On 18 July, at the Aspen Security Forum, General Laura Richardson, head of US Southern Command – which monitors 32 other states and 11 territories for US imperialism – called for a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Latin America. This would be an economic recovery act, like the 1948 US post-war reconstruction fund applied to Europe, introduced to undermine European socialist and communist movements, but now for ‘2024-2025’. This time the US military is pointing specifically to Chinese investments in critical infrastructure, including deepwater ports, 5G networks, and space technology, which it claims, could be ‘quickly turned into military applications’. Alvaro Michaels reports.
General Richardson is here acting as a cheer leader for recent US government policy. In November 2023 President Biden presented his ‘Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity’ plan for Latin America, to boost ‘opportunities and development’ as an answer to the region’s poverty, migration pressures and, note well, Chinese influence. Twelve states are now discussing this plan, 9 of which already have free trade deals with the US. However, US private corporations are, in Biden’s book, failing to invest in the region. In fact, it is precisely the political conditions that these corporations have demanded in order to invest – monopoly, miserable wages, and especially the suppression of trade unions and progressive social movements and so social justice – that has created the social ‘instability’ among the Latin American masses, that they now fear.
The disastrous economic and social crisis suffered by the Latin American working class, resulting from over a 100 years of continuous US political manipulation and material plunder, had, by the first quarter of this century, provoked such social chaos that a continuous and growing stream of despairing ‘Latino’ workers have fled, dreaming of some relief to the north. The US ruling class has for a century stirred up antagonism against the desperate flight of Central and South Americans to North America, to promote reactionary divisions among its own working class. Trump’s wall has been a tool in this campaign.
63.6 million people of Hispanic or Latino origin now live in the United States, or 19.1% of the total population (2022). In the past decade this population has increased by a quarter, growing because of the destructive political intrigues of the US government against its southern neighbouring states. In this population exist 12 million undocumented workers, facing the daily threat of deportation back to the poverty and desperation from which they had fled. They are thus an enormous supply of anxious, unsettled and so cheap labour power for US capitalism.
For well over a century the US has opposed even moderately progressive governments in Latin America, so to maintain its ‘sphere of influence’, first announced in President Monroe’s 1823 warning against European ‘interference’ in ‘the western hemisphere’. This has been enthusiastically pursued by the US State department ever since, but has become increasingly difficult to sustain. European business interests are again flourishing there, but the newer wave of Chinese investments have been the focus to rally public opinion in the US against China. This is all part of the now defensive campaign to maintain the dominance of US investment and trade and so its social and political influence in Latin America, essential for the stability and prospects of US imperialism itself. Chinese investment is denying US corporations opportunities for profit.
General Richardson, whose job it is to intimidate states of the region into accepting US policy, paradoxically sees the consequences of US imperialism as justification for further meddling. In her cretinous speech she noted that while ‘a couple of countries were okay’ (sic), for most she admits there has been a ‘severe economic downturn’. For this she misleadingly blames Covid-19 whilst pointing, in the time-honoured right-wing manner, to criminals, specifically ‘transnational gangs’ causing ‘instability’. This she says, quite bizarrely, has allowed Moscow and Beijing to step with offers of cash or, with China, its Belt and Road projects. ‘I really believe,’ she said ‘that economic security (read: successful US economic dominance) and national (read US) security are going hand-in-hand here in this hemisphere.’ In fact, she sees the value of some sort of new Marshall Plan as undermining opposition to US imperialism.
Such a Marshall type plan, entirely self-interested, would in fact only lead to the creation of jobs and profits on the US domestic front, by ensuring a huge flow of US capital and goods to Latin American markets, so as to extract resources and realise profits. It might reduce the political antagonisms within the US ruling class by modifying the massive flow of currently unwanted labour to the USA. It might encourage political quiescence towards US imperialism in a narrow section of the Latin American working class. Richardson understands that US investment is high in Latin America but she is frustrated at the lack of pro-American responses! The local ruling classes have indeed generally called for more US capital, but also from Europe, and China. The problem for US imperialism is that Europe and China’s new capital now act as a political counterweight to US machinations.
General Richardson’s plea follows the clamour from pro-US imperialist politicians across Latin America for more US investment. A ’Marshall’ type plan, was called for in March 2019 by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He wanted a Central American Marshall Plan, with $30bn channelled to regional development, to ease migration pressures. Donald Trump, keen to halt immigration to the US, then agreed to participate to the tune of $5.8bn. All this follows former mayor of San Antonio (Texas) Julián Castro’s electoral candidate’s call, back in March 2019, for a new Marshall plan for Central America, to contrast to Trump’s then immigration crackdown. In fact, a plan for a regional aid program on the scale of the original Marshall Plan, equivalent to around $175bn today, is an unlikely expenditure given current US congressional disputes and international political circumstances. The 1948 plan in Europe prohibited the nationalization of companies, imposed strict exchange rate controls, and balanced budgets, with intrusive checks on national economic policy through rigorous accounting. This sort of list is unlikely to be agreed by potential recipients now, on top of their experiences with the IMF.
The reality of US plans
In practice US imperialism is never altruistic: it blocks resources to states striving to create a more just society. This is done through blockades – most obviously now Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, in Latin America alone – or the imposition of trade and investment treaties that tailor local economic activity to the interests of US imperialism, subcontracting operations and extracting ‘economic rents’ (extra profit) in particular by monopolistic buyers. In these ways it continues to extract both material and labour resources from Latin American states at low prices. During the 1929-1934 depression US imperialism forcibly deported 400,000 Mexican labourers, a third of all Mexicans in the USA. Then immediately after 1945 it shipped in Mexican workers (the Bracero programme) to meet the demand for labour. Today it continues to pick and choose from the displaced according to its business needs. The actual needs of the Mexican people had nothing to do with the matter at any time.
General Richardson had already addressed the US Congress, on 14 March 2024, presenting her Southern Command ‘posture’ as one that will ‘build that interoperability and counterbalance PRC (Peoples’ Republic of China) military engagements and investments’. She boasted of the new ‘robust plan’ with Guyana to confront Venezuela.
US imperialism has been reasserting military agreements, e.g. with Brazil, which became a Major non-NATO Ally of the United States in July 2019. General Richardson in person donated a $34m C-130H transport aircraft in April this year to the Argentine Air Force – a U.S ‘security assistance’ donation – to strengthen ties with the absurd and reactionary President Milei. In August this year military delegations from Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru participated in the exercise Panamax 2024 hosted by US Southern Command in Houston and several other US locations. Panamax was started in 2003 as part of the failed attempt of US imperialism to remove President Chavez of Venezuela through a general strike.
Reality is the very opposite of the purported generosity of any ’Marshall plan’. Calls for the latter simply represent desperate and ultimately bankrupt investment proposals, hoping to offset, to some small degree, the destructive consequences of the rule of capitalism in Latin America, and are made in order to prevent non-US investors from disturbing US dominance. Such proposals, as announcements, are part of the constant neo-colonial propaganda output by reactionary agents of the US ruling class, seeking to reinforce ‘the Monroe doctrine’. This aimed to block European influence in Latin America, but now China is the target. General Richarson, drumsticks to the ready, declared to Congress that ‘the world is at an inflection point’. Latin America, as ‘our shared neighbourhood, remains under assault from a host of cross cutting transboundary challenges that directly threaten our homeland’.
Behind the label of a ‘Marshal Plan’ we can see a poor disguise for the defensive-aggressive response of US imperialism, another sign of the relative decline in its economic power and political influence.
