AOC and friends met with leftist politicians to offer their support for collectivist causes in the name of nonintervention. “Extractive” U.S. policies are on AOC’s list of gripes. In Chile this presumably means copper mining, which happens to have been the engine of the country’s economic growth going back decades. If it means lithium mining, perhaps Ms. Ocasio-Cortez should have had a word with President Gabriel Boric. He recently nationalized the industry so he could grab more wealth for the state.
A central talking point was the group’s outrage over U.S. Cold War policies, which kept Soviet and Cuban hands off the continent in the 20th century. The defense of the Kremlin’s Western Hemisphere puppets, 50 years after the fact, is a head-scratcher. One wonders why the gaggle of American anticapitalists, spouting facile economics, didn’t instead visit Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia—where communism has taken hold. They would have been greeted as heroes by any of those governments.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s vanity tour underwhelmed the locals. Brazil’s President Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva didn’t make time to meet with them. Press coverage overall was scant, though there was much posing.
Some special interests, such as Chile’s anti-American Communist Party, used the visit to show themselves close to American politicians, which seemed, well, weird. With a huge corruption scandal swirling around Mr. Boric, a meeting with members of the minority party of the U.S. House and some Hill staffers may have been a welcome distraction. For most Chileans the visit was background noise.