Diplomacia e Relações Internacionais

Visitantes exoticos na América Latina: Ahmadinejad

Latin American Weekly Report

Weekly Report - 12 January 2012 (WR-12-02)

Iran seeks to deepen ties with Latin America

Not since US President Barack Obama’s mini tour of Latin America in March last year has so much attention been given to one man’s visit to the region. When Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadineyad arrived in Caracas on 8 January at the head of a large retinue for the first leg of a four (possibly more) nation tour, more column inches had been devoted to his presence in the region in the US media, and what it signified at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Teheran, than any single event in the region in 2011 other than Obama’s visit. This suited Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez down to the ground and he clearly revelled in the attention; both men directed verbal missiles northwards. But beneath their rhetorical repartee what does the visit really mean?
It is the fifth time that Ahmadineyad has visited Latin America since 2005 - he visited three times between September 2006 and September 2007 alone - which is more than US heads of state have managed over the same time span. The main difference between this visit and his previous trips is the backdrop: tension between the US and Iran is always simmering but it is now coming to the boil. On 31 December the US imposed new sanctions on Iran, which responded by threatening to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz oil route in the Gulf. Soon afterwards the European Union (EU) reached a preliminary agreement to ban oil imports from Iran. On 9 January the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claimed Iran had begun to enrich uranium at a bunker in the north of the country. On the same day an Iranian court condemned to death a former US marine of Iranian descent, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, for allegedly spying for the CIA. Two days later a top Iranian nuclear scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was killed in a car bomb in Teheran. Iran blamed Mossad and the US.

This brief summary of events leading up to Ahmadineyad’s visit to Latin America, and during it, explains why it carried added piquancy, and was greeted with howls of outrage by right-wing Republicans, such as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chair of the House foreign affairs committee, who warned of the threat posed by Iran and Hezbollah to regional security and stability. The conviction that Hezbollah is expanding links in Latin America is firmly entrenched in Republican circles: the foreign policy document released last year by Mitt Romney, a strong bet for the Republican presidential candidacy, pointedly mentioned Hezbollah and terrorism eight times while omitting to mention Brazil, the region’s economic powerhouse once [WR-11-41].

The Democrat Obama administration has similar concerns. The US State Department publicly admonished countries preparing to receive Ahmadinejad. And then, on 6 January it declared the Venezuelan consul general in Miami, Livia Acosta Noguera, persona non grata, and gave her four days to leave the country. It did not explain the motives for her expulsion but the US Spanish-language channelUnivisión linked the decision to expel her to a documentary it aired last month alleging that Venezuela and Cuba were involved in discussing possible Iranian cyber-based plots against the US [WR-11-50]. Roger Noriega, a former assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs who is virulently anti-Chavista, tweeted that Acosta was a “Chavista terrorist spy”. Chávez said her expulsion was “unjustified and arbitrary”.

It is noteworthy that Brazil was not included on Ahmadinejad’s itinerary, as it was in 2009; relations having cooled since Dilma Rousseff came to power last year. Brazil, keen to secure a seat on the UN Security Council, felt stung by the US hostility to a nuclear fuel-swap deal it struck with Iran and Turkey in May 2010. Rousseff is much more cautious than her predecessor Lula da Silva about venturing into this kind of diplomatic minefield (see sidebar).

A state visit to Brazil would have eased Iran’s sense of international isolation. The fact that it did not secure such a visit undermines the Republican claims that Iran’s influence in Latin America is deepening and that it is challenging the US in its own backyard. Instead, its influence is probably on the wane, like that of Chávez, who did most to try and advance it in the first place. Brazil is still keen to expand trade (according to IMF statistics, it was Iran’s main trading partner and exporter in Latin America at a total of US$1.26bn in 2008, up 88% on the previous year) but no longer to extend diplomatic solidarity.

Instead, Ahmadinejad visited just radical Alba member countries, moving on to Nicaragua (for the investiture of President Daniel Ortega), Cuba and Ecuador after Venezuela. Intriguingly, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, who had met Ahmadinejad on previous visits, did not receive him. This omission was much stranger than Brazil’s reticence: during a September 2007 visit Ahmadinejad promised US$1.1bn in “industrial cooperation” with Bolivia, an Alba member.
It might just be that Morales is unconvinced about such promises of largesse. When Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa was asked just before Ahmadinejad’s arrival in Quito on 12 January about the tangible economic benefits of relations with Iran, he said that Iran had made great strides with constructing hydroelectric dams and refineries, and would share that knowledge, adding that some of the investment Iran had made in Ecuador had not been registered as it had come through Turkey. Ecuador’s business community remonstrated about deepening opaque relations at the cost of transparent relations with the country’s largest trading partner - the US. Venezuela’s foreign minister, Nicolás Maduro, also argued that Iran had provided technology transfer to develop “a new industrial apparatus”, allowing the construction of food processing plants and tractor factories, but the extent of economic cooperation through the many promised accords is difficult to discern.
The bottom line is that Iran craves allies and beneath the idealistic rhetoric of social justice and solidarity propounded by Alba lies a visceral anti-Americanism that makes the act of defying US foreign policy objectives of ostracising Iran more important than trade or indeed any ideological consistency to relations with Iran: members of the Iranian Communist party Tudeh, for instance, are imprisoned or in exile. Correa insisted he would not be dictated to by the State Department over Ecuador’s foreign ties. His foreign ministry issued a statement claiming that the recent IAEA report was “based on data provided by the intelligence agencies of the very countries trying to isolate (Iran)”, and criticised the US “imposition of sanctions”. Chávez was more direct: “the Latin American people will never again be on their knees before the Yankee empire.” The ties between Nicaragua and Iran are based on the common start date of their respective “revolutions” in 1979 and a shared past of resisting US interference (such as the infamous Iran-Contra scandal); shared future objectives are limited to preserving power after staging similarly dubious “democratic” elections.

Another tour

While President Ahmadinejad missed out on a trip to Brazil, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, a Republican, began a six-member bipartisan congressional delegation to Latin America this week in Brazil, with legs in Colombia and Mexico to follow. During the Brazil leg of the trip, Boehner, conscious of Ahmadinejad’s presence in the region, was keen to focus on shared democratic values underpinning bilateral ties: “Our two nations have a tremendous opportunity to continue to develop a strategic partnership, particularly in areas such as trade and energy… Brazil’s strong commitment to democracy is playing a critical role in defending and promoting the cause of freedom throughout the world.”

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Diplomacia e Relações Internacionais