TU QUOQUE, BRAZIL?

This week, President Lula has welcome and honored the Iranian President Ahmadinejad. No one expected it, and few dare to guess what is beneath the fanfare around this man, who has already visited Venezuela, engaged in military and nuclear power talks with Chavez, the man who wouldn’t mind a South American war with the United States, if that allows him to remain in power. Is Brazil stabbing the U.S., looking for the South American Imperial throne? Or, rather, are we in a different play, in which there are more things in heaven and earth, and also in the Americas, than are dreamt of in any political philosophy?

A few months ago, President Lula and Brazil could be quoted as the best example of diplomacy in South America. Neighbors of Venezuela and also friends of Chavez, Brazil and its president made a point to underline their unaltered friendship with the U.S. When the American military bases in Colombia were discussed, Brazil showed a vague concern but felt somehow relieved that Chavez found an enemy with enough power to maybe dissuade him on his war games. A slight switch was later observed in Honduras, when Brazil hosted within its embassy the former Honduran President Zelaya, as if intending to play a bigger role than the United States and its ambassadors and mediators. The move looked suspicious to some but still was labeled by the most relevant political pundits as a mere blunder of the oldest and most efficient chancellery in South America. The cheerful meeting with the happy Ahmadinejad has put now Lula under a different light: his large, sincere smile could hide a bluff or a sense of genuine victory. Brazil won the Olympic Games over the U.S.; why wouldn’t it win the lead of foreign policy in the Americas? Over Chavez, in the first place, and over the U.S. were it possible. Evo Morales in Bolivia joined, receiving in joy the Iranian president. If this is a version of mice playing while the cat is away, we wonder where the cat is, and when will he be back. As of now, President Obama has expressed to Brazil some concern, as if he didn’t believe all this is actually happening, or as if he knew more –he should- and had everything under control. Mysteries under the rug begin to pile up.

What is Ahmadinejad doing in the Americas? Who brought him and who the Middle East wars to these shores? None other than Iran itself. It carved its way into the Americas with patience, since 1992 and 1994, when they bombed the Israeli Embassy and later the Jewish organization AMIA in Buenos Aires, at a time when the United States and Argentina were the closest friends in the world, and Argentina the best performing capitalist country in South America. Struggling for positions in the backyard to better assail the house. Then, we had 9/11, still Muslim terror under a different disguise. All seems then to be about an attack on the Empire of freedom and wealth and its allies in the Americas, which are more than one. In that case, a strong emperor will do better than a weak one, left to the saddest of farewells, a stab from a loved one.

VENEZUELA’ S WALL

At this point, we wonder if the United States decision of letting down the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas as a top foreign policy has been wise. Emboldened, Hugo Chávez created his own continental fantasy, the ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, and, angry with the U.S. military bases in Colombia, persists with his speeches on an imminent war to defeat the U.S. In his fight against what he continues to see as an imperialistic power, he has even found friends in the United States, who, as enemies of any type of military power the U.S. may exert, are ready to support his views. Chavez, his friends and even some officials in the United States administration firmly believe that the U.S. is to be blamed for all what is wrong in the Americas and the world, and are not ready to accept the good that the U.S. has done to the world, yet the good that it still can do. The idea of war blinds one side and the other, and war is the core of speeches that should rather address a new rationale on progress, economy and state administration. An imaginary wall is parting right now countries and people in the Americas, and creating a divide between those who believe in freedom, free markets and genuine democracy, and those who cannot believe in these values as the only possible road to progress.

The liberal point of view is not new to Americans and Chávez’s left-populist point of view has been largely sustained for half a century by Fidel Castro and others. We were all used to deal with this subtle cultural wall that parted the political continent in two since communism ceased to be a threat, twenty years ago. It seems that now we need to get trained to accept that the cultural wall can become, at any moment, a military wall that parts the continent in more than different types of economies or political administrations. Venezuela’s leader is working very hard to build that ideological wall with weapons that could set the Americas on actual fire if things get out of control, as the Honduran case has shown in a modest scale. To make sure, his ideas are understood, Chávez didn't hesitate to partner Iran’s President Ahmadinejad as the necessary nuclear scarecrow.

While Chávez speaks, the U.S. should think and act, in ways Chávez couldn’t contest and with tactics he couldn’t match. The ALBA actually means nothing but a stratagem for Chavez to gain power. People who have listened to him or even used his oil money, such as the Kirchners in Argentina or Evo Morales in Bolivia, are paying very expensive political bills, since they couldn’t benefit their people with any substantial progress, less to create more wealth. The ALCA (the Spanish for FTAA) was instead a solid proposal of partnership, not with the poor or the rich for a day, like Venezuela, but with the wealthiest country in the world, owner of the best technique to create wealth. Venezuela’s wall, like the communist wall in Berlin, is the wall of unacknowledged impotence to create wealth in freedom and to rule a country in an open and participative democracy. However, the United States refusal to use that fantastic weapon of the FTAA to win hearts and minds in the Americas represents another type of blindness, that which prefers not to get involved in what is seen sometimes as a sticky friendship, if friendship and trust in the idea of a common future don’t prevail.

Venezuela’s wall was born from the United States mind, which has so often denied the idea of unity in the Americas, fearing the Hispanic majority. It will fall not when armies are deployed, but when the idea of the wall itself becomes nonsense. It will fall when the people of the Americas don’t see themselves abandoned but included in a project that involves all the countries, including Cuba and Venezuela, whose people wouldn’t accept any kind of aggressiveness, confronted with a better and possible dream of progress and prosperity. Berliners got the message, but there was a message for in the European community and the tenacity of the United States to sustain a continuous technological progress. Latin Americans, even if deaf to Chávez ‘s rants and raves, are not hearing any one else speaking to them.