Latin America, Rhetoric and the United States

From the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, inaugurating the Summit of Latin American and Caribbean Unity — an assembly of the 33 countries of the Americas, excluding the two richest (the United States and Canada):

“We cannot remain disunited, we cannot approach the future successfully with a base concern over our differences; now it is our turn to unite, without faulting those areas in which we are different (…), to unite over our basic similarities that are much greater than our divergence.”

From the President of Brazil, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, at the closing of the first summit of this sort, carried out at the end of 2008 in Salvador, Bahia:

“All of us, from the smallest to the largest country, are understanding that the more we come together, the more chances we have to participate in global politics, to take part in the global wealth and to avoid having the crisis — born in the risky countries — make such a strong reach to countries that did not create the crisis.”

These two discourses serve to punctuate the fact that Latin America and the Caribbean continue to be the subcontinent in copious rhetoric, in the thousand attempts at integration and little union. Nothing new — as a matter of fact, in his speech, Calderón remembered that integration “is the natural calling of our peoples, and the natural aspiration from the proper origin of our independent nations.” To do the math: This year begins the commemoration of 200 years of independence of the old Spanish colonies in the Americas.

That is to say, it is not just from one summit to the other, with little more than a year in between, but that for 200 years Latin American leaders have been singing the same tune, but never going anywhere, except to a new summit.

It is a shame, because Lula has a point — besides being obvious — in saying that “the more we come together, the more chance we have to participate in global politics.”

It is fully understandable that there will be difficulties in integration, given the heterogeneity of the 33 countries participating in the summit inaugurated [on Sunday], from the miserable Haiti to the nascent Brazil. But it is not this heterogeneity, at the moment, that is the greatest obstacle: The biggest difficulty is defining the stance that the 33 take toward the United States, whether it would be as an enemy (as the Bolivarians desire, led by Venezuela) or as a partner that respects and does not subjugate the region, as Brazil prefers, among others.

It is not possible, for geographic reasons, to wish that the United States (and Canada) not be part of the Americas. It is not possible, for geopolitical and economic reasons, to wish that the United States did not exert a tremendous influence over the subcontinent. Therefore it is necessary, first of all, to define the terms under which we want to exercise Latin American and Caribbean unity: against the United States or at their side.