Is growing anxiety that the US is losing its positions in Latin America justified? (Opinion)

aljazeera.com Opinion …….(Gregory Weeks) The assertion that the United States is “losing” Latin America is a persistent and bipartisan obsession. In an era of intense domestic polarisation, analysts – especially in the United States but elsewhere as well – of all different political stripes seem to find agreement. This line of reasoning gathered steam in the past decade in large part because of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s rise to power. It is a straightforward and tempting thesis, but it is also inaccurate and fosters problematic directions for US foreign policy.

The basic argument goes like this: Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama alike have focused on other parts of the world, primarily the Middle East. They have therefore responded to events in this hemisphere in a reactive and insufficient manner which allows adversaries – Venezuelans, Cubans, Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Hamas, among others – to throw their political weight around. Read Article