Diplomatic Explusions Highlight Need for US to Re-Engage with Latin America

By Jonathan Winer

The expulsions last week of the U.S. Ambassadors to Venezuela and Bolivia, and the U.S.'s reciprocal response should not have been unexpected. They illustrate the current condition of long deteriorating relations between the U.S. and those countries, as well as with Ecuador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, over the course of the Bush Administration. They are also an unsurprising result of systemic neglect of the U.S. relationship with Latin America more generally.

It’s difficult to imagine any Administration having a happy relationship with Hugo Chavez, who is the most difficult (and obnoxious) Latin American leader the U.S. has encountered since Fidel Castro. Chavez has combined cheesy domestic populism, socialistic and anti-Yankee rhetoric, Machiavellian uses of burgeoning oil revenues, corruption, and outright support for terrorists in neighboring countries to create a problem for the region that the U.S. cannot solve alone.

The need for a more inclusivist, collaborative U.S. strategy to combat Chavez’s excesses, and to minimize the harm he can do to such critical policies as combating narcotics and terrorism, has been evident for years. To date, that strategy has been largely Colombia focused, and largely law enforcement focused, and to that extent, it has been largely successful, as the capture of the FARC documents in the Raul Reyes computers last March demonstrated.

But the failure of the Bush Administration to put in place a wider diplomatic and development strategy, by which the U.S. would be able to make common cause with the many governments in Latin America who are infuriated and even threatened by Chavez, is striking. Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Peru, have each recalled their own ambassadors from Chavez's Venezuela in previous years, and merely constitute the starting places for partners in such a strategy. The U.S. will need separately to redevelop its relationships over time with Chavez's erstwhile allies in Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and Nicaragua, irrespective of its issues with Chavez. Figures such as Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega may find provocative behavior towards the U.S. helpful in the short-run, but are likely to find that longer-term political survival is facilitated by rapprochment with a post-Bush United States.

The newfound Russian and Iranian interest in the region highlights the weakness of the U.S. position in the region after two terms of President Bush. Neither country has natural strategic reasons to be involved in Latin America. Each is responding to the opportunity presented by Chavez’s hostility to the U.S., and the U.S. incapacity to date to respond effectively.

The opportunities for the two Presidential campaigns would seem obvious, at least in substantive terms, while U.S. politics remains focused on bridges to remote places in Alaska.

What might such a strategy include?

The substance of the strategy - as opposed to its actual implementation - has already been developed, and is laid out very well in the draft communiqué prepared this past July for next April’s fifth Summit of the Americas to be held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

It states what is needed with remarkable clarity:

“Deep and persistent inequalities continue to exist, especially in education, income levels, health and nutritional status, exposure to violence and crime, and access to basic services. In response, we will continue to develop and implement social protection programs that are specifically targeted to the poor and vulnerable groups in our societies, in order to ensure equal access for all men and women to basic social services such as water, housing, healthcare, food and sanitation.”

The draft Summit of Americas statement goes on to acknowledge that “to eliminate poverty and hunger, create jobs, and raise the standard of living all our people, we must achieve higher levels of continuous economic growth with equity.” It then reaffirms the region’s commitment to open trade, economic integration, and “the necessary policies and regulations to facilitate and promote the movement of enterprises and workers from the informal to the formal sector.”

This is an agenda that bridges right and left, and includes an anti-money laundering and regulatory reform component, as the movement of people, businesses and money from the informal sector requires a reduction in the kinds of taxes and regulations that push economic activity into the grey area, even as it requires documentation of economic activity, and the payment of taxes to governments, which in turn can be used to deliver actual services to people who need them. It needs to be followed with the concrete efforts at implementation, country by country, facilitated by regional institutions and when needed, external assistance and aid. Its urgency is likely to increase, given rising energy and food costs, which are likely to intensify the economic challenges facing many governments in the Americas in the months to come, while prompting intensified efforts to create new means for delivering food and energy close to home through greater use of renewables. There is already a great deal taking place on the ground in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and each of the Central American countries on initiatives to move beyond hydropower and ethanol to biodiesel and solar. It is the kind of territory where practical opportunities have the potential to promptly trump ideological pet rocks.

This does not mean that the U.S. should stop efforts to go after drug traffickers, terrorists, and those who collaborate with them in the region. The publication in full of the documentation in the Raul Reyes computers, and continued designations of those who collaborated with FARC drug trafficking or terrorist activities are necessary cleansing actions, to ensure that are consequences for facilitating criminality, even if it done by state officials as a matter of state policy.

It will not be easy to proceed constructively on the development and economic agenda, while continuing to expose corruption and criminality in Latin America even when it is inconvenient for Hugo Chavez and his ambitions. Both strands will be necessary to crawl out of the deepening hole in the U.S.-Latin American relationship that Chavez has bulldozed while relevant U.S. policymakers appear to have been otherwise occupied.

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