COLONIAL WARS: A SEQUEL

Two months ago, former President Kirchner and his wife, current president, were beaten at an election seen as a plebiscite on their policies. Seventy percent of Argentine voted against them, supporting other parties, including a dissident fraction of Kirchner’s Peronist party. Today, as if such an astonishing defeat had been erased from public memory, both Kirchner are in full possession of power. No one will stop them in Congress, since elections were advanced several months from the original date of October, and the new elected representatives have to wait until December to take their seats. This intermezzo works like a magic key and extends to all spheres of government: every Kirchner’s policies can still be voted or applied, even if a huge majority of Argentines is against them. Some of these policies have an incidence on the local economy poor performance but some others have a great relevance beyond Argentine borders, such as the policy toward military alliances in the Americas. What Argentina does or does not in regards of the United States bases in Colombia, matters.

Today, in Bariloche, during the new summit of Unasur, the Union of South American Nations, wife Kirchner, in her hostess role, always enjoying the light of international cameras, and engrossed with the recent victories at Congress, explained her point of view on the Americas. For her, the United States is an imperialistic military extra-continental power which aspires to control Colombia as a colony, in the same way Great Britain exerted its extra-continental power over the Falklands-Malvinas Islands and fought a war to keep the colonial status. President Chavez of Venezuela, instead would be the new champion of freedom and independence, and the Kirchners, his proud friends in the liberation task. The ideological trick always works well for many Argentines still hurt by the lost war in the islands, but it seems a rather poor comment for a president who, as a head of state, should know better who is who in this world. Pundits and onlookers usually laugh at her, because of her absurd school teacher style, her obvious ignorance of Argentina best interests in the continent, and, above all, because of her submission, shared by her husband, to Venezuelan President Chavez, a sub product of Fidel Castro’s speech and bad reads on Perón, a leader also misunderstood by the Kirchners, who haven’t got yet that the fifty years old peronist theory of Continentalism, never denied geography. The Argentina President’s reference to the United States as an extra continental force makes us wonder if she has ever seen a map, or if she has been the innocent victim of some not innocent foreign intelligence briefs that convinced her that South America belongs politically to a different continent from North America.

Traditionally, there have been three different projects on the union of the Americas. The first one, which goes back in history to President Monroe with scales in Presidents Sarmiento, Perón, Kennedy, and both Bush, looks for a Pan-American union in which all the countries from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego would be equal partners. It was always based on the common identity of American countries which won their independence from European countries, and which built their political identities with alike Constitutions, based on freedom and democracy. The second project, which surfaced mostly during the Twentieth Century as a reaction, often a communist reaction manipulated from the former Soviet Union, exhibits Latin Americans closely united by language and religion against Anglo-Americans; it aims to a cultural war that would defeat the United States from within, with Latinos taking power over Anglos; this project expresses a fantasy dear to Hispanics still in pain from the wars between Great Britain and Spain, and also represents the greatest nightmare of Anglo’s demographists. The third project is a split disguised as a union and was originated in the true master imperialistic minds of some British nineteen century officers, which imagined South America as a different continent from North and Central America, the brightest idea ever thought to control the increasing hemispherical power of the United States. When an Argentine president refuses to be part of a Pan-American project that includes the United States, sabotages Colombia’s President Uribe’s effort to include the United States and obeys Chavez’s wishes of a powerful South America in war with the United States, she is rather functional to old colonial British desires for the region. She is also, very, very far from Argentina’s best interest: the support and friendship of the United States to counterbalance the otherwise too powerful Southern giant of Brazil. Sometimes, United States presidents have fallen into the same trap, rushed by more urgent wars in other places in the planet, or simply misled by some not too independent local agents about politics in a region that, only in the past decades, has gained the full geopolitical attention it deserves from the first country in the world and the continent.

In Argentina, there is a saying that the best never reach power precisely because they are good and decent, and politics in the region request lies and deceit. The Kirchners are masters of this art of lies, leading Argentines into the uncertain path of war, the clumsy apology of enemies taken as friends, and the aggressive speeches against who should be instead the main ally. There is not yet a strong leader who personifies the opposite position and who can be clearly perceived on the side of truth and best Argentine interests. In the coming weeks, continental affairs may get sour, because of the wrong doing of leaders as Chavez and his partners. It would be time, in Argentina as well as in the United States, to give again some public space to the traditional and democratic project of a Pan-American union , such as the now forgotten Free Trade Area for the Americas. In this union of the Americas, military alliances would be openly considered and discussed along with the usual trade issues.

In the 21st century, the politically uncultured chatter about colonial wars and paranoid sequels looks definitely misplaced and describes well the lack of modernity of many of Latin American leaders, who still see the world with a nineteen century mental frame. Continental safety matters to all the people of the Americas, and contradicting Clemenceau, we could say this time: "War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to politicians." Less to those who actually haven’t learned history’s lessons, or updated those they heard a long time ago.