Isn't it time we brought the South on board?

I mean South America. And Central America.  We take the water from the rivers that flow south.  We enter trade agreements that stifle their economies. We deport their people when they try to reach the land of plenty and do what we can to discourage them from even trying.

Honduras is threatening to ditch a bilateral extradition treaty, furthering a pattern of snubs delivered against the United States by an array of Latin American leaders.

Anti-American rhetoric has been on the rise in the region.

[...]

Honduran President Xiomara Castro ordered her government to drop the U.S.-Honduras extradition treaty after U.S. Ambassador Laura Dogu expressed concern over Honduran military officials meeting with Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, a prominent member of President Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle.

[...]

Padrino is under indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly running a drug trafficking operation through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

[...]

Castro’s saber-rattling follows a week of heightened U.S.-Mexico tensions, with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declaring his relationship with the U.S. embassy on “pause” after Ambassador Ken Salazar said a judicial reform proposal “represents a risk for the functioning of Mexico’s democracy, and the integration of the American, Mexican and Canadian economies.”

  The Hill

"Saber rattling?" I hardly think that qualifies as saber rattling.

Seeking distance from the United States is ideologically consistent for regional leaders like Castro, López Obrador and others like Colombian President Gustavo Petro, all of whom to some extent embrace the historical vision of the United States as a post-colonial interventionist power in Latin America.

Historical vision? How about the historical reality?

Castro’s motivations could be more personal than historical.

In 2009, Castro’s husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was ousted as president of Honduras in a coup.

While the Obama administration was critical of the coup itself, the United States quickly moved to recognize a post-coup swift election that much of Latin America saw as de facto support for the coup.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the president who won that election, and Juan Orlando Hernández, his successor, both have direct links to the multinational drug trade. Hernández is serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking in the United States. Lobo’s son Fabio is serving a 24-year sentence, and Lobo had related corruption charges dismissed in Honduras this year but has been under U.S. sanctions for his alleged corruption since 2021.

It does seem a little odd to recognize drug traffic-linked people while complaining about their relationships with other countries' drug traffickers.

“Revenge was inevitable, as the U.S. abandoned [Zelaya] after the coup. Now, with his wife in power, they’re back with a vengeance, exposing the shortsightedness of U.S. policy during the Lobo and Hernandez years.”

[...]

Castro’s first big play on the global scene was to recognize communist China in 2023, dropping a longstanding diplomatic relationship with Taiwan.

China’s interest in Latin America is multifaceted — political and security interests are intertwined, if not secondary, to economic interests both in Latin America as a market and provider of raw materials, and as a gateway to the U.S. market.

Also short-sighted of the US to have been fucking around in and fucking up Latin American affairs for decades now.

China is not the only major power looking to Latin America, a region that’s rarely a high U.S. foreign policy priority under either Democratic or Republican administrations.

Putting it mildly.

“Our future is tied to this region, and we have seen in recent years all these nefarious actors, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, gaining a foothold. And we have to be able to counter that,” said [Eddy Acevedo, chief of staff and senior adviser on national security and foreign policy at the Wilson Center.]

Yeah, like maybe making Latin America a priority.  And maybe promoting more feminist ideas and less machismo.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Cleaning Up Clinton

Clinton's role in the aftermath of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's ouster has come under greater scrutiny since the March 3 assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres. Critics argue that the U.S. push for new elections in the months after the coup helped legitimize the actions of the Honduran military, destabilize the country and pave the way for the extreme violence that followed. Killings of activists like Cáceres and others have become devastatingly common. But the account Clinton offered of her response to the coup in her memoir Hard Choices was omitted from last year's paperback edition.

[...]

Months of protests against the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti followed. While virtually all Latin American governments condemned the coup and called for Zelaya's restoration, Clinton and the U.S. pushed for elections to bring in a new government.

[...]

Zelaya was overthrown just three weeks after Clinton's visit to Honduras for the OAS meeting at which Cuba's membership was debated.

[...]

"We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future," Clinton wrote [in the 2014 hardcover edition of Hard Choices].

  Huffington Post

We do a lot of that. Why doesn't the world thank us?

[I]ndeed, the entire two-page discussion of the Honduran coup  [...] disappeared from the paperback edition.

[...]

"Before she was called on it, she was holding it up as a signature achievement," [writer Greg Grandin] said.

[...]

More than 100 environmental and land rights activists like Cáceres were killed in Honduras from 2010 to 2015, according to the British organization Global Witness. The country became the homicide capital of the world for several years, with a murder rate topping 90 per 100,000 at its peak in 2011, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

[...]

"Hillary [Clinton] and the State Department only wanted the kind of 'stability' that was convenient for them regardless of what was happening on the ground,” Cáceres' nephew Silvio Carrillo said in an email to HuffPost. "This has not changed today and it is the reason you now have had governments operating with impunity."

Asked about the omission of the coup passage from Clinton's memoir, Carrillo accused her of "attempting to scrub away the blood she's helped to spill along with the Department of Defense and the Department of State."

Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But [Berta] Cáceres [herself had said]: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”

The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest.

[...]

We still don’t have a clear idea of the events surrounding Cáceres’s murder. There is one witness, Gustavo Castro, a Mexican national, activist, and journalist, who was with Cáceres when gunmen burst into her bedroom. Berta died in his arms. Castro was himself shot twice, but survived by playing dead.

The Honduran government—that “unity government” Clinton is proud of—has Castro in lockdown, refusing him contact with the outside world.

  The Nation

I suspect he will not survive.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.