The Americas Blog seeks to present a more accurate perspective on economic and political developments in the Western Hemisphere than is often presented in the United States. It will provide information that is often ignored, buried, and sometimes misreported in the major U.S. media.
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Jake Johnston wrote a great piece about Chávez’s legacy in Haiti on the Haiti Reconstruction and Relief Watch blog. He writes:
Last week, after the passing of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Haiti declared three days of national mourning. President Martelly stated that Chávez was a “great friend of Haiti who never missed an opportunity to express his solidarity with the Haitian people in their most difficult times.” It’s not the first time Martelly had such kind words for the Venezuelan president. Last year, Martelly told the press that it was Venezuelan aid that was “the most important in Haiti right now in terms of impact, direct impact.” In February, Martelly attended the 11th summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas, a regional political organization spearheaded by Venezuela, and announced that Haiti was debating joining the group as a full member. While most of the coverage around Chávez’s legacy in Haiti and the greater Caribbean has focused on the Petrocaribe initiative, which provides subsidized fuel to the region, Chávez developed close ties to the Haitian people well before Petrocaribe. Following the earthquake of 2010, Chávez, in cancelling Haiti’s debt to Venezuela, declared, “Haiti has no debt with Venezuela — on the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti.” As Chávez was quick to point out, it was Haiti that provided a vital safe-haven for Latin American independence hero Símon Bolívar before he went on to liberate much of South America from Spanish rule.
Opposition to 2004 Coup
In 2004, following the U.S.-backed coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Chávez was one of only a few voices in the region condemning what had taken place and refusing to recognize the coup government. Chávez told the Organization of American States that, “The President of Haiti is called Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and he was elected by the people.” He formally extended an offer of asylum to Aristide in March of 2004. Perhaps the solidarity was in part due to the fact that just two years previously Chávez had been temporarily ousted in a coup, and similar actors were involved in both the Venezuelan and Haitian coups. As detailed in a 2004 investigation by Mother Jones, the International Republican Institute was active in both organizing and training those involved in the 2004 coup in Haiti as well as opposition factions before the 2002 coup in Venezuela, and its point man in Haiti at the time – Stanley Lucas, now an advisor to Martelly – had been in Venezuela some seven times prior to the coup. Senior Bush administration officials Roger Noriega and Otto Reich also actively supported both theVenezuelan and Haitian coups.
Click here to read the complete post.
Jake Johnston wrote a great piece about Chávez’s legacy in Haiti on the Haiti Reconstruction and Relief Watch blog. He writes:
Last week, after the passing of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Haiti declared three days of national mourning. President Martelly stated that Chávez was a “great friend of Haiti who never missed an opportunity to express his solidarity with the Haitian people in their most difficult times.” It’s not the first time Martelly had such kind words for the Venezuelan president. Last year, Martelly told the press that it was Venezuelan aid that was “the most important in Haiti right now in terms of impact, direct impact.” In February, Martelly attended the 11th summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas, a regional political organization spearheaded by Venezuela, and announced that Haiti was debating joining the group as a full member. While most of the coverage around Chávez’s legacy in Haiti and the greater Caribbean has focused on the Petrocaribe initiative, which provides subsidized fuel to the region, Chávez developed close ties to the Haitian people well before Petrocaribe. Following the earthquake of 2010, Chávez, in cancelling Haiti’s debt to Venezuela, declared, “Haiti has no debt with Venezuela — on the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti.” As Chávez was quick to point out, it was Haiti that provided a vital safe-haven for Latin American independence hero Símon Bolívar before he went on to liberate much of South America from Spanish rule.
Opposition to 2004 Coup
In 2004, following the U.S.-backed coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Chávez was one of only a few voices in the region condemning what had taken place and refusing to recognize the coup government. Chávez told the Organization of American States that, “The President of Haiti is called Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and he was elected by the people.” He formally extended an offer of asylum to Aristide in March of 2004. Perhaps the solidarity was in part due to the fact that just two years previously Chávez had been temporarily ousted in a coup, and similar actors were involved in both the Venezuelan and Haitian coups. As detailed in a 2004 investigation by Mother Jones, the International Republican Institute was active in both organizing and training those involved in the 2004 coup in Haiti as well as opposition factions before the 2002 coup in Venezuela, and its point man in Haiti at the time – Stanley Lucas, now an advisor to Martelly – had been in Venezuela some seven times prior to the coup. Senior Bush administration officials Roger Noriega and Otto Reich also actively supported both theVenezuelan and Haitian coups.
Click here to read the complete post.
In an article by William Neuman, the New York Times reports that “Venezuela had one of the lowest rates of economic growth in the region during the 14 years that Mr. Chávez held office, according to World Bank data.”
According to the latest IMF data, which is the same as World Bank data but includes 2012, Venezuela ranks 15th out of 33 countries in Latin America and Caribbean in GDP growth for 1999-2012. Countries that grew slower than Venezuela during this period include Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and 10 other countries.
In an article by William Neuman, the New York Times reports that “Venezuela had one of the lowest rates of economic growth in the region during the 14 years that Mr. Chávez held office, according to World Bank data.”
According to the latest IMF data, which is the same as World Bank data but includes 2012, Venezuela ranks 15th out of 33 countries in Latin America and Caribbean in GDP growth for 1999-2012. Countries that grew slower than Venezuela during this period include Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and 10 other countries.
Jonathan Schwarz, editor of MichaelMoore.com, wrote a brilliant takedown last week of Sean Wilentz, historian and friend of Hillary Clinton who was angered by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States. Wilentz’s long diatribe against Stone and Kuznick’s book (also a 10-part film series on Showtime) in the New York Review of Books isn’t much worth reading. He never really challenges the main thesis of Stone and Kunzick that, with his generally unprovable and superficial objections, he is trying to undermine: that the United States is really an empire, and that empire has been, and remains today, the driving force of U.S. foreign policy; and that actual “national security” concerns have only rarely had anything substantial to do with our wars and assaults on other peoples, including involvement in dictatorships, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, and even genocide. (Stone and Kuznick’s response is here.)
But Schwarz’s response is a very nice read. He nails it when he says that if Cold War liberals like Wilentz were right,
“U.S. cold war policies should have ended with the cold war itself. If the leftists were right, U.S. policies would have continued almost completely unchanged – except for the pretexts provided to Americans.”
A couple of billion people or so throughout the world understand how that turned out. But Schwarz hammers it home because it is apparently not so clear among some intellectuals and journalists here in the heart of the “free world.”
Cold War liberalism was a curse during the Cold War, and remains so today. It is the dominant framework in discussions about Latin America today, and not just on the right – which conjures up fantasies about left-leaning Latin American countries supporting terrorist camps with Iran – but also among the liberal foreign policy establishment that occupies most of the media space. In 2009 almost all of these liberals, including journalists, editors, and prominent human rights groups, looked the other way when Washington helped the coup-installed government of Honduras legitimize itself. Most of them even pretended that the Obama administration was trying to help restore democracy, when there was a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The deposed, democratically-elected president Mel Zelaya eventually told the world that the Obama administration was actually behind the coup, and there is every reason to believe him, given all the circumstantial evidence. But don’t expect any investigations or even investigative reporting to shed more light on what the Obama administration actually did to support the coup.
The good news is that Washington today is mostly limited to preying upon weakest, poorest countries in this region, like Honduras and Haiti. Most of the rest of the region, for the past 15 years, has finally been free to elect their own governments without a U.S. veto. But we can’t thank Cold War liberals like Sean Wilentz – who felt compelled to raise questions about Obama’s relations with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential campaign – for that progress. This positive change is due to the fact that their friends have lost power in the hemisphere and the world.
Jonathan Schwarz, editor of MichaelMoore.com, wrote a brilliant takedown last week of Sean Wilentz, historian and friend of Hillary Clinton who was angered by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States. Wilentz’s long diatribe against Stone and Kuznick’s book (also a 10-part film series on Showtime) in the New York Review of Books isn’t much worth reading. He never really challenges the main thesis of Stone and Kunzick that, with his generally unprovable and superficial objections, he is trying to undermine: that the United States is really an empire, and that empire has been, and remains today, the driving force of U.S. foreign policy; and that actual “national security” concerns have only rarely had anything substantial to do with our wars and assaults on other peoples, including involvement in dictatorships, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, and even genocide. (Stone and Kuznick’s response is here.)
But Schwarz’s response is a very nice read. He nails it when he says that if Cold War liberals like Wilentz were right,
“U.S. cold war policies should have ended with the cold war itself. If the leftists were right, U.S. policies would have continued almost completely unchanged – except for the pretexts provided to Americans.”
A couple of billion people or so throughout the world understand how that turned out. But Schwarz hammers it home because it is apparently not so clear among some intellectuals and journalists here in the heart of the “free world.”
Cold War liberalism was a curse during the Cold War, and remains so today. It is the dominant framework in discussions about Latin America today, and not just on the right – which conjures up fantasies about left-leaning Latin American countries supporting terrorist camps with Iran – but also among the liberal foreign policy establishment that occupies most of the media space. In 2009 almost all of these liberals, including journalists, editors, and prominent human rights groups, looked the other way when Washington helped the coup-installed government of Honduras legitimize itself. Most of them even pretended that the Obama administration was trying to help restore democracy, when there was a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The deposed, democratically-elected president Mel Zelaya eventually told the world that the Obama administration was actually behind the coup, and there is every reason to believe him, given all the circumstantial evidence. But don’t expect any investigations or even investigative reporting to shed more light on what the Obama administration actually did to support the coup.
The good news is that Washington today is mostly limited to preying upon weakest, poorest countries in this region, like Honduras and Haiti. Most of the rest of the region, for the past 15 years, has finally been free to elect their own governments without a U.S. veto. But we can’t thank Cold War liberals like Sean Wilentz – who felt compelled to raise questions about Obama’s relations with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential campaign – for that progress. This positive change is due to the fact that their friends have lost power in the hemisphere and the world.
