Why do they care so much about who runs these poor countries? As any good chess player knows, pawns matter. The loss of a couple of pawns at the beginning of the game can often make a difference between a win or a loss. They are looking at these countries mostly in straight power terms. Governments that are in agreement with maximizing US power in the world, they like. Those who have other goals – not necessarily antagonistic to the United States - they don't like.

Not surprisingly, the Obama Administration's closest allies in the hemisphere are right-wing governments such as Colombia or Panama, even though President Obama himself is not a right-wing politician. This highlights the continuity of the politics of control. The victory of the Right in Chile last week, the first time that it has won an election in half a century, was a significant victory for the US government. If Lula de Silva's Workers' Party were to lose the presidential election in Brazil this fall, that would really be a huge win for the State Department. While US officials under both Bush and Obama have maintained a friendly posture toward Brazil, it is obvious that they deeply resent the changes in Brazilian foreign policy that have allied it with other social democratic governments in the hemisphere, and its independent foreign policy stances with regard to the Middle East, Iran and elsewhere.

The United States actually intervened in Brazilian politics as recently as 2005, organizing a conference to promote a legal change that would make it more difficult for legislators to switch parties. This would have strengthened the opposition to Lula's Workers' Party (PT) government, since the PT has party discipline but many opposition politicians do not. This intervention by the US government was only discovered last year through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in Washington. There are many other interventions taking place throughout the hemisphere that we do not know about. The United States has been heavily involved in Chilean politics since the 1960s, long before they even organized the overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973.

In October of 1970, President Richard Nixon was cursing in the Oval Office about the Social Democratic President of Chile, Salvador Allende. "That son of a bitch!" said Richard Nixon on October 15, 1970. "That son of a bitch Allende – we're going to smash him." A few weeks later he explained why:

"The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success .... If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble ..."

That is another reason that pawns matter, and Nixon's nightmare did in fact come true a quarter-century later, as one country after another elected independent left governments that Washington did not want. The United States ended up "losing" most of the region. But they are trying to get it back, one country at a time.

The smaller, poorer countries that are closer to the United States are the most at risk. Honduras and Haiti will have democratic elections some day, but only when Washington's influence over their politics is further reduced.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.