Does Latin American Anti-Americanism Herald the Coming of a New World Order?
Image courtesy of Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash
“In some countries, the oligarchy reigns with the facade of democracy”
said President of Mexico Andres Manual Lopez Obrador (colloquially known by his initials, AMLO) in a not-so-vague allusion to the United States during his March 29, 2023 virtual speech to the U.S.-hosted Summit for Democracy, a gathering of countries both democratic and not, strategically handpicked by the U.S. This announcement came mere days afterRepublican members of the United States Congress proposed a bill to unilaterally invade Mexico under the pretense of combating drug cartels. AMLO exclaimed, “Mexico is a free and independent country, not a colony or protectorate of the United States.” It also followed AMLO’s earlier statement after a February 28 press conference, in which he claimed “They still will not abandon the two-century-old policy, the Monroe Doctrine, of thinking of themselves as the world’s government.”
AMLO’s various anti-American comments are novel to a modern Mexican leader, as the nation has, for decades, been led by administrations denounced by AMLO as a “neoliberal oligarchy” itself. However, across Latin America, anti-Americanism is something of a time-honored tradition—one that has become more popular as of late with the resurrection of the “Pink Tide”—a wave of center- to far left-wing governments that have come to power across almost every country in the region since the beginning of the 2020s, after temporarily subsiding in the early 2010s. Gustavo Petro, Columbia's first ever leftist president elected in 2022, has repeatedly lambasted the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs, which he claims has ravaged his country. Alberto Fernandez, Argentina’s center-left president in power since 2019, has rebuked the United States for excluding several Latin American nations from the Summit of the Americas (Nicuragua, Venezuela, and Cuba specifically) and other institutions. Luis Acre, Bolivia's leftist president in power since 2020, has denounced the United States’ practice of imposing unilateral sanctions on non-cooperative states, and Lula Da Silva, Brazil’s center-left president, has criticized the unfair advantage granted to the United States by the U.S. dollar being the world's reserve currency. And of course, there are the long-established leftist governments of the region—Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua—for whom anti-Americanism forms an integral part of their political identity.
These examples may seem cherrypicked, however, this isn’t because these Latin American leaders rarely propound anti-American ideas but because explicit and implicit anti-Americanism is a fundamental aspect of these left-wing leaders' anti-neoliberal and anti-colonial agendas. Moreover, anti-Americanism is not limited to the rhetoric of this resurgent cohort of Latin American socialists but is arguably even more pronounced in their policies than in those of other political groups.
Since the dawn of the millennium, countries across Latin America have gradually decreased their reliance on trade and investment from the United States and increased economic and political cooperation between other non-Western powers—particularly the Washington's greatest rival, China, has replaced the United States as the largest trading partner of Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Bolivia. In 2001, while serving his first term as president of Brazil, Lula Da Silva organized the first formal summit of the BRIC countries (now BRICS+), which is a grouping of developing economies (also including Russia, India, China, South Africa) seen by analysts as a countervailing force against NATO and other United States allies. In 2014, the BRICS+ created the New Development Bank, a financial institution with the stated goal of creating a new global reserve currency, intended as an alternative to the United States-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In addition, Latin American nations under the first and second Pink Tides have reversed much of the neoliberal policies imposed by regimes installed by U.S.-backed coups or policies created under the Washington Consensus. Another core focus for the region recently has been increasing integration—a major step toward which was the preliminary announcement of a new regional currency known as the “Sur” between Brazil and Argentina, which is intended to one day be adopted by the entire region.
Anti-American rhetoric and policies are predominantly a left-wing phenomenon in Latin America, whereas right-wing political movements tend to view the United States more favorably. However, another important aspect of anti-Americanism across the region is its inextricable link to populism—a political phenomenon which spans the Latin American political spectrum. The more populist a Latin American socialist politician tends to be, the more anti-American they are as well. Anti-Americanism is utilized by populist rhetoric to create a narrative in which the United States is framed for policy failures in Latin America due to its meddling in regional affairs, as well as the view that the United States is the hegemon that enables rich, white, industrial countries of the global North to exploit the poor, colored, and underdeveloped countries of the global South through neoliberal capitalism and neocolonial imperialism. The question then becomes: Is this rise in anti-American rhetoric and policy a genuine grievance against an unjust and exploitative international system operating for the benefit of the American empire. Or, is it fodder for populist politicians trying to justify their own power-lust by turning away from the liberal democratic West and pivoting toward the supposed despotism of China, Russia, and the like?
In some senses, both are true and false.. The United States does have a long, sordid history of imperial expansion and meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations. In Latin America, that legacy stretches back the longest, from the annexation of half of Mexico’s territory with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 to the installation of Banana Republics in the first decades of the twentieth century. For the rest of the world, since the United States emerged from the Second World War as the paramount superpower, its imperial ambitions have primarily consisted of efforts intended to maintain that hegemonic position. International institutions often accused of being weapons for the maintenance of unipolarity include: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as the Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization–which granted the U.S. dollar the exorbitant privilege of being the world’s reserve currency–as well as the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment programs on developing economies across the Global South, which have been shown to exacerbate inequality and instability and enable Western-based multinational corporations to extract and exploit these poor countries resources and labor. Other bad habits of U.S foreign policy which engender anti-Americanism abroad include: fighting proxy wars to contain rival influence, undermining and meddling in foreign elections, backing military dictatorships, and using U.S intelligence agencies to spy and interfere in the affairs of allied and enemy nations alike.
On the other hand, there is a realpolitik dimension to Latin American anti-Americanism. The rapid modernization of the post-colonial world has seen non-western societies, such as India and especially China, which for millennia were the most wealthy and powerful on Earth, beginning to reclaim their place on the world stage after centuries of European domination. The relative power of the United States as the unipolar world superpower is widely perceived as having declined since its apex in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War, and many scholars have even speculated that a second Cold War is beginning to brew between a declining West, a rising China, and their respective allies. Evidence commonly cited for this include the abundant support given by the United States to Ukraine in that country’s war against Chinese-allied Russia, the escalation of military brinksmanship around Taiwan, as well as the increasingly virulent anti-Chinese rhetoric of the United States’ political establishment.
Of course, there is another alternative explanation as well. It may be possible Latin America is following in the footsteps of the Cold War’s non-aligned movement, cooperating with both East and West only insofar as benefits its own people while refusing to be played like a pawn of great power politics. Latin America’s relationship with China, in some respects, has much more resembled one of mutually beneficial cooperation than of domination and subordination as it has historically had with the United States. Regional integration efforts also support this hypothesis, as Latin America unified behind a common vision could mobilize the population and resources necessary to become a great power in its own right.
Let’s return to AMLO’s comment: “In some countries, the oligarchy reigns with the facade of democracy.” Suppose that was true of the United States. Is a Chinese-dominated world order, which reigns without the façade of democracy, a superior alternative? Or, perhaps, Beijing doesn’t intend on using hegemony to impose their political and economic systems upon other nations the way the United States has during its time in the sun? If you examine the record, Chinese foreign policy has seen far greater respect for national sovereignty than the United States ever has. Answering either of those questions is beyond the scope of this article; however, one thing does seem clear—if the speculators are right and the decline of the United States and rise of China is shaping into a second Cold War, anti-American rhetoric and policies from the current camp of left-wing leaders indicate Latin America is leaning closer to the Chinese bloc. Whether the region will simply be trading one imperial master for another or emerge as a rising pole in a rapidly approaching multipolar world order, still remains to be seen.
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