By Nate Foote, Latin America Contributor
Evo Morales’ visit to Tehran last week to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as his decision to move the country’s lone Middle East embassy from Cairo to Tehran, have come as a stark reminder that Iran has found friends among the South American left, and vice versa. Ahmadinejad has also strengthened his relationship with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, meeting him for no less than six visits to the Islamic Republic.
To some, the increasingly friendly relationships between South America’s most bombastic heads of state and the Iranian President seem dubious, but Iran has increasingly been reaching out to countries like Bolivia and Venezuela, who share contempt for the United States, as a way to gain influence in America’s back yard. Ahmadinejad has praised “the resistance of the Bolivian people”, and Bolivia certainly isn’t complaining, with Iran pledging over $1 billion dollars to help develop the countries’ natural gas industry, ensuring that Bolivia remains one of Iran’s few supporters in its standoff with the west over its nuclear program.
Iran, long one of the most alienated countries on earth, has been experiencing something of a geopolitical renaissance. Growing ties with Russia and China, a controversial nuclear program, not to mention the removal of its long time archenemy Saddam Hussein, have thrust Iran into the spotlight, and made it a serious player on the world stage. It is not surprising, then, that Iran has expressed no misgivings about nurturing alliances with very Catholic countries like Bolivia or Venezuela, illustrating that despite the Islamist rhetoric, policy makers in Tehran are making pragmatic calculations. Clearly, Bolivia and Venezuela have come to similar conclusions, seeing a relationship with Iran as essential to protecting them from the American “imperialists”.
Understandably, the United States is worried, and rightfully so. Bolivia and Venezuela, by allowing themselves to be surrogates for Iranian influence in the Western Hemisphere, have increased their own footing worldwide, and as two of the most energy rich states in Latin America, an alliance with oil-rich Iran gives the trio real power.
Chavez and Morales have used their growing power to curry favor in Moscow as well. In July, Chavez called for a strategic alliance with Russia in order to protect the South American nation from the United States, saying, “Go ahead and squeal, Yankees.” Russia has responded favorably, agreeing to hold joint naval exercises in Venezuelan waters. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said the exercise is “…unrelated to the current political situation and the developments in the Caucasus”, but no one is entirely convinced. Indeed, Chavez has expressed his support for Russia’s “new world potential”, voicing his support for Russia’s intervention in Georgia. Russia, like Iran, sees her ties to South America’s left as an answer to American power in her own backyard. Fears of a new cold war may be overblown—the battle over ideology is over—but Russia is still yearning to recover from its dwindled sphere of influence, and South America is becoming a front of growing importance.
Although Latin America has long been a bastion of anti-Americanism, Bolivia and Venezuela’s ties to power hungry energy rich Russia and fundamentalist Iran, may be a sign that anti-western sentiment to the South may be more powerful and more far-reaching than previously envisioned.
We may be witnessing a growing movement among countries opposed to American predominance that could produce a formidable antithesis to American power, especially in South America, where American patronage produced some of the world’s bloodiest regimes, and has long been viewed warily by many Latin Americans. Anti-western sentiment to the south, since the end of the cold war, has been stymied by economic interdependence, but a growing economic partnership between Central and South American countries, and states like Iran and Russia, will threaten that balance.
