What the US Has To Propose to Latin America

After putting on as good of a face as it could during the time it was isolated from Latin America, now the United States returns to having preferential partners of its policies, especially in Argentina and Brazil (despite that in this case, it had been through a coup). And what is it that the United States has to propose to the continent?

We already know it is next to nothing, given the situation of the countries having free trade deals with the United States. Mexico is an exemplary case because it has more than two decades of privileged trade with Washington and friendly relations with the empire. The balance of this agreement is frightening. It largely explains why Mexico is both a social and political disaster.

In fact, the United States has nothing to offer. It has an economic model currently in Mexico, among other nations, and it is one of the reasons for the disastrous situation in the country; this model has already failed in Latin America in nations like Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. For precisely this reason they have decided to abandon that model and substitute it for an alternative model of neoliberalism.

The United States, which is in a prolonged recession, has nothing to offer in investments and nothing that can compare to China or the BRICS and their development bank. The free trade deals are now rejected, on one side of the Atlantic or the other, for being responsible for the loss of employment in all of the nations. The Pacific Alliance is not an alternative to the processes of regional integration, which has intensified trading between the countries within the region as never before.

The destiny which has condemned Mexico for more than two decades, and is trying to condemn Argentina and Brazil, is the abandonment to the ups and downs of the international market in a crisis of financial speculation. In Argentina, the elected government for which Washington has the greatest sympathy, there is leakage and ingestion of capital. The sympathetic visits of leaders from Washington do not promote anything, except for the sympathy of the United States.

The countries of Latin America have had their best cycles of development when they have distanced themselves from the United States. They have privileged processes of regional integration and south-to-south exchanges. Their outlooks are continuing in that direction, including closer relations with the BRICs and not returning to free trade policies linked to the neoliberal model.

The most unequal continent in the world requires prioritizing the social policies and non-tax adjustments, which concentrates income, excludes the most impoverished and promotes unemployment and loss of purchasing power of wages.

The United States cannot promote alternative models because their interests are directly linked with global speculative capital, represented by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The new geopolitics of the world are going in the other direction: returning to productive development, which has south-to-south relations, with the bank of the development BRICs, their global reference.

Aimed toward a productive economy and not a speculative one, it doesn’t reproduce the indebtedness of governments, but on the contrary, their release from that cruel mechanism, which the countries have experimented with in the past and know how it produces a recession which is very difficult to get out of.

Returning to the neoliberal models, which were unsuccessful in the ‘90s in Argentina and Brazil, means restarting a deep and prolonged recession, changing settings of social exclusion, autocratic governments and social crisis that isolates those governments, and mobilizes all of the popular sectors against them.

That is the period that includes Latin America, where Argentina and Brazil distance themselves from their allies in the process of regional integration and the approach to models that have produced deep social crisis, such as in Mexico, Colombia and Chile. The fight against the reinforced neoliberal hegemony and the construction of anti-neoliberal alternatives is reset as the core of economic, political and social clashes of our time in Latin America, the continent that has most advanced in overcoming neoliberalism. So it pays a heavy price with the right-wing counteroffensives, the revenge against the people and the rights they have achieved in securing in recent years. Their outcome will determine the future of the continent in the first half of the 21st century.