The dramatic call for "insurrection" by deposed Honduran president Mel Zelaya and the 72 hour ultimatum issued by the Organization of American States (OAS) are reminders of how just much the stakes have escalated since negotiator Oscar Arias won the Nobel Prize trying to bring peace to his region a generation ago. Mara Salvatrucha gangs now exercise the same de-facto government status the Mafia once had in Sicily thanks to a wide berth from Zelaya. His main backer, Venezuela, is now a Russian client giving the Kremlin a beachhead in South America. Sandinista lite Nicaragua has become the poorest nation in the Americas. And Cuba, apparently still sponsoring terrorism, was reinstated to the OAS in a Zelaya organized effort just days before his army removed him from power.
Hondurans earning $1800 a year in real wages and neighboring Nicaraguans earning just $475 want economic equity,effectivo, not the social equity that US president Barack Obama's foreign policy vision offers them.
More social unrest in Latin America could complicate Washington's emerging soft power strategy, which morphs the US from global superpower to kinder gentler top cop for the world economic order. Obama wants to take the war out of the war on drugs while Honduran gangs who haven't had their alpha drives stepped on by Harry Potter books sell crack in Chicago for less than a value meal. No 40 hour work week, no problem; sweatshop labor issues get wrapped in a tidy package by consultants like former assistant secretary of state Otto Reich.
To complement the makeover of American might one would expect Washington to have top line intelligence and embassy resources to not only predict but prevent getting blindsided by diplomatic train wrecks like Honduras. The fact that they didn't show up gives legs to the Miami Herald story in which Fidel Castro blames Zelaya's ouster on the US Embassy in Honduras.
The White House denounced the action in Honduras as "illegal." But that call requires Washington to cut off all but humanitarian aid and could jeopardize the big Soto Cano base outside Tegucigalpa used by a large contingent of US military and civilian advisers that is critical to Pentagon regional security strategy and logistics.
Known as Palmerola, when the US armed the Contras and return trips carried contraband back to governor Bill Clinton's Arkansas, the base boasts runways long enough to handle C-5 aircraft carrying 219,000 pounds of helicopters, troops and weapons. NGOs, wonks and media amping up the noise to volume ratio for the US to end its military presence in Honduras might ask themselves just how comfortable they'd feel when Russia exploits the power vacuum their recommendations would create. Although mafia drug war games have become the rage on Facebook, the realpolitik reveals Honduras as a pawn in a geopolitical picture larger than what the Obama administration likes to paint.
Prospects of an Obama flip-flop on Honduras and Zelaya's friendship with Fidel and Raul Castro and the Venezuela-Russia connection play into the hands of Republicans searching for issues in the run up to mid-term elections. Thanks to Jimmy Carter's giveaway for globalism, Chinese interests operate the key ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. Iran is trying to sensitize Latin America's large middle eastern population to the politics of revolutionary Islam and working with Venezuela and Russia to broker nuclear technology to the highest bidder.
Prospects of having Ahmadinejad tag team with Venezuela on nuke deals when Hugo Chavez is having a Prozac moment has caused enough consternation that in a meeting earlier this year with Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Saudi Arabia agreed to authorize overflights by Israeli aircraft in the event facilities in Iran need to be taken out.
So far, $20 million in cutbacks in aid to Honduras have been announced. But influential Cuban-American congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee with strong ties to Miami anti-Castro groups, has formally requested to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that aid to Honduras not be stopped. Zelaya's visit with Fidel and Raul Castro in Havana did little to raise his popularity among her constituents. Obama's relations with Cuban Americans could become more problematic now that assistant secretary of state-designate, Arturo Valenzuela, recently testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the full rehabilitation of Castro's Cuba is the crowning achievement of the Inter-American system.
As long as globalism and free markets fail to distribute wealth more equitably relative deprivation and political instability will ratchet up. Latin Americans know that dollars, drugs and NAFTA flow north and south, But Washington took the Latin out of Latin America during Bill Clinton's presidency, with the State Department servicing the southern hemisphere with an assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. That job, in its various makeovers, has the highest churn rate of all regional assistant secretaries of state in the post World War II era. As Oscar Arias said in his 1987 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "peace has no finish line."