Can Obama Fix the Troubled Export of American Democracy to Latin America? Hrafnkell Haraldsson - PoliticusUSA.com
go to original January 8, 2015

“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” – President of Mexico Porfirio Diaz

One of the things President Obama talked about with President Peña Nieto on Monday deserves further discussion. In their joint remarks in the Oval Office, President Obama said,

I described my initiative to end the 50-year policy with relation to Cuba, to move towards what we hope will be a more constructive policy but one that continues to emphasize human rights and democracy and political freedom. And at the Summit of the Americas, one of the things I informed Peña Nieto is we will participate but we’ll insist that those topics are on the agenda.

This goal might not seem problematic from an American point of view, but this is only because Americans do not realize how haphazard and insincere our dedication to these principles seem to the rest of the world. All too often, the export of democracy has looked a lot like the export of imperialism, and America’s defense of freedom in Latin America has been translated into right-wing dictatorships (including most of South America in the 1970s).

The Monroe Doctrine, the source of so much of this evil, is dead, killed by the Obama administration on November 18, 2013 when Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” But another troubled source remains: democracy itself.

Read the rest at PoliticusUSA.com

Image: Oliver Munday

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