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FROM THE FOREIGN PRESS
Democracy
Triple Play: Ecuador to Mexico to the OAS
• The Smackdown of Condoleezza's
agenda came on the week of her Latin American tour
BY AL GIORDANO--
Taken from The Narco News Bulletin
MEXICO; MAY 1, 2005: For U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, her
photo-op tour of Latin American nations last week
was supposed to mark
a
comeback for flailing U.S. policy in the region.
Instead - as she
jet-hopped from Brazil to Colombia to Chile to El
Salvador - the week
brought a chain reaction of defeats for her
government's impositionson other lands and victories
for the democracy that surges from below.
A
quick review of the week's hemisphere-shaking
events:
* On
Friday, April 22, Ecuador's US-backed president,
Lucio
Gutiérrez, dissolved the Supreme Court to save two
corrupt former
presidents from prosecution. The people took to the
streets (as
Luis
Gómez reported here), Congress rebuked him (Gómez
redux),
Lucio backed down. But for the Ecuadoran president
it was already
too
late....
* By
Saturday, April 23, Lucio had to resign in disgrace
and seek
asylum in the Brazilian Embassy. Later last week, he
slipped into
Brazil, as the new president of Ecuador, Alfredo
Palacio, came to
power amid speculation that, having learned from the
mistakes of
his
predecessor, he will bring Ecuador, now, into the
"axis of
good" led by Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, in the
growing
coalition of South American nations - a veritable
South American
Union - no longer willing to take orders from above.
"Ecuador
could become the next member of the new left
movement that is
sweeping across South America if the local
indigenous communities
are
allowed to help fill the country's new political
vacuum,"
notes an April 21 analysis by the Council on
Hemispheric Affairs.
*
Meanwhile, Mexico has spent recent days inching
closer South to
the
pro-democracy axis as well. On Friday the 22nd, a
judge threw
out
the federal government's nuisance case against
Mexico City
Governor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aimed to block
the popular
man
they call El Peje from running for president in
2006. The
Court told Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la
Concha to go back
to
the drawing board and prepare a better case, and
rejected the
maneuver by which the prosecutor called in political
opponents of
López Obrador to pay the governor's bail against his
will, so that
Macedo and his boss, President Vicente Fox, could
avoid the heat
that
would indubitably have come by putting the political
superstar El Peje in jail.
* On
Sunday, April 24, the streets of Mexico City filled
as never
before (or, at least not since the 2001 Zapatista
Caravan) as an
officially estimated 1.2 million Mexicans marched
silently (read
Quetzal Belmont's eyewitness report in Narco News)
against the
"desafuero"
plot of President Vicente Fox against López Obrador.
*
On Tuesday, April 26, Cuban President Fidel Castro
threw his own
oratorical gasoline on the fire when, during a
four-hour public
speech, he suggested aloud that Mexican President
Vicente Fox will
have
to resign now that his coup plot has been exposed
for what it
was.
Always a headline generator, Castro's call was
highlighted on
front pages and on TV news in virtually all the
Latin American
countries.
* By
Wednesday night, April 27, Fox, surrounded by the
bloodhounds
of
ridicule abroad and of surging democracy at home,
forced his
Attorney General to resign in disgrace, washed his
hands of the
desafuero plot, and in an eight-minute nationally
televised speech
announced that he would no longer stand in the way
of any citizen
(meaning López Obrador, whose public popularity has
skyrocketed
with
each attempt to victimize him) to run for president
next
year.
*
Condoleezza Rice, by then in Colombia in a futile
effort to tame
uppity Latin America, must have felt the needle
sticking in her.
After all, it was Rice who, immediately upon taking
office last
January, had shifted gears from her predecessor
Colin Powell's
grudging acceptance of Latin America's democratic
left turn, and
had
filed a bombastic State Department Traveler's
Warning in an
attempt to tighten the screws on Mexico and instruct
Fox to pursue
the
pre-electoral coup d'etat against López Obrador.
When Fox
began to lose his resolve to take the desafuero case
to the
ultimate consequences (the protests surged, in three
short weeks,
from
a whisper to a roar, with one poll by the daily El
Universal
showing that 61 percent of Mexican citizens
indicated their
personal willingness to participate in a "civil
resistance"
campaign against the Fox government), Condi's State
Department
tossed yet another silly travel advisory upon
Mexico.
Compared to a population of 100 million that is
about to explode,
not
even the United States seems so powerful anymore.
*
Fox, under siege in Mexico, was surely looking south
and paying
nervous attention as the head of his counterpart
Lucio Gutiérrez
rolled and bounced on the sharp rocks of disgrace
from Ecuador
into
Brazil. Vicente Fox, having an Ebenezer Scrooge
moment, could
not
help but see his own mustache painted on that face
(see
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/4/29/125547/063
for Dan Feder's sharp analysis comparing Mexico's
Fox to Ecuador's
Gutiérrez, describing how both had promised, but
failed to
deliver, change to calcified political systems).
* Condoleezza's puddle-jumping from Bogotá to
Brasilia to Santiago
to San Salvador had taken on a new urgency two weeks
prior, on
April 11, when the 34 member countries of the
Organization of
American States (OAS) deadlocked in a 17-17 tie
between
Washington-backed candidate for OAS chief, Luis
Derbez from
Mexico, and the Brazil-and-Venezuela backed
candidate from Chile,
José Miguel Insulza. And here is where the story of
last week
takes an even bolder new turn...
Standing with Washington in the OAS internal battle
were Canada,
Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, the seven
Central American nations, and a handful of tiny
Caribbean island and
seafront countries that were backing Mexico's
obedient Derbez.
But the counterforce had achieved parity in recent
years: Standing
together, for the first time, against the US-picked
OAS candidate, the
lion that now roars, Brazil (which had Condoleezza
inside its lair as
Marco Aurelio Garcia, Brazil's Latin American point
man, was gathering
up the votes abroad to place her in checkmate), with
Venezuela,
Argentina, Uruguay, and the grand majority of
Caribbean islands.
The members of CARICOM, the Caribbean Community of
Nations, after all,
remain steadfast in refusing to recognize Haiti's
regime as
legitimate, and Haiti remains expelled from CARICOM,
one of the
undercurrents that brought a Caribbean tide
decisively into the OAS
battle on the opposing side of the northern
government that backed the
Haiti coup.
Two more strange bedfellows joined the opposition
coalition (no longer
mere "opposition" because it has resulted
victorious) in the conflict
over who will lead the OAS: newly liberated Ecuador
(what is the sound
of a domino falling in the woods?), and Chile.
The Organization of American States, founded in
1948, has long been a
rubber-stamp for U.S. impositions in the region,
dominated by
autocratic governments and dictatorships: the very
same countries Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela,
Uruguay... - that today are
practicing more vibrant forms of democracy than are
practiced in the
United States with its cash-dominated electoral
system and its Diebold
Overlords.
Truth be told, Washington began to lose control of
the OAS steering
wheel in April 2002, when the OAS balked on
recognizing the three-day
coup regime in Venezuela. The control slipped a bit
more in December
2002 when the OAS, for the first time in 54 years,
directly confronted
Washington by voting to defend Hugo Chávez's
government in Venezuela
as an elected democratic republic from a US-authored
resolution to
damn it (a story I filed here in 2002 about that
watershed moment in
OAS history now provides context for what happened
last week).
Condoleezza, entering Latin America last week, with
the budget to
bribe and the might to blackmail, went searching for
just one more
vote to impose Mexico's Derbez as the new OAS chief.
The victory was
supposed to be consummated while she was down here,
to emboss her
image as an effective foreign minister. Had Lucio
still been in power
in Ecuador, he would have offered the easiest
pickins. But by the time
Condi's jet touched down in Bogotá, Lucio's head was
bouncing
somewhere alongside the Amazon, and Ecuador had
slipped through her
fingers.
With Mexico's own government trembling from the
consequences of
executing Condoleezza's desafuero plot against the
Mexico City
governor, the jig was soon up. With the OAS vote
tied in four
consecutive votes at 17 to 17, Mexico's Fox, as he
was backing down
from the desafuero plot in Mexico City, sent Derbez
to inform Rice
that he was withdrawing from the OAS contest. And
Mexico inched closer
back to the Bolivarian América where its heart, its
soul and its
history rightfully places it.
Now the forces of reaction in Mexico from Fox's own
National Action
Party, or PAN in its Spanish initials, and from the
old PRI party,
too, are calling for Fox's head. The rug has been
pulled out from all
of them. As Mexican columnist (and harsh López
Obrador critic) Carlos
Ramírez lamented last week: "The only thing left for
Fox to do is to
hand the keys to (the presidential palace) over to
López Obrador." In
other words: the right wing is out-shouting even
Fidel in Havana in
demands for Fox's resignation.
The press spin after Condoleezza's messy defeat in
the Organization of
American States last week was Orwellian: A Voice of
America story went
so far as to say that it was Rice who engineered the
withdrawal of
Derbez and the victory of Insulza, with vague,
unsupported claims that
she got concessions from Insulza regarding OAS's
stance toward
Venezuela. This, after months of first throwing up a
candidate from El
Salvador against Insulza and, when that failed,
backing Mexico's
Derbez. An AP story headlined that Rice was
"pleased" with the result.
Why make such a claim unless it is necessary to
paint a pasty, smiley
face over a resounding wound? The intentional
simulation of the
Commercial Media about events in Latin America
continues to astound in
its level of transparent stupidity.
But that just three weeks into the entire spectacle
the unrest in
Mexico (and the solidarity from Civil Society around
the world) became
so palpable as to force Fox - always a master
opportunist, with his
finger to the wind - to back down so rapidly
indicates the most
gigantic paradigm shift in our América since the
2002 defeat of the
Venezuela coup: A Mexico reborn.
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