US Interference

Although a meeting with the leader of the world’s greatest superpower is always a positive thing, tomorrow’s meeting between Jose Mujica and Barack Obama could be seen as interference from the United States government in our electoral campaign. Obama had four years to host Mujica, but he is doing it now when the Uruguayan president has just announced that he will lead the Senate list for his party. Mujica, besides being a candidate, has not stopped working at partisan politics, as proven by his statements in favor of his wife’s nomination for the vice presidency.

It is candidate Mujica who Obama will host tomorrow. He called him because of his urgency for placing Guantanamo prisoners [in Uruguay] and creating a precedent for other Latin American countries to accept similar transfers. It is a give-and-take in which the Uruguayan president satisfies his wish to visit the White House, along with the cameras of filmmaker [Emir] Kusturica, while the American president tries to resolve a predicament. Obama thus confirms that foreign policy and diplomacy are not his strong suit, something which is evident just by observing his weak actions in the crises in Syria and Ukraine. Tradition in the White House has always been to prevent summit meetings from interfering with foreign electoral processes. More than one South American president has suffered for, and complained about, that restriction on visits to Washington during electoral campaigns.

If Obama is breaking the rule with Mujica tomorrow, it is because he needs Latin America, a region with which he had promised to close a “new deal” — a deal for which he hasn’t taken a single step. Today he fancies Latin America as a land of asylum for those detained in Guantánamo, a prison he promised to close six years ago and which is still open. Now he asks for help.

Fast as the speed of light Mujica answered the call. It could be said that he did well — that a meeting between the Uruguayan president and his American colleague is always good for our country. Perhaps, but in this case it was ill-timed because it happened in the midst of the electoral campaign. Mujica himself is aware of that. So much so that at one point during his comings and goings for this trip he admitted that it could be criticized as inconvenient because the elections are so near.

Something noteworthy about the episode is the silence on the left regarding this crusade into the heart of the “Yankee empire.” It is true that Mujica blunted possible criticisms with his long list of potential benefits [of the meeting] and possible petitions to Obama (recently, it was even discussed to include a farfetched SOS to fight Philip Morris). He went overboard with that, just as he did when he called the White House occupant a victim of a reactionary right-wing opposition that will not let him do anything because he is an upstart or even because of the color of his skin.

They are inadmissible comments. Obama is a politician who was minted in turbulent Chicago; a man close to the not-so-pure Daley dynasty that governed that city for decades; a full-fledged politician who came to the presidency with the support of the Democratic Party’s machinery; not a helpless African-American as Mujica describes him, perhaps to separate his image from the caricature of evil Uncle Sam spread by his party colleagues.

The least that can be expected is for Mujica to not fall into that type of rhetoric or take advantage of the “loudspeaker” — that is what he called it — that Obama offers in order to promote partisan politics from Washington. That would be deplorable.