The truth
is that nobody pays attention to Chávez. Why? The answer
came from political scientist George Friedman in a recent column:
because Chávez, Castro and Morales -- despite the folksy,
verbal pyrotechnics they like to flash -- are irrelevant.
True, Chávez
sells 16 percent of the crude oil imported by the United States,
but -- his bark notwithstanding -- he has no better customers
for his merchandise than the Americans. In turn, the United States
sees an oil-producing country with which it can do business, regardless
of the hostility and the verbal abuse emanating from the man who
rules and manages it.
After all,
what the United States wants from Venezuela is not the courtesy
of its politicians but the fuel it can buy there.
Friedman
goes beyond Venezuela in his cold analysis of the relations between
the U.S. and South America, however. Seen from Washington's perspective,
the whole region is irrelevant, he writes, except for the immigration
problem, which is a matter that affects principally its links
with Mexico.
Objectively
speaking, all Washington sees south of the Rio Grande is a bunch
of backward countries that sell raw materials or farm products
but have an ever-decreasing share of international trade and are
practically nonexistent in the scientific, academic, military
and financial fields. They -- we -- count for little in the big
questions being debated worldwide.
Friedman's
column, written for U.S. consumption, is not an isolated opinion.
A recent column by Marcos Aguinis, one of the most brilliant Latin
American writers, said more or less the same in connection with
the successful book Cuentos Chinos (Chinese Tales), by Miami
Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer.
As Oppenheimer
pointed out, while China and India -- countries that account for
more than one-third of the world's population, have strong links
with the developed world and are bursting at the seams with engineers
and scientists -- gained increasing importance as manufacturers
of complex products with great added value, Latin America gradually
fell behind the central nuclei of civilization, basically the
United States-Canada, Europe and Japan.
Greatly concerned,
Aguinis recalled another tragic region of the planet where something
similar occurred on a scale even more dramatic: Africa. Africa
is also irrelevant and is taken into account only when some catastrophe
or extraordinary massacre is reflected in newspaper headlines.
I might even
add another interesting case of decivilization: Turkey. From being
one of the world's mightiest empires in the 16th and 17th centuries
and perhaps the first Mediterranean power, Turkey after World
War II became merely a poor and disoriented nation without the
slightest specific weight in world affairs.
If these
analyses are right, as I sadly suspect they are, their most important
inference is that wise Latin Americans realize it is senseless
to sit around and wait for the international community to pull
their chestnuts out of the fire
No foreign
power will fight fiercely to rescue from failure those who persist
on taking the wrong road. If most Latin Americans insist on walking
away from the standards of behavior of the First World and waste
their time and resources on the costly neopopulist pipe dreams
proposed by Chávez and the rest of the madmen running loose
in the region, no powerful nation will make much of an effort
to steer them in the right direction.
During the
Cold War, when the game was zero-sum and every country that moved
into the Soviet sphere meant a loss for the West, the Americans
conceived the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps to counteract
Moscow's influence. But those incentives to stimulate international
solidarity no longer exist. Prevailing in the world today is the
absolute freedom to leap into the abyss.
