U.S. Stays Home

The failure of Venezuela’s national strike to oust President Hugo Chavez carries significance far beyond Venezuela’s borders. It is an indication of a subtle but significant shift in U.S. policy toward Latin America.

The collapse of the 2-month-old strike -- despite broad support by the political opposition, the backing of nearly every business and financial leader in the country and a pro-business, pro-democracy platform that should have resonated throughout the hemisphere -- is partly because its organizers violated the traditional rules of political rebellion.

They underestimated their opponent, poorly exploited their own considerable resources, had no comprehensive strategy and found no appealing leader to rally their supporters.

But their failure also reflects the changing nature of U.S. involvement in Latin America. When they first called for the strike, opposition coordinators expected that the Bush administration would intervene on their behalf. This assumption was not without reason.

Chavez has routinely turned his back on the U.S., befriending Fidel Castro, meeting with Iranian and Libyan leaders and -- supported by the poorest elements of Venezuelan society -- enacting populist, anti-business reforms that fly in the face of American economic values.

All this from a leader in a region where the U.S. has openly and aggressively pursued its interests for more than 150 years.

Washington, however, has begun to change its historical practices for two distinct reasons.

First, the U.S. no longer can intervene against democratically elected regimes without a global outcry. During the Cold War, the U.S. did not hesitate to openly manipulate Latin American governments, including aiding the contras in Nicaragua and aiding in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile.

But after 1989, economic interests surpassed political ones, and Washington began to heavily promote democracy and the free market in the region.

For most of the 1990s, many Latin American governments embraced both in exchange for foreign capital.

The last few years, however, have shown a growing backlash against open-market policies, demonstrated by the election of quasi- socialist leaders like Chavez and, more recently, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador.

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. is faced with governments in South America that openly resist some of its policies. But because it had pushed so hard for democracy, any indication that it is willing to subvert the electoral process would be quickly and widely condemned.

The second factor keeping the U.S. out of Latin America is the war on terrorism.

Since 9/11, the U.S. has shifted its primary focus to its own national security. As a result, the Bush administration has taken a number of steps indicating that it now places a premium on political stability over free-market dogma in Latin America.

For instance, U.S. representatives have begun to work behind the scenes with France, Italy and Spain to force the International Monetary Fund to deal more flexibly with Argentina, angering many in the fund’s upper echelons who were accustomed to automatic American support for their rigid financial requirements. Washington has shown increasing willingness to deal with presidents like Lula and Gutierrez despite their clear intent to depart from the financial strategies of their predecessors. And in Colombia, U.S. Special Forces teams were recently authorized to train the Colombian military to fight rebels rather than simply concentrating on the war on drugs.

In Venezuela, the presence of oil has made political stability even more of a necessity. With war looming in Iraq, the U.S. must be able to count on a steady flow from its third-largest supplier. The U.S. has no reason to believe that the opposition would be able to provide any more stability than Chavez, who has skillfully managed to hold the opposition at bay without flagrantly betraying democratic principles.

More important, the prospect of Venezuela’s most impoverished and desperate citizens reacting violently to Chavez’s ouster is far more dangerous than a firmly entrenched Chavez, regardless of his political views.

After more than a century of intervening against unfriendly governments in Latin America, the U.S. is no longer finding such measures feasible, and it now may be willing to accommodate divergent economic views for the sake of stability.

Those who are counting on the U.S. to continue its traditional protection of their interests may be in for a surprise.