{"content":[{"text":"A President Comes to Visit and the \n Chickens Home to Roost in South America \n This week, President George Bush will be in Uruguay on the latest stop of his Latin America \n tour. The purpose and nature of his meeting with President Tabare Vasquez -- and the presence \n of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Buenos Aires to protest it -- say a great deal about how \n much U.S. relations in South America, and indeed around the world, have changed since Bush \n and Dick Cheney were re-elected just over two years ago.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.088268,"width":0.7604780000000001,"height":0.16025699999999998}},{"text":"Here in Argentina, Nestor Kirchner had been elected president a year earlier amidst the virtual \n collapse of an economy that had been the model of the International Monetary Fund’s formula of \n wholesale privatization, deregulation and liberalization. Riding a wave of popular protest that \n has brought to power governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay and, more recently, Bolivia \n and Ecuador that promised a different economic future for their countries and region, Argentina \n was in 2005 still in considerable debt to the IMF. In fact, at that time about 80 percent of the \n IMF’s portfolio was in Latin America. And the United States was still pressing for the creation \n of a Free Trade Area of the Americas that would effectively extend NAFTA to the rest of the \n hemisphere.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.263503,"width":0.761549,"height":0.15945400000000004}},{"text":"Today, the FTAA negotiations are on life support, having been dealt a virtual death blow by \n Brazil, Argentina and their neighbors at the late 2005 hemispheric summit in the Argentine \n beach resort of Mar del Plata. And IMF lending to Latin America has fallen so precipitously that \n it now constitutes less than one percent of the fund’s portfolio. As the influence of the United \n States and the IMF recedes, South America’s common market, the Mercosur, is growing in size \n and strength, and most of the governments on the continent have reintroduced mixed economies \n with varying degrees of state involvement.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.437896,"width":0.762223,"height":0.12478300000000003}},{"text":"What factors account for this rapid and profound economic change? The first is the utter failure \n of the U.S. government – Republican and Democratic administrations alike – to use the \n opportunity presented by the decline and dissipation of the Soviet Union to play a constructive \n role in the hemisphere’s and global economy as the world’s only superpower. Catering to the \n avarice of its major corporations for ever greater profits, the United States has used its unchecked \n power and its effective control of the IMF and World Bank to transform most of the economies \n of the South into low-cost production platforms. While poverty and inequality, along with \n environmental destruction, have been the most widely noted results, with workers, in the South \n and North, being the major victims, the widespread destruction of locally owned businesses by \n free trade has, along with other imposed policies, destroyed the industrial and agricultural \n productive capacities of many Southern countries.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.577467,"width":0.764024,"height":0.19449300000000003}},{"text":"The influence of China and Venezuela","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.787338,"width":0.31837299999999996,"height":0.02098500000000003}},{"text":"These developments engendered protracted popular protests and mobilizations until a critical \n mass of Southern governments finally took a stand and rejected a proposed global trade accord in \n Seattle in 1999, a situation that has remained unchanged to date. Yet the IMF and World Bank, \n working as a cartel with Northern governments and private banks, remained the only significant","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.822076,"width":0.7636830000000001,"height":0.07248399999999999}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}