Joseph Biden, Venezuela and Latin America | Opinion

From Caracas.The dimension of the crisis that appears to be corroding the United States was exposed on three consecutive Wednesdays in January. On the 6th, a mobilization called by President Donald Trump took the Capitol, on the 13th the second indictment against Trump was approved in the House of Representatives, and on the 20th it happened. the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with a deployment of 25,000 troops in the city of Washington.

The country is going through a nested crisis that it cannot hide. In the space of a year, we saw it the inability to cope with the pandemic, the systemic violence of the police force against the African American population, the uprisings and mobilizations against this violence, the even more repressive responses, the action of armed militias, mostly white supremacists , Trump’s defense of these organizations, ignorance of the election results of Trump and a majority of his voters, structural flaws in the electoral system, until the events of January which will go down in history.

Biden assumed in this context with a speech calling for unity, the need for a national meeting, with a cabinet which, in terms of image, seeks to project itself as progressive: a female vice-president, an African-American, Lloyd Austin, in charge of the secretary of defense, an indigenous woman, Deb Haaland to the secretary of the interior, a Cuban-American, Alejandro Mayorkas, to national security, a woman transgender, Rachel Levine, as health assistant.

But multiculturalism, the foreground of the so-called minorities in government, does not indicate what the policies will be, which does not presage gradual changes in view of the paths of the men and women who occupy key positions in the new administration. A review by the trajectories of Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, USAID Director Samantha Power, CIA Secretary William Burns and Austin himself – who comes in addition to military contractor Raytheon – show a history of conducting or directly supporting overt or covert armed actions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine, to name a few.

Biden faces two central goals. On the one hand, rebuild internal crises, in the order of the economic, health and social divide which with Trump – coming out of this same crisis – has acquired new forms and radicalities which, everything indicates, will continue. And if the new president calls for unity, he also evokes once again the notion of “internal terrorists”, at a possible inflection point of an internal policy of criminalization and surveillance which could be extended so far. as permitted by the term “terrorist”. In other words, regarding the administration and the generally invisible powers that in recent months have sometimes come to light, need it.

On another side, the new government is faced with the need to rebuild the external front, both in the return to multilateralities abandoned by Trump, such as the Paris Climate Agreement – a return already decreed by Biden -, and the World Health Organization, as well as in the reconstruction of the image and the American international mythology in international decline, seeking the head of a self-proclaimed democratic axis, as well as the recuperation of spaces lost due to the growth of powers, like China and Russia, which continued their advance in 2020 in different parts of the map, as on our continent.

Latin America

Blinken, interviewed by Marco rubio in the Senate, he argued the need “to increase the pressure on the regime of the brutal dictator”Nicolás Maduro, during a hearing in the Senate on Tuesday, during which he outlined the orientations of foreign policy. Blinken’s remarks were not surprising: the greatest likelihood should be that the new administration will not make major changes to its public discourse on Venezuela, and that the issue will not be a priority amid American fire and priority foreign affairs, such as China. ., Russia or Iran.

However, after the possible continuation of a similar discourse on the Venezuelan dossier, which has been bipartisan, it is also expected that changes could occur in the approach, the return of the dialogues and, perhaps, of the agreements. One of the men identified as being at the heart of this new possibility is Gregory Meeks, new foreign affairs speaker of the House of Representatives, who helped found the Boston Group, a group of Venezuelan and American parliamentarians created after the April 2002 coup. Meeks, who was in Caracas for the funeral of Hugo chavez then twice more, he appears as an actor in the plot, almost always invisible, in the rapprochement, in the attempts at dialogue and mediation, which generally occur between the two countries.

Venezuela will be one of the central themes of Latin America, a continent beset by conflict and instability. Biden’s victory represents a defeat for the president’s political bet Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly expressed his closeness to Trump, as well as to the Colombian governing party, the Democratic Center, led by Alvaro Uribe, accused of having campaigned in the state of Florida in favor of the now former president. Although this scenario anticipates possible tensions, these, often maximized in the media and politically, should not make us lose sight of the fact that there are permanent political agreements which are not substantially altered by changes in administration. in the White House and on the surface of the State Department.

The moment when a significant change can occur is in the case of Cuba, where the difference between the administration Barack obama, which opened an approach, and that of Trump, who redoubled the blockade, was significant. Biden’s plan, as expected, is to return to the keys developed with the island with the previous Democratic government, that is, when he was vice president.

The new US government takes office in the midst of an extraordinary crisis and a reconfiguring and reckless geopolitics. The possibility of continuities, the reproduction of mechanisms, such as the infiltration of judicial powers in Latin America to develop the law, with the aim of securing American interests in our region, seems more likely than a surprise turn.