Latin America to U.S.: So Long, Jerk

"Bye bye, America. Thank you for nothing!" says Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

It looks a lot like the beneficent and subversive spirit of Hugo Chavez’s annual donation of 100 million gallons of heating oil to impoverished families in the United States for the last four years has spread to Venezuela’s neighbors. Some nations of Latin America are growing increasingly unified in their progressive drug policies recently, and it appears that the changes are, in part, a means of pulling down the pants of the common bully of the region, the United States.

It’s difficult to not root for Latin America a little bit as it rallies against the U.S. Ever since the United Fruit Company set up shop as a tool for industrial colonialism in 1899, the region has been exploited politically by America. This exploitation peaked during the Cold War, especially in the 1980s: the U.S. ambassador to every Latin American country was a CIA plant. The CIA trained the Honduran army in the art of torture which it, in turn, practiced on its Leftist countrymen. Insurgent right-wing paramilitary groups were covertly trained and armed by the CIA in countries where left-wing regimes held power and countries where the right was in power received even more covert aid.

Latin America became a Cold War proxy battlefield between the Soviets and the U.S., the former looking to gain a foothold in America’s back yard and the latter trying to prevent a Leftist domino effect to its south. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans died during the civil wars that were supported, encouraged and implemented by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. America’s involvement in Latin America continued as the Cold War was replaced by the Drug War, where the U.S. attacked the supply side of Latin America, rather than focus on the demand side within its own borders.

So one can see how the cascade of laxening drug policy that’s moving across Latin America can be viewed as something of an affront to the United States. Last August, while engaged in a real-life drug war, Mexico’s federal government decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of LSD, crystal meth, heroin, marijuana, cocaine and — one would imagine — model airplane glue.

The Fog City Journal says that other Latin American countries are in the process of implementing similar policies. A week following Mexico’s decriminalization, the Argentine supreme court ruled that arresting drug users is unconstitutional. Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador all have similar measures in the works. The moves are part of a changing attitude toward drug use in much of Latin America — from the realm of crime to a disease model of addiction and a nonchalant shrug toward non-addictive drugs like pot and acid.

The change in policy and attitude toward drugs is a major departure from the region’s ties to the U.S. Countries that were once partners in America’s War on Drugs have not only signaled the end of their involvement in it, they are beginning to institute policies that undermine the very rhetoric it is based on: that drugs can be eradicated through police and military force within the context of a war. The policy change suggests that as a democracy the U.S. is behind the curve with its certain clumsy, hawkish and unproven mentality that anything can be gotten rid of if you shoot enough bullets at it.

This break up has manifested itself literally as well as symbolically. The Progressive reports that following a private military attack that left dozens of Bolivian civilians dead after the country’s left-leaning president was elected, the U.S. ambassador to the country was accused of supporting the right-wing insurgency and expelled from the country in September 2008. The country has since officially ended its cooperation with the U.S. Shortly after, Venezuela expelled the U.S. ambassador to its country as well. In Ecuador, the government said that the United States would be allowed to renew the lease for its military base if the U.S. allowed Ecuador to construct one of its own in Miami. The U.S. declined the swap and the U.S. military has been forced out of Ecuador’s borders.

You can’t keep a continent under your thumb forever, I guess.

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