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The 1990s were an unusually optimistic period for inter-American relations. After a decade of debt crises, lost opportunities, and the painful emergence from military rule, much of Latin America seemed determined for the first time in decades to march forward enthusiastically to a tune orchestrated by Washington. The consensus view, powerfully supported by the newly installed elected governments in the region, the U.S. Treasury, and the international lending agencies, touted the benefits of free trade, electoral democracy, privatization of state assets, and open economies.
Within the United States the change was no less dramatic. The straitjacket that had defined America's "friends" and "enemies" in Latin America along a rigid left-right divide had also been superseded. Following on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the winding down of the bitter conflicts in Central America, for the first time in living memory policymakers in Washington were relatively relaxed about the perceived threats to U.S. strategic interests from the left.
No less remarkable, the Latin American left itself became skeptical of the totalitarian utopias of communism, criticized Fidel Castro's authoritarianism in Cuba, and recognized the importance of elections, individual
These broader democratic and capitalist aspirations were well encapsulated in the Enterprise of the Americas Initiative of the Bush administration and in Bill Clinton's early successes in using fast track authority in Congress to push forward trade legislation. They were greatly assisted by the Brady Plan, launched in 1989, which created new instruments for debt renegotiations backed by significant funds from the United States and Japan. The declarations that ensued from the Summits of the Americas in Miami (1994) and Santiago (1998), the Treaty of Asunción of March 1991, which set the framework for the establishment of the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 were all in their own ways remarkable developments that committed the hemisphere to free trade within the first decade of the next century, joined ancient enemies in trade pacts and customs unions, and overturned Latin America's inward-looking nationalistic economic models, which had been dominant in many cases since the 1930s.[2]
Much of this convergence passed without a great deal of attention from the American public. For them, Latin America remained by and large a place from which unwanted immigrants arrived, poisonous illegal drugs were produced, irreplaceable tropical forests burned, and where 90 miles from Key West a seemingly eternal Fidel Castro ranted on in anti-American, anti-capitalist, and antediluvian rhetoric from the proverbial Latin American dictator's balcony. This dichotomy between elite and popular perceptions of the region, however, was not without a basis in real experience. While the bankers, investors, and policymakers looked at capital flows, trade, and investment opportunities, for the general public Latin America's presence within the American body politic was growing in nontraditional ways with profound implications for the U.S. economy, the composition of the U.S. population, and state and federal electoral calculations; all of which served to underline just how complex and intimate the relationship between domestic and international policy had become in the United States at century's end.
Latin America specialists in academia usually lament the inattention at the top of the U.S. government toward hemispheric affairs; but it is important to disaggregate what "attention" means in this context since it arises for positive, as well as negative, cultural prejudices and stereotypes usually insinuated to explain U.S. disparagement of the region.[3] With the end of the Cold War, for example, this is not a part of the world where the United States faces the threat of nuclear challenge, or biological, or chemical weapons of mass destruction. Nor like the Balkans or parts of Africa is it currently a region where the systematic and often state-sponsored mass murder of ethnic minorities has been commonplace. Neither is it an area where the United States has long stationed major military forces or is entangled in significant military alliances of the type it has sustained since the end of the Second World War in Asia, the Middle East, and the North Atlantic region.
Inattention to Latin America at the highest levels of the U.S. national security apparatus is in part a function of the lack of overwhelming national security concerns of a traditional type in the hemisphere.[4] But if the scale of threat in this major sense is slight, and hence the allocation of financial resources and the deployment of military assets is comparatively speaking minimal, significant risks do exist and can be categorized. And it is useful to assess how, given past history, the United States might react to these "risks," especially during the delicate period of a protracted election season, and before a new president and his or her foreign policy team is in place.
I. Assessing the Risks
One curious consequence of the end of the Cold War for Latin America has been its relegation to a mushy zone where hard choices seem unnecessary, or at least can be subsumed within a platitudinous pan-Americanism. But if the United States cannot define its national interests in the region, others will. NAFTA was in fact the classic case: an idea pushed initially by the Mexican government, not by Washington. And the president of the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank, when he commissioned an elaborate and costly history of Latin American economic development over the past century, turned to Oxford and a battery of Latin American and European scholars, as if Harvard, or MIT, or UCLA possessed not an economist or Latin Americanist among them.[5]
Given the hypersensitivity of Latin Americans to U.S. unilateralism, this of itself is not very surprising; but the great disadvantage for U.S. policymakers is that it makes any realistic assessment of interests in the region virtually impossible, since to establish a hierarchy of risk tends to imply also a hierarchy of importance, and where the common denominator is often the self esteem of the smallest and least significant participant in the discussion, any such categorizations become anathema. But to begin any fruitful debate about U.S. policy options in the Americas, such an exercise seems to me to be absolutely necessary and long overdue.
The A List
Looking ahead to the next 18 months, my list of top "hot spots" would be as follows:
Cuba. Cuba continues to be high on any list, much less because of intrinsic strategic importance than because of its mischievous intersection with U.S. domestic phobias and the straitjacket within which U.S. responses to any dramatic change in Cuba are constrained. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has spoken of the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market; the problem with Cuba is that U.S. policy is purely irrational. It is regrettable that the Clinton administration did not endorse the idea put forward by former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger and other distinguished foreign policy practitioners, and backed by an impressive cross-section of senators and high government officials, for a bipartisan national commission on Cuba. Cuba policy deserves fundamental reassessment, not tinkering at the edges. Above all, the debate needs to be lifted above the narrow electoral political considerations where it is currently mired. A broad-based bipartisan national commission may or may not recommend drastic changes, such as ending the embargo, but it is essential that an open debate takes place on the fundamental questions, and the sooner the better.
My own view is that openness is the best policy, and that contact, not ostracism, is a greater threat to dictatorships, be they of the left or the right. This is especially true where regimes like Castro's can exploit a strong history of nationalism. In the Cuban case, it is an inescapable fact that despite 40 years of embargo Castro remains in power. He may indeed be "contained" in politico-military terms, but it is also a fact of life that Havana is awash with Europeans and Canadians, that the papal visit of 1998 will be followed in 1999 by the Ibero-American Summit and a parade of Latin American and European leaders, and that there are very few U.S. luminaries who can resist the chance to sup with Castro if invited.
Nor for that matter did the embargo restrain Castro's adventures in Africa and Latin America in the past. It would be nice to think that small (so-called calibrated) unilateral steps will undermine the regime and promote fundamental political change in Cuba, but I do not believe they will. They are too dependent on Castro's implicit agreement, and he has never carried through on positive overtures of this type from Washington in the past, preferring to kick away the ladder when it seemed a mini détente might be in the offing. Nor has he ever hesitated to remove potential threats to his power. Yet one thing does seem certain: it is that change, when it happens, will come quickly and unexpectedly, and that once Castro is gone his ramshackle regime will collapse in short order. Like Louis XV, even Castro seems to believe that "après moi le déluge."
It is therefore critical that the United States free itself from the legal and emotional handicaps that now bedevil its Cuba policy and that will prevent the U.S. government and U.S. society, including Cuban Americans, from reacting with speed, flexibility, and good sense when the happy moment of liberation arrives. To promote minor modification in the status quo is no answer. It leaves Castro with a situation he has long known how to navigate and exploit. And it leaves the United States with a policy that perpetuates the all-too-familiar pattern of paternalism and micromanagement toward Cuba's internal affairs that has plagued U.S.-Cuban relations now for over a century.[6]
Mexico. After 70 years of authoritarian rule by one party and highly stage-managed presidential successions, the most important presidential election since the end of the Second World War will take place in July 2000, with great uncertainty as to the outcome. Mexico is in the midst of an agonizing process of democratization. The rebellion in Chiapas, which coincided with the implementation of the NAFTA agreement in 1994, has been contained, but the conflict has not been resolved.[7] The stakes are very high, and party stalwarts (the "dinosaurs") of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) are fighting a rearguard action to retain their control of government patronage against the background of escalating public insecurity and political violence.[8] A major crisis of transition in Mexico would soon spill over into a major crisis for U.S. foreign policy, given the multiple cross-border links that affect all aspects of the U.S. economy, not to mention immigration and the traffic in illegal drugs. A large financial contingency fund of $23.7 billion has been put in place by the Zedillo administration with U.S. and international support to guard against a repeat of the cyclical economic crisis that has plagued Mexico's presidential succession in the past.
But the path to democracy remains strewn with dangerous and often hidden minefields. And, as John Coatsworth, the director of Harvard's Center for Latin American Studies, has pointed out, the trend in Mexico toward a more vibrant civil society and greater democracy could be threatened by narco corruption and violence on the Colombia model. It is a threat he believes might well be encouraged by the U.S. policy that supports the militarization of public security and law enforcement in Mexico.[9]
Brazil. The financial crisis that resulted in the disorderly devaluation of the real in January 1999 has been mitigated by a massive foreign bailout but not eliminated. The impact of the devaluation in January and the recession that followed has had a severe contagion effect on Argentina, which is facing presidential elections in October 1999 and the end of the Menem era. The strains within Mercosur are severe; and it cannot long contain within itself two dramatically opposed currency regimes—a fixed rate to the dollar in Argentina and a floating exchange rate in Brazil. There will be great pressure on Argentina to devalue after the election.
If Brazil does not succeed in its economic stabilization policy, which focuses principally on containing the chronic government deficits that force the government to borrow at high and unsustainable interest rates, and the capital flows needed to sustain these imbalances dry up as they did in 1998, it is difficult to see how the rescue devised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Treasury at that time can be repeated. Such a failure would have serious repercussions for the credibility of the 22 countries involved in the fund's $41.5 billion package and will unquestionably force serious political questions in legislatures throughout the West about the risk-management skills of the finance ministers and central bankers, not to mention the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, all of which have heavily committed their credibility as well as other resources to Brazil's recovery.
Northern South America. The crisis in Colombia grows out of a complex multifaceted conflict—three heavily armed and self-sustaining guerrilla armies numbering some 20,000 are arrayed on a hundred fronts across unrelenting mountain ranges and jungle terrain. They finance themselves by taxing the growers of coca, kidnapping, and extortion. In addition, highly organized and ruthless paramilitary bands wage their own war on behalf of landowners and, it is said, the military. Drug lords and money launderers, and a substantial part of the country's elite, profit indirectly and sometimes directly from the billions cocaine production and trafficking brings with it ($16 billion in 1998, according to Time magazine, compared to $11 billion from products such as oil, coal, coffee, and bananas).[10]
Colombia is the origin of 80 percent of the world's cocaine and three-quarters of the heroin consumed in the United States. As Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, four times the number of people have died in Colombia as in the wars in the Balkans, 300,000 children have been orphaned, and 700,000 have been forced from their homes.[11] The government has entered into peace negotiations with the major guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its acronym FARC, and has ceded control to FARC of a large part (40 percent by some accounts) of Colombia's territory.
But the war continues, weakening the credibility of the government, which is simultaneously facing a deep recession, rising unemployment, and burgeoning debt. Violence ordered by drug traffickers kills judges, government officials, journalists, and human rights workers, and intimidates legislators. There is a grave threat of the potential rise of a narco regime, following a victory of the guerrillas, or an escalation of the violent civil war, with the United States heavily involved in supporting the beleaguered government. This will present a huge problem for Washington, given the central role of Colombia in the supply of cocaine to U.S. and European markets and the role of the U.S. Congress in the "certification" process, whereby countries are judged on their antinarcotics efforts.
Venezuela is a major U.S. oil supplier (16 percent of U.S. oil imports came from Venezuela in 1998). President Hugo Chávez, who is strongly nationalistic, faces the expectant masses on one side and a terrified elite and their foreign associates on the other, along with a dangerously unbalanced economy. It is difficult to see an outcome that will not lead to disappointment on one side or the other, and the prospects for increasingly authoritarian rule are likely. The United States went to war to protect its vital interests in oil supplies in the Persian Gulf in 1990. By any definition, a threat to oil supplies in the Caribbean would quickly move Venezuela to the top of the national security agenda.
Ecuador is facing a major economic crisis that could bring the first default of the Brady bonds, which allowed Latin America to get itself out of the debt crisis in 1989 and reenter the financial markets. The "contagion" effect of an Ecuadorian default would shake confidence in these financial instruments throughout the region, reopen the debt question that appeared to have been resolved, and constrain Latin America's access to capital markets, which is essential in sustaining the economic model it is currently committed to.
The B List
The issues in Central America, the Caribbean, and Panama are of different order, but there are persistent problems in many of the "hot spots" of the 1980s. Overall, these are problems of development, access to markets, and chronic poverty, and involve complicated issues concerning access to restricted markets for commodities and decreasing competitiveness and prices (the "banana dispute" between the United States and the European Union, for example, falls into this category). Cuba, along with the impediments of the regime's own economic policies and the U.S. embargo, also faces many of the same problems, in dealing with a commodity-based export economy, that are plaguing the Caribbean as a whole. Panama will assume full control of the Panama Canal on January 1, 2000, and it faces threats on its Colombian border from insurgents. Many Central American countries are only slowly recovering from the terrible destruction of Hurricane Mitch and heavy debt burdens. All of these factors work against the healing and consensus building that are essential after decades of bitter internal strife.
In Peru, Alberto Fujimori, who has dominated Peruvian politics throughout the 1990s, has achieved considerable success on the economic, political, and drug control fronts, breaking the back of a vicious guerrilla movement that was threatening the stability of the state itself at the time of his inauguration. By imposing drastic neoliberal measures, he also rescued Peru from paralyzing inflation and economic collapse. But he has also run roughshod over civil society, whose collaboration is essential to the long-term survivability of these reforms. By manipulating the constitution to assure his reelection, Fujimori also set a dangerous precedent other Latin American elected leaders were quick to follow. If Fujimori did not invent the concept of "illiberal democracy," he has become one of its most assiduous practitioners.
In Paraguay, democracy remains shaky, corrupt, and penetrated by powerful lobbies of contrabandists. The benign and quiet pressure of Paraguay's more powerful neighbor in Mercosur has on more than one occasion over the past five years prevented a return to military rule. Severe tensions within Mercosur following the devaluation of the Brazilian real, however, have adversely affected Paraguay's economy and raised tensions along the borders with Brazil and within Paraguay proper, where there are many Brazilian immigrants.
II. Seven Major Generic Problems
In addition to the specific threats outlined above, seven continuing deep-rooted problems of a generic nature form a critical backdrop to any policy response to the region.
Vulnerability to global economic conditions. Much of the region today is highly dependent on the continued good health of the U.S.economy. A deterioration of U.S. economic conditions, rises in U.S. interest rates, and a return of Wall Street jitters about the political and economic stability of Latin American markets will all quickly have negative repercussions for the region.
The major economies are heavily leveraged and dependent on capital flows to sustain their internal fiscal imbalances. The achievement of budget surpluses in government expenditures is essential, but not easy with elections in the offing, borrowing requirements heavy, and worrisome social conditions, with education and basic infrastructure in need of urgent funding.
The global financial crisis of the past year and the working out of the neoliberal model has aggravated the chronic inequities within the region. This has led to high unemployment, personal insecurity, and the postponement of the benefits, in terms of health, education, and the opportunity for social mobility, that must be seen to flow from the fiscal restructuring if these difficult and painful reforms are to continue to receive political support within a democratic framework.
The great question mark over the current transfer of assets from the state to the private sector through the privatization process, for example, is whether or not it will bring about real changes in the economy, stimulate competitiveness, and encourage long-term growth. In the past, when similar transfers of assets occurred, it did not. The rich became richer, and the old mentalities and oligarchies thrived until a new cycle of state intervention took place.
"Corruption" is only one manifestation of this deeper structural dilemma, and to focus only on individuals will do little to resolve the problem. This is why the context within which these reforms take place is so important and why the U.S. retreat from free trade and the abandonment by the Clinton administration of its commitment to obtain the fast track approval for trade legislation, with its concomitant promises of increased exports, economic growth, and fuller participation in global markets for Latin America, is so damaging.
For Latin America, the easy way is the old way. Competition and open markets do not come without opposition, precisely because they can be painful, and even lethal, to entrenched interests. One of the aspects of the much touted "Chilean model," least noted but most significant in its economic impact, was Augusto Pinochet's willingness to confront the protectionist-minded Chilean business community as ruthlessly as he did the left. Corruption, of course, is a threat to liberalization in both the political and economic sense of the term, but principally because it is depressingly indicative of business as usual at a time when the pace of global change makes this a recipe for long-term marginality for the region in the global marketplace.
Assuring the quality of democratic governance. If we are to break out of what the Argentinian scholar Atilio A. Borón calls the polar moods of "foolish blind optimism of Pollyanna and Cassandra-like deep pessimism," policymakers must explore the "fault lines" that underlie the democratic forms within Latin America. These involve the shallowness of electoral politics, weakened political parties, declining support for political institutions, the uncertain consequences on politics of television, the violence and insecurity of everyday life, the absence of legal guarantees for many citizens, and the failure to fully subject the military to civilian authority.[12]
Confronting legacies. Almost all the nations of the region are slowly being forced to come to terms with the legacies of dirty internal wars. Some have confronted these issues with truth commissions and even the imprisonment of former leaders. But this story is far from over, as the complicated case of General Pinochet's arrest in London for crimes against humanity reveals. From Guatemala to Argentina, there are deep wounds to the collective memory that will take time to heal. And the U.S. role and responsibilities in these repressive regimes has itself only begun to emerge.
Negotiating the complex intersection of domestic and foreign policy concerns. The insatiable appetite for soft money in U.S. presidential and congressional campaigns, and the revolving door between government and special interests makes the U.S. political system highly vulnerable to foreign interference. The Mexicans soon learned in the course of the NAFTA debate, for example, that they needed the best advice money could buy to navigate the intricacies of the House and Senate and to galvanize U.S. public opinion in support of the NAFTA agreement. The Mexicans were soon directing an "armada" of government relations advisors, several law firms, lobbyists, public relations firms, and former congressional staffers and government officials, as well as assiduously courting the U.S. Hispanic community.
"Several Mexican officials were initially cagey about confiding our thoughts and discussing our plans with a variety of Americans whose job it was to sell their expertise in Congress," according to Hermann Von Bertraub, who was seconded from the Mexican private sector to help coordinate the Mexican government's NAFTA negotiating team in Washington D.C. But Von Bertraub had no such misgivings and acted accordingly.[13]
The danger of such manipulation is aggravated by the complex and at times contradictory nature of the U.S. policymaking process, the multiple agencies and actors involved, not only within the executive branch but also among federal agencies, state and local governments, and the private sector. The rise of transnational communities concomitant to the rise of instant communications has unfolding political consequences for the Western Hemisphere that further complicates inter-American relations. Immigrant communities—Dominican, Mexican, Salvadoran—increasingly have homes in two worlds, speak two languages, live bi-cultural lives, and commute back and forth between their country of origin and country of residence.
This is also increasingly affecting Cuba, which as the distinguished Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes has said, has "its polity in Havana and its economy increasingly in Miami."[14] Voters of Latin American origin will play an ever more important, and at times critical role on many of these issues in the year 2000, especially in Texas, Florida, and California, all pivotal states at election time. Hispanics are projected to become the nation's largest minority group in the year 2010 and to make up 25 percent of the nation's population by 2050.[15] Many scholars believe that this "integration from below" will have as much effect on the future of the hemisphere as trade or capital flows.
The interventionist temptation. The past decade has seen an increasing U.S. reliance on military interventions to fix perceived political threats: in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Haiti (1994), for example. The dangers of the "imperial temptation," always strongly present in U.S.-Latin America relations since the end of the eighteenth century, were prophetically defined in a remarkable book by the political scientists Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson written soon after the victory in the Gulf War.
Tucker and Hendrickson argued that the "isolationist sentiments among the public, expressed above all in their desire to avoid casualties to American troops and to avoid protracted engagements, may nevertheless be combined with an interventionist disposition to produce an explosive mixture—one marked by the desire to employ massive force and the wish to disengage from the scenes of destruction."[16] But as the Marines found out in the 1920s, "nation building" in Haiti and Central America is a very complicated, frustrating, and often self-defeating task. It was a lesson learned then, but which has been forgotten in the neo-interventionist 1990s.
III. How These Problems Will Affect the U.S. Elections
Each of these "threats," combined with the generic problems of the region and the in-termix of foreign and domestic pressures can have major implications for U.S. foreign policy in an election year.
Cuba/Haiti. Those most interested in preserving the status quo in U.S.-Cuban relations have a strong self-interest in aggravating the situation since a hard line favors the retention of their political influence, be it in Havana or in Miami. In the face of a renewed arrival of Cuban refugees in Florida and the continuing deterioration of the situation in Haiti, which might also renew the Haitian exodus, there is much scope for electoral mischief here over the next 18 months.
Brazil. If the financial crisis returns, serious questions will arise about the use of public monies to bail out Brazilians and rescue Wall Street speculators. There will be scant congressional or public support for further rescues, especially if the crisis is confined to Brazil and does not threaten contagion globally.
Mexico. A toxic mix of potential "hot issues"—migrants, drugs, democracy. If Mexico's transition falters and the United States is perceived as being unable to help its closest neighbor, the democratic progress of the region as a whole will be jeopardized. The deep reservations on both sides of the political divide over NAFTA in Congress will reemerge in the midst of a presidential campaign and make U.S. assistance controversial and difficult.
Colombia. A classic case of "mission creep," with the U.S. engagement increasingly bogged down in a potential quagmire. The shift in military funding from Central America to massive anti-narcotic assistance in the 1990s is complete, and there is now talk from U.S. drug "czar" Gen. Barry McCaffrey of Colombia needing a billion dollars in military funding. Here the domestic intersection is intense because of drug policy, the role of certification, and the cohabitation of narcotics traffickers with guerrillas and paramilitaries.
Venezuela. The potential for angry rhetoric on both sides is high. Members of the U.S. Congress are already talking of "decertifying" Venezuela for failure to cooperate in the antidrug "war." President Chávez will find a populist challenge to the United States irresistible if he needs to divert attention from intractable problems at home. A quarrel with Venezuela could quickly become the first nationalist challenge from a major oil supplier in the hemisphere since the 1950s.
IV. Policy Implications/Likely Outcomes
The route of least resistance for Washington is to continue with the status quo—largely along the model of the transition from Bush to Clinton. This is the most likely outcome; but in effect it means inaction and ad hoc responses to potential crises and the continuing lack of a clear definition of U.S. national priorities.
Trade. The much touted Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is going nowhere. The acrimonious debate in Congress and among the American public over NAFTA shocked Mexican negotiators at the time, and the battle lines have hardened since. Despite Clinton's eventual success in securing the approval of NAFTA, the position of the Clinton White House reminded the Mexican NAFTA lobbyists on more than one occasion of Arthur Balfour's verses of almost a century ago: "I'm not for Free Trade or protection. I approve of both, and to both have objections.... So in spite of all comments, reproach and predictions, I firmly adhere to unsettled convictions."
Given the internal splits in each party on this question, the enhanced role of special interests in an election season, and the rise of protectionist sentiment among the public, politicians will want to finesse the question. The survey of American public opinion toward U.S. foreign policy published every four years by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations is not encouraging on many of these questions and reveals a wide gap in perceptions of interest between the public and the "leaders" polled. By large percentages (83 percent) the public worries about "protecting the jobs of American workers," while only 45 percent of the leaders thought this important. As to whether Brazil, for example, was of vital interest to the United States, leaders gave a 75 percent rating, the public a mere 33 percent. Yet, 66 percent of the public thought Mexico was of vital concern and 93 percent of the leaders agreed.[17]
Democracy. The early achievement of removing military rulers underestimated the difficulty of the second stage of reforms to make Latin America's bloated and complex bureaucracies more responsive to public scrutiny and more efficient in their delivery of services. The trend seems to be toward more Fujimorization, and the emergence of a region characterized by what the writer Fareed Zakaria has dubbed "illiberal democracies."
Military Intervention. A dangerously and largely undebated drift into more direct engagement—this is a very slippery slope in Colombia.[18] Colombia currently receives $289 million in U.S. aid annually, making it the third largest recipient of military aid after Israel and Egypt. Politicians will not wish to seem soft on guerrillas, drug traffickers, and money launderers. This is a situation ready-made for demagoguery. Meanwhile, the agencies most interested in intervention (the Drug Enforcement Agency, the CIA, and the Pentagon) will quickly increase their engagement without much public scrutiny.
An Ideal Policy
This then is the most likely scenario, but an ideal policy would entail the following:
A unilateral lifting of the embargo on Cuba. There is no quicker way to end the Castro regime than by removing his remaining scapegoat for failure: U.S. hostility.[19]
No more bailouts for Brazil. Brazil and only Brazil can get its fiscal house in order. If Brazilian politicians think outsiders will rescue them from their own failures, they will never bite the bullet.
Thinking of North America as a region. Mexico accounts for over half of the trade between the United States and Latin America, it is the destination for most U.S. investment in the region, and it is the source of the bulk of immigrants to the United States. Some clear thinking is needed on deepening NAFTA. Given that the FTAA is going nowhere, Mexico should not be relegated to "hemispheric" free trade; it is time to provide structural assistance to Mexico on the model of the European Union.
There is a vital need to diminish disparities of opportunity. Above all, it is time to face the implications of financial, monetary, and exchange rate coordination and to move beyond the ad hoc responses to crises exemplified by the response to the peso collapse of 1994–95. The consequences of the lack of any serious approach to the question of establishing an intergovernmental financial institution has been high: $50 billion for the international bailout, the high indebtedness of Mexico's banks (21 percent of GDP), and Mexican unemployment and wage cuts.[20]
Latin America should not be made to bear the brunt of the failure of U.S. drug policy. The United States and, increasingly, Europe provide the market for Latin America's drugs, as well as the mechanisms for the laundering of drug profits. This is an international problem. More surveillance and transparency in private banking would help. The average taxpayer has no secrets from the Internal Revenue Service; suspected money launderers, even when they are the brothers of presidents and customers of U.S. banks, should be equally open to scrutiny. And why is it so difficult for "free marketeers" to understand that unless peasants in the Andes have alternatives they will always find ways to maximize their returns by planting the most profitable crops? The U.S. drug "czar" should not be a general; a banker or a medical doctor, even a psychiatrist, would be a better choice.
Avoid the imperial temptation. It is essential to take a hard look at priorities and avoid the easy route of militarizing responses. And the United States should not fear or distrust multilateralizing responses to complex problems that are global in scope.
What the United States needs is a robust definition of the national interest in the Western Hemisphere, matched with a return to the policy of the Good Neighbor. The first is important, because too often the United States allows its interests to be defined by others, a phenomenon that has become deeply rooted in the inter-American ethos, but which clouds the thinking about U.S. priorities and prevents the establishment of achievable objectives. The second is also needed, because in day-to-day relations, and in the process of problem solving, an appreciation of Latin America's priorities is vitally important. These two objectives should not be contradictory. Above all, there is a need for more pragmatism, greater coordination within the U.S. government, more realism and less ideology—and, yes, purposeful presidential leadership.
Notes
[1] See Jeremy Adelman, ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (New York: Routledge, 1999).
[2] On the emergence of the new "paradigm," see Sebastian Edwards, Crisis and Reform: From Despair to Hope (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Albert Fishlow, "The Western Hemisphere Relation: Quo Vadis?" in The United States and the Americas, ed. Albert Fishlow and James Jones New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), pp. 15–35.
[3] This position is captured most succinctly in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Towards Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); but also in Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas 1898–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
[4] There is a paradox here, of course. It should not be forgotten that Latin America can leap to the top of the national security agenda in unexpected ways and at inopportune moments, with major domestic political consequences. The Cuban Missile Crisis during the Cold War is the most extreme case, but there have been others in recent years—the crisis in Central America, the invasions of Panama, Grenada, and Haiti, the recurrent problems caused by unauthorized boat people arriving in Florida from Cuba and Haiti.
[5] Rosemary Thorp, Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the 20th Century (distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press for the Inter-American Development Bank and the European Union, 1998).
[6] I am repeating here my dissent to the conclusions of the Independent Task Force on Cuba sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. See U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 21st Century (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1999).
[7] The complex causes and intractable problems involved in Chiapas are brilliantly described in John Womack, Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader (New York: New Press, 1999); Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).
[8] Wayne A. Cornelius, Todd A. Eisenstadt, and Jane Hindley, eds., Subnational Politics and Democratization in Mexico (La Jolla, Cal.: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1999).
[9] John Coatsworth, "The United States and Democracy in Mexico," in The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda, ed. Victor Bulmer-Thomas and James Dunkerley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 153.
[10] "A Carpet of Cocaine," Latin American edition, Time, August 9, 1999, p. 18.
[11] Mark Falcoff, "Does Colombia Have a Future?" Latin American Outlook (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, July-August 1999). See also Michael Shifter, "Colombia on the Brink," Foreign Affairs, vol. 78 (July-August 1999); and Linda Robinson, "Colombia Dispatch," New Republic, September 6, 1999.
[12] For the risks to democratic consolidation in the region, see Felipe Aguero and Jeffrey Stark, eds., Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-Transition Latin America (Miami: North-South Center Press, 1998), in which leading scholars examine the problem of governance in "post-transition" Latin America.
[13] Hermann Von Bertraub, Negotiating NAFTA: A Mexican Envoy's Account (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).
[14] "The Face of Cuban Immigration: An Interview with Alejandro Portes," Cuban Committee for Democracy, Asuntos Cubanos, vol. 5 (spring/summer
[15] See a report from Public Agenda and the Tomás Rivera Institute, Here to Stay: The Domestic and International Priorities of Latino Leaders (New York and Austin, 1998).
[16] Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1992).
[17] "American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1999," Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 1999.
[18] There is a good description of the seriousness and complexity of the problem and the dilemmas for U.S. policymakers in Gabriel Marcella and Donald E. Schulz, "War in Peace in Colombia," Washington Quarterly, vol. 22 (summer 1999), pp. 213–28. See also Gabriel Marcella and Donald E. Schulz, "Colombia's Three Wars, U.S. Strategy at the Crossroads," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, March 5, 1999; and Richard Downes, "Landpower and Ambiguous Warfare: The Challenge of Colombia in the 21st Century," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, March 10, 1999.
[19] See the recommendations contained in Cuba's Repressive Machinery: Human Rights Forty Years after the Revolution (New York: Human
[20] Given the importance of the national sentiments in Mexico and Canada, this implies something less than "dollarization" but does involve institutional, as well as constitutional, questions for the United States, which need to be thought out and discussed. See E. V. K. FitzGerald, "Trade, Investment and NAFTA: The Economics of Neighborhood," in The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda, ed. Victor Bulmer-Thomas and James Dunkerley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 99–121.
