A blond Condoleezza

The Inca nails Hillary Clinton –er, let me rephrase that. Otto, at the well-known Peruvian business site, Inca Kola News,  unrepentant liberal capitalist that he is, has much the same reaction to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tour of Latin American nations that one hears throughout the region, regardless of ones political and economic biases:

If Hillary is the yardstick, the US attitude to the region hasn’t changed one iota, both on a political/diplomatic level and on a public level. On the diplo side, Hillary is still trying to push the “good left/bad left” agenda of the Dubya years, which is naïve at best. It just doesn’t work like that round here, as she found out to her cost in Brazil. The pushback from the Brazilians was polite (because Brazilians are polite by nature) but on a protocol level the message translated as “Time for a nice cup of STFU”. She left Brazil looking nothing less than stupid and the Chávez quip about Clinton being “a blond Condoleezza” was to the point and wittier than his usual bludgeoning sense of humour.

On a public awareness level too, the song remains the same. Put into a nutshell, the US doesn’t give a crap about LatAm (if you watch US news channels you’d hardly know she was down this way) however LatAm does care a lot about what Hillary said and did, being the spokesperson of its rich, powerful neighbour that has a history of thuggish behaviour in what it still believes is its back yard. The verdict down here, even from those sympathetic to the US cause, was that the trip was a diplomatic net negative and stirred up more ill-feeling than it dampened.