Her remarks come after Iran announced that their President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be visiting Brazil later this week, a visit Clinton described as "quite disturbing." Ahmadinejad is bringing quite a crowd with him, more than 100 representatives from dozens of Iranian companies, all in a bid to build economic ties between Iran and Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America.
Clinton said that the ties countries like Iran and China are establishing with the nations of Latin America are not in America's foreign policy interest. She blamed the Bush Administration for some of America's loss of influence in the region because of its unpopular policies towards Venezuela and Cuba - policies many Latin American leaders have been urging the Obama Administration to change.
"The prior administration tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to turn them into international pariahs. It didn't work,” Clinton said. Not only didn't it work, you could reasonably argue that the policies did more harm than good to the United States in Latin America. Keep in mind that last December when countries in the region held the inaugural "Latin American and Caribbean Summit on Integration and Development", they invited China and Russia to sit in as observers - and asked the US to stay home.
In the past few years China and Russia have been steadily building ties in Latin America: Russia has renewed their relationship with their old Soviet-era ally, Cuba and has invested in projects in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua; while China is also courting Cuba, hoping to develop oil fields off the island's coast and has quietly become Chile's biggest export partner. Now Iran is hoping to build new ties in the region as well.
“I don't think in today's world...that it's in our interests to turn our backs on countries in our own hemisphere," Clinton said.
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