WorldCity Business Magazine
President's note: Under the Volcano
by Ken Roberts
As anti-U.S. sentiment becomes a rallying theme for Latin American leaders, a remedy is suggested.
There is tremendous symbolism in the return of Daniel Ortega to the presidency in Nicaragua.
At this writing, less than two weeks before the Nov. 5 election, he appears likely to win outright in the four-way race or face Ivy League-educated Eduardo Montealegre, the White House favorite, in a runoff.
Once a darling of leftist intellectuals and the spark behind the Iran-Contra scandal the darkest stain on Ronald Reagan’s presidency Ortega looks like another in a continuing line of left-leaning politicians coming to power in Latin America.
It was simply unimaginable a decade ago that former anti-government union organizer Luiz Incio Lula da Silva would be elected president of Brazil, probably twice. And that Chileans would elect an avowed agnostic and a former torture victim during Pinochet’s rule, as they did with Michelle Bachelet. And that Hugo Chvez, a once-imprisoned coup leader, would win the presidency in oil-rich Venezuela and exert untold influence throughout the hemisphere while Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, naturalized the natural gas industry. And now Ortega.
Latin America has never been more democratic. And that’s what the current political scene reflects.
An Ortega win would have implications for South Florida, home to thousands of Nicaraguans who fled during the Sandinista revolution. Nicaragua also counts South Florida as its leading import-export conduit. Of the four presidential hopefuls in Nicaragua, only Ortega opposes the Central America Free Trade Agreement.
How then, could a right-leaning White House interested in democracy, transparency, free trade and a more secure hemisphere take some wind from the sails of the anti- U.S. fervor espoused by some of these left-leaning leaders?
During the October launch of our New York TradeNumbers publication during an event at the Council of the Americas, our keynote speaker, Moiss Nam had an answer.
End the Cuban embargo. Quietly. Without fanfare.
Nam, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, a former World Bank director and author of the book Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, is no communist sympathizer. As a strong supporter of free trade and globalization, he could not even be called a liberal. And he understands an end to the embargo would draw a strong reaction from Miami’s hard-line Cuban-American community.
He acknowledges that with Bush’s brother Jeb ending his second and final term as governor, and Fidel Castro all but impotent after more than four decades in power, the move would largely be symbolic but it would also be an end to one of the most controversial U.S. policies in the hemisphere.
Contact: kroberts@worldcityweb.com