The latest Wikileaks deluge has produced varied responses. For journalists and historians it has so far been a gold mine. For diplomats it has been a nightmare. And for conspiracy theorists, the leaked cables have been a disappointment.

While there are embarrassing tidbits and some fodder for gossip in the cables, for the most part they are professional and reflect well on US diplomats. Almost everything had been previously reported – or at least widely rumored.

To be sure, there are personal characterizations that seem gratuitous and some dubious analyses and judgments, but these are part of the diplomatic world – in the United States and everywhere else in the world, Latin America included (Imagine what LA officials say about their US counterparts!). It is hard to point to examples of the US diplomats secretly conspiring with one another and coordinating actions in an attempt to rule the world. Whether or not those days ever existed, they now appear to be over.
As expected, US diplomats in Mexico, for example, expressed concern about the capacity of the government, and particularly the military, to subdue the drug cartels and reverse the deterioration in security conditions (it would have been surprising, and disappointing, if they hadn’t expressed such concern).

There are also some cables that show US concern with Hugo Chavez’s agenda in the region to curtail US influence, the presence and role of the FARC in Venezuela, and connections between Cuban intelligence services and the Chavez government. Others focus on the role of Iran in Latin America, the political orientation of Muslim communities in the region, and the Tri-Border area in Paraguay. None of this is surprising. Security and terrorism-related issues predictably dominate US diplomatic cables in the post 9/11 world.
Also not surprising was the reaction of some Latin American leaders. At last week’s Ibero-American Summit in Mar de Plata, Argentina, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa charged the US with manipulating the region’s governments. He said, “Enough interfering with our sovereignty, our independence, enough of betraying the confidence of countries that consider the United States to be a friend”

US diplomats — as other countries’ diplomats – were doing their jobs. Still, there is nothing in the cables to date regarding US policy in Latin America that would suggest that Washington was engaging in deception and seeking to destabilize or plot against any other government it considered unfriendly. The task was to gather relevant information and interpret what was going on. In the case of Honduras, for example, it is clear that the US ambassador to that country believed that what happened in June 2009 was a military coup that deserved to be condemned.

It would be too much to expect that the Wikileaks dump will improve relations between the United States and Latin America. US diplomats will probably not get much credit for their reporting, even if accurate. Instead, embarrassing descriptions of leaders and questionable practices (like collecting personal information about UN diplomats) will get most of the attention and will only reinforce well-defined ideological positions. Sensitivities about the US influence in the region will increase, not diminish.

But the truth is that those who continue to believe that the US is spending its time plotting and scheming to remove Latin American governments it doesn’t like – and who are convinced that there is a big difference between what US officials claim publicly and what diplomats on the ground are reporting – will not find much in the recently released cables to support their case.

Complete article via El Colombiano