On November 1, just prior to the elections in the United States, US President Donald Trump tweeted with regard to his Democrat rival: “[Joe] Biden is a proven Castro puppet! Vote TRUMP.”
The tweet did not specify any Castro in particular, but it is likely the reference was to late iconic Cuban leader Fidel, a staunch critic of US imperial aggression in Latin America and capitalism in general – a system he accurately saw as perpetuating poverty.
Considering now-President-elect Biden’s Latin American track record, however, it appears the deceased Castro is a rather terrible puppet master.
For eight years, Biden served as vice president to US “Deporter-in-Chief” Barack Obama, who assumed power in 2009. That same year, the democratically-elected president of Honduras was overthrown in a right-wing coup d’état, the success of which was ultimately ensured by the Obama-Biden administration.
The coup plunged Honduras into a seemingly irreversibly violent neoliberal hell, with skyrocketing homicides and widespread impunity for murders, rapes, and other abuses committed by Honduran security forces – and all with the help of increased US military and police aid.
A principal excuse for such aid to Honduras and other trigger-happy states like Mexico was, of course, the “war on drugs” – the gift that keeps on giving in terms of legitimating post-Cold War US imperialism and continuing militarisation of Latin America.
During a 2012 excursion to the region to reiterate US satisfaction with the panorama of right-wing, corporate-friendly brutality, Biden affirmed that there was no possibility for drug legalisation in the eyes of him and his boss, despite the horrific levels of violence generated by the drug war itself.
The perils of existence in Honduras have only been compounded by the post-coup privatisation binge, mega “development” projects entailing land grabs and environmental despoliation, and other US-backed neoliberal experiments in mass impoverishment and communal displacement. Given this reality, it is only logical that a whole lot of Hondurans – as well as other Latin Americans in a similar boat – would attempt to migrate in the direction of potential physical and economic safety.
And yet when a surplus of unaccompanied minors, most of them from Honduras, turned up on the US frontier in 2014 to seek asylum, Biden saw it as a “dangerous surge in migration”. This opinion was espoused in his 2015 New York Times article, “A Plan for Central America”, in which the vice president outlined his strategy for ameliorating violence and poverty in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and thereby stemming the migrant surge.
Biden’s plan, also known as the “Alliance for Prosperity”, was based on the notion that “security makes everything else possible”. The plan prescribed collaboration between the US, the three aforementioned governments, and “international financial institutions and the private sector”. Never mind that, in all three locations, the current lack of security has pretty much everything to do with decades of US interference and furtherance of the interests of – what else – international financial institutions and private sector. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.