Suchergebnisse

Since his election in 2008, President Barack Obama has tried without success to disguise U.S. military initiatives and the neoconservative milieu inherited from George W. Bush without changing any of the government's strategic goals. He has developed an economic plan similar to that of his predecessor, merely replacing fundamentalist neoliberals with pragmatic ones. More broadly, Latin America has practically been erased from the map in the White House. In particular, his administration has failed to deliver in three areas: ending the Cuban embargo, respecting democratic institutions in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and abandoning its military agenda (the Colombia Plan, the Mérida Initiative, the Fourth Fleet). Whatever changes Obama's presence may have introduced into the White House, Latin America remains forgotten.

The mix of old and new in the United States's role as world leader creates ambiguity and confusion. The United States is looking for ways to regain its lost economic punch and to consolidate its world hegemony. At present, however, with no true enemy on the horizon, it is being dragged down by the Soviet collapse. The twentieth century was a period of transition but not from capitalism to socialism. The nonmarket alternative or challenge represented by the Soviet Union gave capitalism the means to overcome many obstacles to its reproduction and raise profits to new levels. The United States occupied a privileged position in that process. However, the twenty-first century demands new solutions for capitalism's inherent contradictions, and as a result the United States is apparently still trying to invent a new Soviet Union.

Continual wars of resistance and wars of imperial conquest mark the development of capitalism as we know it. One of the driving forces of this violent history and a direct effect of capitalist development is the fact that new states are forced to struggle for a share of the fruits of the world system. As a result of this pattern of capitalist accumulation, the twentieth century witnessed multiple disconnections. Against this background, the following questions call for answers: What new disconnections can we expect in the short and medium term? How is the United States preparing to block, prevent, or abort these disconnections? Will future disconnections require an imperialist war? Is the polycentric world envisioned by Samir Amin, with its multiple coexisting cultures, a viable alternative?

Imperialism is a useful analytical tool that must be further developed to comprehend the present day contradictions of a multi-polar, capitalist system and its implications for Latin American social struggles. A critical look at the contributions of Wallerstein and Arrighi are taken as a point of departure for suggesting how imperialism in the context of its sharpening contradictions can help inform oppositional forces to think in terms of social transformation. A critical look at provisions within the general framework of regional and bilateral free trade agreements reveals their tactical relationship to recent attempts to maintain and further consolidate U.S. hegemony. The "total market utopia" of imperialist projects such as the FTAA can be usefully understood when conceptualised against the backdrop of neoliberal and imperialist crisis.

The period of Panamanian history which is commonly referred to as that of the "military regime" (1968-1989) can be divided into two, and clearly distinct, phases. During the first stage (1968-1982), the military regime was engaged in trying to resolve the contradiction posed by two incompatible commitments: the commitment to pursue a national project of capitalist development on the one hand, and a commitment to support US interests on the isthmus on the other. To many observers, Panama assumed this latter commitment when it became a signatory of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties concerning the Panama Canal. The second stage (1983-89) witnessed some significant changes in this agenda, particularly the regime's abandonment, for the most part, of the project for national development, replacing it with a program to militarize the Canal route.