AOC: “What Latin America Wants Is Sovereignty”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) gives a speech about border politics outside the US Capitol on January 26, 2023. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke with Jacobin following her recent trip to Latin America and on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile. She discussed the crimes of US intervention and the struggles for justice and democracy across the Americas.
Interview by DANIEL DENVIR
Generations of US leftists have looked to Latin America for inspiration and to express solidarity, from the Mexican Revolution to Salvador Allende’s socialist project to the pink tides of recent years. Continuing this tradition, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and a group of left elected officials recently traveled to Colombia, Brazil, and Chile to meet with some of their counterparts in Latin America.
On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 US-backed coup against Allende, Ocasio-Cortez spoke with Daniel Denvir on Jacobin Radio’s The Dig podcast. In a wide-ranging conversation, they talked about building solidarity across the Americas, the delegation’s (successful) push for declassification of documents related to the Chilean coup, the devastating toll of US intervention in the region, what’s driving migration from Venezuela, and one Brazilian movement’s “awe-inspiring” melding of committed radicalism and hard-headed pragmatism. “The absolute rejection of cynicism,” Ocasio-Cortez says, “was astounding.”
You can listen to the full conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity and condensed, here.
DANIEL DENVIR What does solidarity with Latin America mean today?
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ I think it requires an actual relationship. When we speak about movements happening in Latin America, it can be from an academic or historical perspective, but there are so many movements that are in present-day struggle. Developing real relationships with them is one of the best ways for us to express solidarity.
Earlier this year, when [Brazilian] President Lula came to Washington, I had the benefit of sitting down with him, and I asked him what he thinks is needed right now from the progressives. He said, quite directly, that in Latin America progressives regularly gather, but US progressives are nowhere to be seen. He doesn’t know where we are. I took that as a challenge, and that’s one of the main things that precipitated our visit to Brazil, Chile, and Colombia.
Our policy stances need to spring from that relationship building, because a lot of these stances are not obvious and they can’t just be gleaned from study. They have to be gleaned from dialogue.
DANIEL DENVIR The ghosts of bloody US intervention are everywhere in Latin America, including in Chile. First, what stuck out to you from your visit to a country whose socialist government was overthrown, with US assistance, in 1973 — fifty years ago this September 11? And secondly, what can the United States do today in solidarity with Chileans, who are still very much fighting to confront Pinochet’s legacy?
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ One theme that was very prominent in Chile, and also came up in Brazil and Colombia, is how deep the polarization is, especially when it comes to media and how that is influencing the current political dynamics.
The US far right and fascist movements have been working extremely hard to export many of their tactics and goals throughout Latin America. We’ve seen it in Brazil, famously, with Bolsonaro and the January 8 attack on their capital. But in Chile, this is also very prevalent. One of the ways we are seeing this is a desire to erase history.
There’s an enormous movement to try to erase what happened with the coup overthrowing Salvador Allende’s government — to portray coup as almost sympathetic, as though this was a government that had it coming — which is why our call for the United States to declassify many of the documents regarding its involvement in the coup are so important.
For the United States to be able to declassify this information, to say that there was external involvement, that this is something that happened and was incredibly unjust — it can’t be understated how important that would be for the Chilean people as well as the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people impacted by having a family member lost or missing or tortured during the Pinochet regime. [Editor’s note: The United States declassified some of these documents late last month.]
DANIEL DENVIR Are there similar declassification steps that could be taken in terms of the historic US ties to the Colombian and Brazilian militaries?
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ Yes, I have introduced legislation to declassify records regarding US involvement in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. All three are incredibly important. But with Chile, I think that the country is still so much in a process of healing over what happened that it is potentially most urgent in Chile, especially coming up on the fiftieth anniversary.
It is very important for our relationship in Latin America, in general, for us to declassify this information and for everyday Americans to understand how the politics of Latin America today are deeply shaped by US intervention in the region.
DANIEL DENVIR Historically, Colombia has also been on the receiving end of an enormous amount of US-sponsored violence, and we don’t have to go back fifty years — look at the track record of [the militarized counter-narcotics program] Plan Colombia. What did you learn about the country’s peace process and the history of violence there — a peace process, by the way that is today overseen by Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president in Colombian history — and how could the United States play a different role? Or is the best thing the United States can do just stay the hell out?
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ I do think that we have a role to play. The notion that we would come in, wreak so much havoc, and then just leave is, I don’t think, a proper way for us to be held accountable and to also be a good partner moving forward. It’s not something that Colombia wants either, on any end of the political spectrum.
Something I appreciated far more in visiting there is how much the history of Colombia is never told, and how that prevents people in the United States from supporting just policies. For example, when you hear “Colombia,” if anything comes to mind, it is narcos and guerillas and different paramilitaries and warfare. It’s a caricature without an understanding of the root of this conflict.
The issues in Colombia, I believe, are fundamentally about the legitimacy of governments. You have a government that historically was dominated by elite interests that then stated they were going to be a democracy in the mid-1900s and ostensibly converted to that democracy — except every time a liberal or left party member began to ascend, they were assassinated. You basically have a one-party right-wing state, and it leads many people to say, well, clearly this is not a legitimate government, and if we want the poor, if we want working-class people to have any shot at life, we’re going to engage in revolution, and in violent revolution at that.
That’s the seeds of what we have in Colombia, which historically has right-wing government and left-wing militias because there’s no democratic space for an actual two-party system.
And when you have the introduction of cocaine and the drug trade, this situation grows much more complicated. You have a much more ideological frame, perhaps, in the ’80s and ’90s, but then with the introduction of illegal mining and the introduction of narco-trafficking, the financial incentives start to muddy the waters.
Then you have Plan Colombia, where the United States starts to funnel billions of dollars: between the year 2000 and now, the United States has given $14 billion to the Colombian government, overwhelmingly militarized aid. And this was under Uribe, who was an autocrat. You have the scandal of falsos positivos, where the Colombian government financially incentivized killing guerilla combatants, and innocent people were killed and marked as guerrilla combatants.
All this has created an enormous divide.
Gustavo Petro as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. (Wikimedia Commons)
The election of Gustavo Petro as the first leftist president in the history of Colombia is incredibly important. It is the first time that Colombians have had any shred of evidence that democracy can yield diverse political results. His election is less connected to him as a figure, and more that someone on the left can be elected president without being assassinated. It provides hope for some semblance of peace and nonviolence in this country.
That is why when we see Republicans attack Colombia and try to withdraw aid or block a US ambassador, it is so dangerous because it begins to reinforce this slide back into illegitimacy for Colombia. There is disagreement about how to approach very difficult topics, even in Latin America — for example, Venezuela, or how Latin America positions itself in an increasingly multipolar world. All of that discourse is valid and important, but what cannot be eroded is the legitimacy of this government.
DANIEL DENVIR The politics of oil and mining are contentious across Latin America. Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro was a victory against Amazon deforestation, yet Lula has also been criticized by environmentalists for indicating that he may support new oil exploration in the Amazon basin. Meanwhile, Gustavo Petro has pledged to end oil production in Colombia, and Ecuadorian voters just took a historic vote to bar oil production in the Yasuni, the country’s remotest Amazonian region. What can we learn from Latin America’s environmental movements?
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ There are a couple of things to examine. One is the geopolitics of fossil fuels in the region. When we talk about, for example, President Lula and oil drilling or Gabriel Boric seeking to nationalize lithium in Chile, a lot of it has less to do with the domestic demand. It has to do with international fossil fuel demand and geopolitics and how any individual country seeks to position itself.
All three — Brazil, Chile, and Colombia — do not rely on fossil fuels for the majority of their energy consumption. Brazil uses geothermal and hydro. All of them have at least 50 percent renewable energy. So when we talk about why there is this push to export more oil, it’s about global markets. And that’s because Latin America is very motivated to be independent in this multipolar world.
Also, to pursue and afford many of these important social programs, they depend on the revenue from fossil fuel exportation, as well as many other natural resources. So, when we talk about a just transition to renewables, one of the big questions is, what is going to be the revenue replacement for fossil fuels in order to sustain critical programs like Bolsa Familia in Brazil, or healthcare programs? On the other side, as you mentioned, Ecuador, Colombia, and many others are having great strides in their climate movements and protecting the Amazon.