This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Latin America 20 years after 9/11: a missed opportunity

By:   []

Date: 2021-09 

The world had been changing before 11 September 2001, but the moment that planes brought down the towers in lower Manhattan, history began to accelerate in the wrong direction. An image of the fall of the American empire was fixed, sharply, in the retina of humanity.

Morning newscasts throughout Latin America could not believe what the gringo networks were broadcasting live, while the region’s population, half way between stupor and schadenfreude, realised that their northern neighbour was vulnerable.

Geopolitics were now, definitively, being moved by other forces. Latin America had gone from being the backyard of the Cold War to China’s bottomless pit – the pasture for the limitless extractivism brought about by globalisation.

While Washington and the Pentagon were engaged in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Brazil emerged as a global power, and the robust diplomacy of President Lula da Silva came to promote alternative alliances, such as the BRICS. Together, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa presented an alternative to the G7. Although the alliance was not solid, given the deep differences between the participants, the BRICS did manage to show that there was life beyond North American and European hegemony, and that other geopolitical spaces, including that of the Global South, were real.

The war on drugs

The US-led War on Terror sidelined an earlier bloody, useless war that it had unleashed, albeit one that is still being waged in Latin America: the war on drugs. Following the same logic of militarising a struggle that should have been a matter of targeted policing, US governments heavily armed Latin American security forces and trained them in the use of excessive violence. This is now often used against civilian populations, but is not at all effective against criminal gangs and drug trafficking. In Colombia, for example – the country that, along with Mexico, is the epicentre of this war – the police are run by the Ministry of Defence rather than the Ministry of the Interior.

By flooding Latin America with weapons and dollars, the war on drugs became a business that led to the perpetuation of anachronistic guerrilla struggles. Born during the Cold War, these groups lost their revolutionary ideals, but the war on drugs allowed them to transform themselves into bloodthirsty mafias, involved to the core in extortion and drug trafficking.

The militarisation of civilian security forces brought with it the violent repression of social protests, recurrent in a continent where inequality is enormous and each economic crisis ends up pushing an incipient middle class back into poverty.

While the US devoted all its strength to perpetuating its order in the Middle East, China took advantage of the power vacuum in Latin America to consolidate its economic penetration of the continent, which is discreet but deep. The rise in demand for the raw materials in which the continent is so rich pushed up the price of minerals, hydrocarbons, timber and soya, and boosted exports of meat and fish.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/latin-america-20-years-after-911-missed-opportunity/
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