South vs. North

Regardless how the story of the fugitive National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden ends, he has already secured himself a place in the history books.

The young programmer, who crossed over to the ”light side of the force” and is presumably sitting in the transit zone of the Moscow airport Sheremetyevo, has provoked several diplomatic scandals and seriously complicated the affairs of dozens of countries’ foreign ministries. Such occurrences are not soon forgotten.

For nearly three weeks, Snowden remained in limbo: The U.S. demanded his extradition, and the countries in which he requested asylum one by one refused to offer it. Now suddenly three countries — Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia — have announced that they are prepared give the fugitive shelter.

It is not surprising that Latin America has extended a helping hand to Snowden. The region, which the powerful United States has historically considered its “backyard,” is gaining strength and becoming an independent player in the proverbial great game. This region is very heterogeneous, but in general it seems the rich northern neighbor is not well-loved in Latin America. The semi-contemptuous term “gringo,” which Central and South Americans of color use in reference to whites, was originally a nickname for American sailors. Broadly speaking, there is a sense that Latin America is to the U.S. what the “near abroad” is to Russia. A long existence in the shadow of a powerful state is not conducive to love and affection. At a distance, however, it is easier to love. That is why EU countries so unanimously denied Snowden asylum, caving in to the pressure of their stronger partner, while Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega and Evo Morales were not afraid to challenge Washington.

Here, of course, it should be noted that two of these leaders have personal scores to settle with the U.S. Ortega was the leader of the Sandanista revolution in Nicaragua and fought against the dictator Somoza, the son of Somoza Sr., about whom Roosevelt said “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”* The U.S. long financed Ortega’s enemies, the Contras — remember the Iran-Contra scandal that cost the Reagan administration a third of its allies in Congress? — and supported Violeta Chamorro, who kept the presidency from Ortega. Washington has accused Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, of harboring the drug trade. Morales still insists that cocaine is not a drug and resists U.S. demands to eliminate this crop in Bolivia. It seems that Nicolas Maduro has the least justification for a grudge against the U.S. — although he was once subject to a humiliating detention at JFK airport — but he is the successor to Hugo Chavez and will inevitably be compared with his great predecessor. Would Chavez have given shelter to Snowden? Almost certainly. And now Maduro is trying to measure up, announcing that “Latin America is a humanitarian territory and this territory is constantly growing. This is, perhaps, the only humanitarian or political asylum in history that grants asylum collectively, as a group of states, which tell this young man: If the empire is persecuting you, come to us.”

It is a complete reversal of stereotypes. The United States won the Cold War because they were — or seemed — the ideal of freedom, a shining city on a hill. The naive counterarguments of communist propagandists — “But you lynch blacks!” — shattered against the invisible armor of that remarkable freedom. The symbol of that America is “Easy Rider,” the endless road movie, highways straight as arrows, along which fly powerful Harleys toward the setting sun. And to the south of this citadel of freedom was the territory of dictatorial regimes, the land of bloody juntas, the kingdoms of “black generals,” who were occasionally overthrown by representatives of the Empire of Good, although primarily in Hollywood blockbusters. But that was yesterday.

Today it is the “humanitarian territory“ versus the Empire. South versus North. Freedom versus total control.

After European countries closed their airspace to the plane carrying the Bolivian president — someone told the Americans that Snowden may secretly have boarded the plane in Moscow, and they pulled all available levers — and the Austrians detained Morales in the Vienna airport for over 12 hours, Latin America exploded. The vice president of Bolivia announced that “Morales was kidnapped by imperialism” and that the honor of Latin America had been trampled by Europeans. Morales himself demanded apologies from European countries — some apologized, some did not — and promised to close the American embassy in Bolivia. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa also threatened to recall ambassadors to the U.S. and countries that refused Morales passage. And even the extremely loyal president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, called the actions of the Europeans an example of “unprecedented impunity.” On July 5, 12 Latin American presidents came together for an emergency meeting of the Union of South American Nations and expressed outrage at the incident with Morales’ airplane, demanding that European governments reveal all details about what occurred.

Snowden became the catalyst for a situation that had been smoldering for years. There has long been a deep rift between the North and South of the Western Hemisphere, but now it is as if an atomic bomb has exploded in that gulf. And the confrontation between the left-leaning South and the imperialistic North is increasingly visible and acute.

The U.S. has already threatened the Latin American countries offering Snowden asylum with a restriction of trade preferences. “This is serious business,” said the chairman of the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was certainly right. Morales, for example, is also a determined opponent of the expansion of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, to the scale of an American Free Trade Agreement, seeing it as a neocolonial move by the northern neighbor. Venezuela can hardly be scared by the restriction of trade preferences — it is the largest supplier of oil to the U.S. Latin American countries can respond by deepening their own integration, and the resources of this region are truly endless. This region is also overwhelmingly Catholic, which means it can count on the assistance of an influential ally — the Vatican, which under the leadership of the new pope clearly does not intend to be a “junior partner” of Washington. So the split is not just political, but also religious.

Of course, Snowden himself is neither a politician nor a statesman, just a hacker working for U.S. intelligence. But sometimes history is made by less significant people. Gavrilo Princip, whose shot started World War I, was just a Serbian schoolboy.

*Editor’s Note: This quote is attributed to Reagan, but there is no conclusive evidence that he actually said it.