Boomerang Politics or the way the world might look upside down...

    There is a well-known weapon which pre-industrial tribes used to use in Australia which can either hit a desired object or come back towards the thrower. A verbal example of that was recently used by Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, referring to the U.S. military base at Manta, whose lease expires in less than two years.

 

    Correa said he would accept renewal of the base "on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami--an Ecuadorian base. If there is no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil, surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States."

 

     It doesn't seem very likely that President George Bush or whoever follows him would say: "O.K. That's fine! Tit-for-tat. Why not come to Florida and set up your own military base here?"

 

     The base at Manta is theoretically a staging area for the "war on drugs," but as everyone knows U.S. bases are used for many purposes not mentioned in public: for example, in neighboring Colombia there is a multi-million dollar military aid program which is supposed to be aimed at curbing illegal drug traffiking but likewise is aimed at the continent's longest living guerrilla organization, the FRAC.    

     During the decade of the 1970's, that is, during the "Cold War" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the continent was caught in the net of an international struggle that had little to do with its own particular interests. For the past thirty-five years economist Milton Friedman's ideas--tax cuts, free trade privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation, etc. became the rule of the day. They were imposed to a great extent by military regimes such as that of Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, nudged into power with help from Washington. Other dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Central America followed the same pattern of "economic shock treatment."

 

     In an article entitled "Latin America's Shock Resistance, Naoimi Klein adds: "These economic shock therapy programs were facilitated by far less metaphorical shocks--performed in the region's many torture cells, often by US-trained soldiers in Latin America."

    

      Friedman has maintained that "only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." Translation: sometimes it becomes necessary to invent a crisis in order to facilitate the imposition of economic policies on the menu of international corporations.

    A glance around the continent shows towards the 1980's the replacement of military regimes with very fragile democracies, most of which continued to apply the essence of Friedman's notions. In Argentina, for example, President Carlos Menem proudly proclaimed "carnal" relations with the United States and proceeded to privitise right and left.

    The problem of shock treatment is to determine the direction to be taken following recovery. Following the 2001 debt crisis in Argentina, the country evolved towards economic policies strongly questioning the previous no-holds-barred market economics....and it has been growing over the past few years by around 8%. In Venezuela President Hugo Chavez went much further: he proclaimed his own version of socialism. 

      In November 2006, Ecuador's presidential elections turned into an ideological battleground between Rafael Correa, a 43-year-old left-wing economist and Álvaro Noboa, a banana tycoon and one of the richest men in the country. Correa called for the country "to overcome all the fallacies of neoliberalism" and won. By the time he took office Bolivian President Evo Morales, of indigenous extraction, was already approaching the end of his first year in office and advanced towards recuperating oil and mineral resources for the State.

      There are many other examples of boomerang politics--and there will certainly be more in the future.