THE US LEADERSHIP: GOOD AND EVIL IN THE BATTLE FOR THE WORLD’S SOUL (2001)

Right at the time when talks on a variation of the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas started, the attack on the World Trade Center put a question mark on this issue --- the four plus one, linking the four countries from the Mercosur to the United States of America. The United States, by an act of war, was distracted from its continental purpose and sent again to the battlefields of Asia.

If the FTAA project was the reassessment of a constructive leadership, trying to build an American continent with equal opportunities for every country in an incredible and generous spread of US knowledge and resources, the war against terrorism seems to appeal more to the destructive military power of the United States to guarantee a global modernity. Confusion about the means might nevertheless ruin the end.

Formerly the shining example of the growth that is possible for countries in Latin America, Argentina’s now sinking economy gives part of the clue to the dilemma the US leadership has to face and which certainly goes far beyond terrorism. Widely promoted by the media, a rise in anti-capitalist thinking in Argentina is demonstrated by acts of urban subversion and by the recent electoral campaign, where most of the candidates pointed to the failed destiny in the friendly USA-Argentine relationship. Traditionally linked to European social-democratic and liberal thought, many of the Argentine media persist in showing how weakened the US position can be in this part of the world. The Argentine leaders who support a strong and close friendly link with the USA as well as a determined resolution to progress into modernity, whatever it costs the country, are not believed by the people since the United States doesn’t seem to be an enthusiastic supporter of the same idea. The United States' slight distraction from hemispheric issues has developed into a strong indifference since the terrorist attacks. This would be irrelevant to United States destiny if not for the fact that the terror it is having to endure now grew out of those very same sources of indifference, distraction and lack of planning.

Decades of terrorism all over the world, based on a theory by which the rich have to be destroyed in the name of poverty, a theory vastly spread and still alive and well in countries once upon a time known as the Third World, like Argentina, show political planners and military strategists that the best way to avoid destruction is to make plans for a common construction. In other words, it is up to the rich countries with the know-how to do it, to build with the poorer countries a strategy for a better and safer world, where everybody’s needs are taken care of. The Free Trade Area for the Americas has this profound meaning, based in a continental brotherhood, and represents also the beginning of a military commitment, since the terrorist threat is believed to come also from the neighboring continental countries.

A military alliance extra-NATO between Argentina and the United States started in the nineties an example of cooperation; but without a strong United States interest in the common continental destiny, this alliance wouldn’t be enough to prevent Argentines and other continental populations from becoming resentful crowds more affiliated with violence than with justice.
If Latin American countries have been considered as the US’ backyard, it is no less true that the US is Latin America’s backyard. The attack on the city of New York and on the Pentagon means that the vulnerable and weak backyard might not be any longer the Garden of Eden for Latin Americans in quest of leadership and a model. The effect could be that they turn their minds and economies to Europe again, like in the years before World War II. Then the effect of the terrorist attack could only be seen, like in the old times of the Three Worlds, not as a Third World envious revenge but as a carom, the billiards master coup of a declining Second World on a rising and powerful First.

Maybe while pursuing and punishing the terrorists, the United States should invest intelligence in the reconstruction of the idea of paradise as well as in the strategies for sharing it with the whole planet, starting with their own continental region and ending, why not, in Afghanistan, where the local millionaires like Osama Bin Laden continue to play the same role that regressive oligarchies all over the world have played: destroy and divide in order to reign. The role that US Americans have in this unexpected and maybe really holy as well as wholly new war is no more, but no less, than to be the crusaders of common wealth and prosperity.

Part of the idea of paradise is bounty. Nothing better than the promise of this bounty to the hungry people of the world, to make understandable the real difference between good, which builds, and evil, which destroys.