President Donald Trump and his team seem stubborn in asphalting to China the highways that will allow him to consolidate his presence in Latin America. At the beginning of the 21st century, the United States dominated hemispheric trade, with the exception of Cuba. A quarter of a century later, the only countries in South America where this primacy is still Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, the French Guiana and Paraguay. In the north, Greenland lost; and in Central America, Panama.
In 2000, the United States surpassed China in world trade by a margin of 4.22 times. Today, the Chinese get them in 1.1 billion dollars, and bilaterally maintain an annual surplus close to 300,000 million dollars. This hard and harsh reality led Trump to start his well -known tariff war, imposing strong rates on Chinese products and applying a 10 % tax to most countries (currently in pause). Trade, and not geopolitics, has become the gravitational axis of its foreign relations. Washington has taken a 180 degree turn and has returned to protectionism that, years ago, fought with iron hand. It is ironic that their policies are more similar today to the model driven by ECLAC than to the Chicago School, Blood and Fire Tax in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, who came to power with the sponsorship of Nixon and Kissinger after giving a brutal coup d’etat to Salvador Allende.
The question that should be asked in Washington is whether to carry a club – a better Roosevelt style -, give orders and launch threats can be an effective recipe today in Latin America. Trump believes that “true power is to scare,” following the advice of Florentino. In Chapter XVII, “cruelty and clemency,” Machiavelli states: “It is much safer to be feared than loved, when one of the two must be missing.” However, it makes a crucial distinction: the prince must try to be feared, not hated. The key is to rule firmly, imposing respect and authority, avoiding acts that generate deep resentment in the subjects, such as abuse of power, free humiliation or unjustified dispossession of goods. Apparently, Trump did not read the full page.
The times are changing, as Bob Dylan’s song says. And while Trump bland his club, and drives an oligarchic and autocratic model, Xi Jinping, on the other hand, looks for alliances.
The treatment he is giving to Latin American immigrants – who criminalizes – will leave a deep injury that will take years to heal. That attitude reinforces a long history of grievances in the region, where the United States has combined all forms of struggle: from terrorism – to dynamit the ports in Nicaragua – to the open war and the economic blockade, as in Cuba. Trump is awakening old ghosts. In Colombia it is not forgotten that Washington was the efficient cause of the separation of Panama, a country that now intends to expel the Chinese with the fallacious argument that they have taken over the interoceanic channel. Some things seem innocent, and they are not. Pretending to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico entails a colonial design.
It is said that history cannot tell us what to do, but what we should not do. Someone should remind Trump how the policy of the Catholic Monarchs ended in their American colonies, with the hiring house of Seville, established in 1503, to manage and control the round trip trade, ensuring a strong monopoly. With her, he prohibited the migration of Jews, Moors, Gypsies and heretics, and imposed a 20 % tariff on the goods, to swell the royal coffers. The institution disappeared in 1790, and from that moment Spain began to lose one by one its domains, in a domino effect. In the Archive of Indies of Seville, located in a building raised in the time of Felipe II, 80 million pages of original documents rest on three centuries of commerce with America, which their researchers could consult.
At the end of January, five days after Trump assumed the presidency and began the massive deportations of immigrants, President Gustavo Petro made two American military planes return in full flight, arguing that the United States could not treat Colombian migrants as criminals, who were chained from feet and hands. The fact unleashed the imperial fury, and immediately decreed the imposition of tariffs on the country. The crisis, however, that lasted only a few hours, perhaps because someone made Trump see the geopolitical value of Colombia, served to write the prologue of the tariff war as a strategy to contain the Chinese progress.
Pope Francis has died, star figure in contemporary history and even more in Latin America. He deserves to remember that it was he who led to the transcendental approach between the United States of Barack Obama and the Cuba of Raúl Castro, which allowed us to think about the reconciliation between these two nations. This episode led Obama to pronounce, in Spanish, his famous phrase: “We are all Americans”, something that contrasts with Trump’s actions in the region. Nor can the role of both countries in the peace process forget with the FARC in Colombia, led by President Juan Manuel Santos. It was in Havana where Pope Francis and Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all of Russia, took a transcendental step in the world inter -religious dialogue. Two important branches of Christianity separated since 1054. It was another moment.
There are many signs that announce an increasingly profound fracture, a pernicious distancing between Washington and the peoples to the south of the Rio Bravo, propitiated by the xenophobic policy and clearly violation of human rights, driven by Trump. Meanwhile, China hits the doors to offer cooperation and alliances.
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