opposite: Lula aroused Chavez and Evo, supported the Cuban regime to the point of getting tangled up in its human rights violations and lauded any protest against the gringos, because all of this forms a part of the Brazilian assertion of the regional sub-empire. I suppose that in his conference with Dilma Rousseff, he will not meet the equivalent of the little emperor that Lula was, but it is a given that the first key relationship for the United States in the region cannot be with anyone other Brazil.

Chile’s case is different. The visit is the prize for the top student in the class. Obama previously said to Michelle Bachelet in June 2009: “Chile is a model country in the region.”* Plus, for a long while, the Chileans, in all of their ideological, doctrinal and socio-economic variations, have never abandoned the spirit of service to the national interest, “by reason or by the sword.” They got ahead of the rest in their relations with the most powerful economies on the planet; they have the best percentage of exports in their GDP; their economy is recognized as the most competitive in the region; Chile has become an investor nation in Argentina, Peru, and now Brazil, with figures numbering in the billions of dollars; and, to top it all off, it is an extraordinary example of bureaucracy. Even the most famous of its criminals, Augusto Pinochet, was bureaucratic! And for labeling purposes, a visit to one from the left wing and one from the right wing. I say labeling purposes, because I do not believe that Dilma is left-wing nor that Piñera is right-wing, because they are modern, because the politics of 40 years ago and its archaic definitions are no longer alive; because they do not govern looking backward; because they want progress, not regressive utopias; because they know the horizon is always ahead, never behind. Obama knows that, too.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.