by ANDREA LOBO
Following a trip to Brazil, Chile and Colombia last month at the head of a US congressional delegation, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-linked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has confirmed that it was an operation to advance the hegemonic interests of US imperialism by offering a few cosmetic rhetorical changes.
During and since the trip, Ocasio-Cortez has repeated bromides like wanting “to learn from you” and comments based on undigested pieces of information to promote the farce that US imperialism has a “new” understanding and a democratizing mission in the region. The entire affair was a politically criminal attempt to provide a “left” cover for the ongoing policies of imperialist plunder and oppression.
The stop in Chile in the context of the 50th anniversary of the CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, was particularly revealing. The Richard Nixon administration played a key role in organizing the coup and subsequent bloodbath against left workers, peasants, and youth at the hands of the military-fascist junta under Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
The US congressional delegation held meetings with several top officials of the government led by the pseudo-left Broad Front coalition and the Stalinist Communist Party in Chile, including a barbecue with President Gabriel Boric. The American pseudo-lefts hailed “the efforts by Chile to defend and deepen democracy” during the anniversary and seconded an appeal by Boric for the Biden administration to declassify documents on the US participation in the coup.
Ocasio-Cortez said that such a gesture “could launch a new century in the relations between the US and Chile.”
For months before the trip, however, the Boric administration had already been using the anniversary to accommodate itself to Washington, the Chilean military and the fascistic political successors of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Throughout July and August, Boric focused on convincing the far-right parties to sign statements commemorating the coup and vowing to “defend democracy,” only to help these forces conceal their historic support for the coup and authoritarian politics. Boric joined hands with his far-right predecessor, billionaire Sebastián Piñera, in signing such a statement even though one of his campaign promises only two years ago was to prosecute then President Piñera for human rights violations in the crushing of mass protests against inequality in 2019-2020, leaving dozens dead and thousands injured.
On August 25, days after the Ocasio-Cortez trip, the CIA declassified two briefs (one partially) informing then President Richard Nixon on the actions by the Chilean military during the coup. Peter Kornbluh, the National Security Archive Chile specialist said these documents “contain not a single sentence that could compromise U.S. national security” and called upon Biden to release “all documents that, inexplicably, remain secret after all this time.”
The cynical and purely symbolic release of the documents shows that the trip by Ocasio-Cortez was part of a policy developed from the White House and the State Department. Along the same lines, Biden has taken a much more active approach than his predecessors in meeting with “pink tide” Presidents Lula da Silva of Brazil, Gustavo Petro of Colombia, Gabriel Boric of Chile, and Argentina’s Alberto Fernández.
Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also announced on August 22, a day after Ocasio-Cortez’s trip ended, that the administration would urge the IMF and World Bank to offer a “positive, affirmative alternative” to Chinese credits for developing countries, which takes place amid calls for reforming those institutions by several Latin American governments.
Only last Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez met with Alberto Fernández in New York to manifest support for his administration as it appeals against IMF surcharges and opposes a US ruling favoring a vulture capital fund demanding $16 billion from Argentina.
“A trust problem”
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez said that US-Latin America relations were characterized by “a trust problem” that her trip hoped to help fix. The World Socialist Web Site sharply exposed this approach in an August 30 Perspective:
This is how the CIA might describe the consequences of the mass suffering and death created by the crimes of US imperialism in Central and South America. It’s all just a “trust problem,” rather than the irreconcilable conflict between the financial interests of US corporations and the basic needs of the Latin American masses.
In her interview with the New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez openly declared her support for US imperialism. “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize my foreign policy goals as oppositional to the president’s or to the United States,” she said, stressing that she has “sworn an oath to this country, and I take that oath very seriously.”
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