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I think what has happened is that the crude methods of the Bush Junta--and there were many--simply didn't work in the face of an historic, peaceful, leftist democracy revolution that has swept most of South America and parts of Central America.
They tried a coup d'etat in Venezuela. Didn't work. The Venezuelan people peacefully repelled it.
They tried an oil bosses' lockout in Venezuela, to cripple Venezuela's economy. Same result.
They tried a USAID-funded recall election in Venezuela. Chavez won it, hands down.
They tried a lot of things to overthrow the FIRST of the leftist democracy revolutions--and failed.
THEN Brazil elected a leftist--Lula da Silva. The revolution in Venezuela caught fire throughout the region, leading to a profound new regional consensus about Latin American governments serving their people. Lula da Silva quickly allied himself with Chavez, and met monthly with Chavez to strategize on several issues, including U.S. hostility to democracy and social justice in Latin America and its continued efforts to sabotage this revolution and to restore its bullying dominance, and, among those strategies was to PULL THE REGION TOGETHER--to have each other's backs and to "raise all boats" (both within their countries, as to endemic poverty and between countries, rich countries helping poor countries, big helping small). Mutual prosperity--the well-being of the whole region--was/is the goal.
The writer dwells on Brazil, as if it sprang out of nowhere. What is sprang out of was Lula da Silva's agreement with Chavez that things had to change, very fundamentally, both in Latin America's relations with the U.S. and in Latin American countries' relations with each other. There were others involved. Nestor Kirchner, in Argentina. His wife, Cristina Fernadez (who is now president). And eventually, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua--as more and more countries elected leftist governments--and not just leftist but also visionary governments with a new paradigm in mind for Latin America: independence, cooperation, social justice.
I think the writer is well-intended, but he misses a great deal. The Bush Junta's crude methods didn't stop with all their efforts to topple the Chavez government. They included funding and support (right out of the U.S. embassy) for white separatist rioters and murderers in Bolivia, to overthrow Evo Morales--the hugely popular, first Indigenous president of Bolivia--a very important moment in Latin American history, with the region quickly pulling together and strongly backing Morales, when he threw the U.S. ambassador out of the country. From this, UNASUR was born (this was UNASUR'S first crisis and first action--it had been formalized a few months prior)--membership, all South American countries. Not the U.S. Not Canada. And recently, CELAC was formed, membership, all Latin American countries. No U.S. No Canada. (CELAC has been called the anti-OAS. The OAS is headquartered in Washington DC and dominated by the U.S. CELAC is headquartered, by common consent, in Caracas, Venezuela, and neither Brazil nor Venezuela is likely to dominate it, because they don't want to. Their purpose is to encourage democracy, cooperation and social justice.)
There are many more instances of Bush Junta attempted interference. And U.S. interference and attempted interference did not stop with the Bush Junta--f.i., the successful rightwing/military coup in Honduras, intended, as one of its generals stated, to "prevent communism in Venezuela from reaching the United States." Brazil continued to fight the U.S. on that coup through last month when an agreement was reached about constitutional reform in Honduras and former President Mel Zelaya's return.
Then there is CAFTA (U.S. corporate colonization of Central America), the U.S./Peru "free trade for the rich" agreement (hasn't helped the poor in Peru, which just elected a leftist president), the proposed U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement, the thousands of murders of trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, peasant farmers, Indigenous leaders, journalists and others, in Colombia, under color of the U.S. "war on drugs" and with $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid, the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement (yet more U.S. military bases and 'forward operating locations") (--it was declared unconstitutional by the Colombian Supreme Court, but still...that's hardly "ignoring" Latin America); the U.S. (Bush Junta) reconstitution of the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, and on and on.
Far from "ignoring" Latin America, it's beyond doubt, in my mind, that the Bush Junta was preparing for Oil War II: South America. (Note: Lula da Silva said of the U.S. 4th Fleet that it presented "a threat to Brazil's oil"! Everybody south of the border knows that it was a threat to Venezuela's. Da Silva then proposed a common defense, to UNASUR.)
The real story is that these brutal, bullying Reaganish methods HAVEN'T WORKED. Brazil is very big and has a lot of resources, which are being well-managed, but Brazil is part of a political, economic and moral consensus that encompasses the whole region, and to single it out, as some sort of miraculous economic eruption, that occurred because of U.S. "neglect," is myopic and fundamentally wrong. Call it the "Ayn Rand syndrome." Writers steeped in "dog eat dog" capitalism like singular, glitzy, go-it-alone heroes, and can't fathom cooperation and a whole society--let alone a whole region--improving their economies TOGETHER as a COMMUNAL effort to benefit EVERYONE. Both the Bush Junta and the Obama administration have tried to split Brazil off from this consensus--a "divide and conquer" strategy--and both have failed.
The writer quotes da Silva about Brazil paying off its IMF debt. But prior to that, Venezuela had helped Argentina pay off its IMF debt, and had originated the idea of the Bank of the South, to keep development funds local. Brazil used its economic clout, along with Argentina, as Bolivia's chief gas customers, against the white separatists (whose provinces contain Bolivia's gas reserves--they wanted to split off their provinces; Brazil and Argentina refused to trade with them). Da Silva also helped Paraguay re-negotiate its hydro-electric contracts with Brazilian companies. (Paraguay's poor were getting a raw deal). In summary, Brazil and all of its allies have been creating PARTNERS, with goals of cooperation and social justice, and they've also been creating a "level playing field" as to multinational corporate contracts in their countries, with countries from all over the world competing, and having to make social justice concessions, instead of U.S. corporations getting all the profits and leaving devastation and poverty behind.
I've seen this kind of glitzifying of Brazil before, and have sometimes suspected corporate writers of promoting the U.S. corporate/war profiteer agenda of "divide and conquer." I don't think that is the case with this writer--but I don't know him or the web site well enough to be sure. It is certainly a good thing for readers who want to understand our government's foreign policy, for business people, for travelers, students and others to focus on Latin America and the remarkable changes that are occurring there, and their lessons for us. But be careful of it being the wrong focus, or a distorted focus. This writer has done more than the usual research on Brazil--you won't find even this level of depth in most of the corporate press--but he has missed the context for Brazil's prosperity and is wrong about the U.S. "ignoring" the region.
He should have given Lula a call. In his last speech in office, recently (his protege Dilma Rousseff was elected as his successor), Lula said, "The U.S. has not changed."
He was not talking about U.S. "neglect." He was talking about on-going U.S. interference in the interest of its corporations and war profiteers. And he was speaking of Obama as well as Bush.
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