Author: Prof. Dr Miguel Ángel Barrios – 17/04/2019
The first summit of the Foro Progreso de América del Sur (PROSUR), held in March and the abandonment from Unasur of several South America countries (including Argentina that motivated its exit from Unasur “due to its high ideological content “), require a geopolitical analysis.
As we know, actuality exists in a fluid dialogue with the past-present and the future and vice versa.
Jose Vasconcelos has defined, like nobody else, the history of Latin America as the confrontation between Monroe and Bolivar, to the point of writing a monumental work Bolivarismo y Monroismo (Llamaremos bolivarismo al ideal hispanoamericano de crear una federación con todos los pueblos de cultura española. Llamaremos monroísmo al ideal anglosajón de incorporar las veinte naciones al imperio nórdico, mediante la política del panamericanismo.)
It is important to point out that Vasconcelos, Minister of Education of the Mexican Revolution and philosopher of the cosmic race, was invited by President Peron to the 1949 Congress of Philosophy, and today, in 2019, after 70 years, this central fact passes almost unnoticed.
Monroeism is not a doctrine, but a unilateral declaration by a president of the United States, Monroe, pronounced in his speech in 1823, but already outlined by Quincy Adams in 1817. It essentially constitutes the first American geopolitical doctrine and can be summarized with the well known statement: “America is for Americans”, which makes us the US backyard.
The path of pan-Americanism – in order not to get lost in the chaotic history of Latin America – is, in broad terms, the following:
• 1889. First congress of the Americas, convened by the United States in Washington.
• 1947. Foundation in Rio de Janeiro of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR)
• 1948. Foundation of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Bogotá, Colombia
• 1960. Foundation of ALALC, the Alliance for free trade in Latin America (Montevideo)
• 1980. Foundation of LAIA/ALADI, Latin American Integration Association (Montevideo)
• In 1994, the United States launched the FTAA – Free Trade Agreement of the Americas – through its president Bill Clinton.
• 2018 Foundation of the Lima Group.
• 2019 PROSUR Foundation.
We can say, with a strong strategic concept: that kind of Pan-americanism died forever in the South Atlantic, in the Falklands wars, when the United States turned its back on Argentina, allying itself with the British; now they are trying to revive him. This would not be a surprise, if we had considered that the United States invalidated its Monroe doctrine, when the warship “Lexington” bombed the Falklands in 1831, two years before the pirate usurpation of 1833.
Pan-Americanism is nothing else that a USA doctrine, a strategy devoted to the colonization of South America. With Pan-Americanism – formally conveyed through rhetoric, by means of non-political language, always using the words of “democracy”, ” civilization “,” humanity ” – the USA does not lack their goal: the geopolitical annexation South America to the imperial Republic.
And so, our history was: we could call it the “history of Latin American disintegration”.
Bolivarism is the geopolitical doctrine of Latin American unity, which has its antecedents in the struggles of the Latin American syndicalism of the Libertadores San Martín and Bolívar. This doctrine turns to geopolitics by adding sovereignty or autonomy to the integrationist idea of Simón Bolívar.
Here is a brief overview of his historical path:
• 1826. Amphictyonic Congress of Panama, convened by Liberator Simón Bolívar.
• 1846. American Congress of Lima.
• 1857. American Congress of Santiago de Chile.
• 1864 American Congress of Lima (second congress of Peru).
All these congresses were designed to strengthen the Ibero-American identity in terms of external threats.
That is to say that Our America tried to model itself as a State more than a century before the Paris Treaty of Coal and Steel of 1951 which led to the European Community in 1957, with the Treaty of Rome which attempted reconstruction geopolitics. of Europe, after the Second World War with Schuman and Adenauer. One of the causes of today’s European crisis lies in the fact that the EU has lost its geopolitical goals.
• 1953. Treaty of Santiago or Nuevo ABC with Perón, Vargas and Ibáñez, where Juan Perón poses, for the first time, a true Latin American policy of independence with the strategy of continentalism.
• 1991. Treaty of Asunción, creator of Mercosur. It can be discussed theoretically – and beyond the governments that signed it – its open or closed regionalism, but MERCOSUR has the merit of having proposed a common market.
• 2008 Foundation of Unasur, the Union of South American Nations (strategic cooperation, the highest authority in South America: for the first time, there was no Pan-american entity, without the United States, outside a monroeist system.
It is important to outline that the South American Defense Council emerged from UNASUR as an example of cooperation, as an attempt to replace the national security doctrine.
• 2012. CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, was established as the maximum enveloping link in the history of our disintegration.
We could say that Monroe was leaving and Bolivar was coming back. Obviously, these strategic movements contain political consequences.
And now the new Monroe doctrine (North-Americanization of the security of South America, politicization of the Armed Forces, entering the subcontinent through Venezuela) has its diplomatic arm in PROSUR, which is, we repeat it again, the Monroe program, represented shamefully from Macri and Bolsonaro.
However, Bolívar is much closer and alive than one can imagine.
Prof. Dr Miguel Ángel Barrios, Scientific Director of Dossier Geopolitico, Argentina