By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

The Barack Obama pres­i­dency was sup­posed to sig­nal a new era in U.S. for­eign pol­icy, includ­ing in Latin Amer­ica, which had turned deci­sively against George Bush’s blus­ter­ing, bul­ly­ing and coup-making. What has emerged under Obama is not a rever­sal of his­toric U.S. impe­r­ial poli­cies in the Amer­i­cas, but a cos­metic adjust­ment.Pres­i­dent Obama uses far less war­like lan­guage than his pre­de­ces­sor, but he deploys every trick and deceit in the book to main­tain U.S. dom­i­nance in the region. And like all bul­lies who have had their noses blood­ied, he tries to cre­ate fear in the hemi­sphere by pick­ing on the smaller countries.

For most of the 20^th cen­tury, Haiti and Hon­duras were de facto colonies of the United States. Haiti was occu­pied by the U.S. mil­i­tary for nearly 20 years, between 1915 and 1934. Hon­duras was the orig­i­nal, pro­to­typ­i­cal “banana repub­lic,” ruled by a local oli­garchy totally sub­servient to the United States. Both Haiti and Hon­duras are prime exam­ples of a U.S. strat­egy to under-develop its neigh­bors – a delib­er­ate pol­icy of impov­er­ish­ment and petty tyranny.

“What has emerged under Obama is not a rever­sal of his­toric U.S. impe­r­ial poli­cies in the Amer­i­cas, but a cos­metic adjustment.”

In Haiti, the U.S. proxy is the United Nations, which took over the job of mil­i­tary occu­pier from George Bush in 2004, after the Amer­i­cans sent demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide into exile. Aristide’s Lavalas Fam­ily party has been sup­pressed ever since.

In Hon­duras, the Amer­i­cans still find it pos­si­ble to act in the old-fashioned way, through the local oli­garchy and its U.S.-dominated mil­i­tary. Back in June, the Hon­duran mil­i­tary bun­dled demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected Pres­i­dent Manuel Zelaya into a plane, made a stop at a U.S. air­base, and sent him into exile in Costa Rica. Zelaya then snuck back into Hon­duras, liv­ing under the pro­tec­tion of the Brazil­ian embassy. The U.S., stand­ing vir­tu­ally alone in the hemi­sphere and the world, refused to call the removal of Pres­i­dent Zelaya a coup, and announced that Wash­ing­ton would rec­og­nize the results of last weekend’s elec­tions to suc­ceed Zelaya even though they were held under mil­i­tary mar­tial law. Hon­durans who opposed the coup had no one to vote for, so of course, the oligarchy’s can­di­date won in a very low turnout.

Pres­i­dent Aristide’s party was last week barred from tak­ing part in leg­isla­tive elec­tions sched­uled for Feb­ru­ary, in Haiti. The oligarchy-controlled elec­tions com­mis­sion claimed the party failed to fill out some forms prop­erly. Back in June, only about ten per­cent of the peo­ple turned out for elec­tions in which Aristide’s party was excluded.

These two elec­toral trav­es­ties are the true face of Pres­i­dent Obama’s pol­icy on democ­racy in the Amer­i­cas. Wher­ever the U.S. has the power to thwart the demo­c­ra­tic process, it does so, and then bides its time, wait­ing for another oppor­tu­nity to stab its neigh­bors in the back. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

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