Whether out of a desire to escape his record-low approval ratings at home or a hunger for Mexican tamales
and Brazilian rice and beans, George W. Bush is making a run south of
the border. This week the president will stop in Brazil, Uruguay,
Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico—making his longest-ever official visit
to Latin America. Taking place at a time when feelings of animosity
toward the United States are widespread, the tour will serve as Bush’s
most concerted effort yet to improve relations with the region.
What are the odds that his travels will do anything to reverse anti-yanqui
sentiment? Not good. Our neighbors to the south have ample reason to be
resentful. They have suffered from a White House approach to Latin
America that is based on a fundamentally flawed conception of U.S
national interest.
In a speech on Monday, the president contended that his trip will
signal a new, more caring attitude toward Latin America and its people,
including the large populations that live in poverty. But actions speak
louder than words. Few things say more about the Bush administration’s
attitudes toward Latin America than the appointment in February of John
Negroponte to Deputy Secretary of State. Negroponte was an ardent Cold
Warrior who served as ambassador to Honduras for a stretch in the 1980s
when the country became a haven for death squads and CIA-funded Contra
mercenaries. Negroponte’s promotion made it ever more clear that Bush
policy is being defined by Reaganite reactionaries whose conception of
international relations is based on an outdated notion of U.S. power
and Latin American acquiescence.
This rearguard policymaking has little chance of swaying a region
that is growing increasingly independent. A foreign policy that values
strong democracies and shows genuine concern for the people of Latin
America, the majority of whom live in or near poverty, is far more
likely to win allies than the diplomatic strong-arming and electoral
meddling that has so often marked U.S. relations with Latin America.
Fates Worse Than Neglect
The failure of past U.S. policy is not merely a problem for the
current administration; it also presents a challenge for the Democrats.
Before gaining a majority of seats in Congress, the Dems claimed that
the President had failed to pay enough attention to Latin America. In
2004, John Kerry argued in his campaign that Bush's Latin America
policy was marked by "neglect, failure to adequately support democratic
institutions, and inept diplomacy." Since then, various Democrats have
repeated the charge, using the language of "neglect" whenever Latin
America comes up.
Yet now that the Democrats hold more power, this observation no
longer suffices as a position on hemispheric affairs. Under President
Clinton, Democratic policy toward Latin America focused on promoting an
aggressive “free trade” agenda and pushing poor countries to pursue a
corporate-friendly path to development. Clinton, after all, was the
president who ushered the North American Free Trade Agreement through a
Democratic-controlled Congress. Clinton further envisioned spreading
NAFTA throughout the hemisphere with a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
(Thankfully, the FTAA has been buried in recent years by waves of
popular resistance, as well as disinterest from the new generation of
progressive presidents that has won office in countries throughout the
region.)
Clinton-style economic neoliberalism failed to benefit the majority
of Latin Americans, and this failure is at the very root of
the region’s recent swing to the left. Policies like privatizing public
industries, cutting government social spending and deregulating
financial sectors may have paved the way for multinational corporations
to spread. However, they produced two decades of abysmal GDP growth in
Latin America. While a small elite grew fantastically wealthy, most
people in the region saw few, if any, improvements to their standard of
living.
The 1990s were supposed to be years of globalizing prosperity. Yet
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported in 2001 that “nearly 36
percent of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean lives
below the poverty line—the same proportion as a decade ago.” This
number greatly understates the number of citizens who are scraping
together only meager livelihoods or relying on money sent back from
family members who have migrated north. Moreover, the wealth that has
been produced in the region has not been shared equally. As a 2003
World Bank report explains, “The richest one-tenth of the population of
Latin America and the Caribbean earn 48 percent of total income, while
the poorest tenth earn only 1.6 percent.”
Of late, economic elitism has been smacking up against the popular
vote. Comfortable candidates promising pro-U.S. policies are learning
that it’s hard to win elections with only that richest one-tenth of the
population behind you. The Latin American populace is clearly fed up
with neoliberalism’s lackluster results, and rightly so.
Democrats who propose a return to Clinton-era policy that values
“free markets” above all else have missed this key lesson. They may vow
to pay more attention to Latin America, but there’s no guarantee that
such attention will be a good thing. Given their past relations with
the United States, Latin Americans are all too aware that there are
worse things than neglect. It is incumbent upon the Democrats to offer
a positive vision of America’s national interest that can transcend
both Bush’s Cold War-minded approach to hemispheric affairs and the
flawed corporate globalization still favored by segments of the party.
Beyond Hugo Chávez
One of the key pressures motivating U.S. action to improve its image
in Latin America is the rise of Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela as a formidable
ideological rival. The most outspoken of the left-of-center Latin
American presidents, Chávez has cemented his popularity by using the
windfall of high oil prices to fund anti-poverty initiatives in
Venezuela and beyond. He has sent upwards of $16 billion in aid abroad
in recent years, with especially significant infusions of resources
going to Bolivia and Argentina. Chávez has gone so far as to send
subsidized heating oil to families that might otherwise go cold in poor
sections of New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and other American
cities.
No doubt, there are criticisms to be made of Chávez’s style of
governing, but the rabid Bush White House and the mainstream newspapers
that have followed its lead have lost all sense of proportion in their
outrage about Venezuela’s “checkbook diplomacy.” The denunciations make
it sound as if Venezuela could have no humanitarian vision whatsoever
about helping those in need, and as if the money that the U.S. sends
overseas as foreign aid is offered out of pure, untainted benevolence.
Given the Bush administration’s well-established ideological
preoccupation with shrinking government and its distaste for social
safety nets, it has little credibility to speak out about the proper
way to deploy the profits from oil resources. As it is, Venezuela’s
example is a powerful and persuasive one in a region that is ready for
more equitable economic policies.
Chávez has charged that the intent of Bush’s trip is “to divide
Latin America.” He’s right. A main White House strategy for handling
newly progressive governments has been to denounce the vaguely ominous
dangers of “populism” and try to separate “good” Latin American
leftists from “bad” ones. Bush has selected to visit countries where he
thinks he can pull leaders away from a Chávez-led regional bloc.
But the real issues go far beyond Chávez, and those who want to pin
our country’s image problem in Latin America on a single antagonist
ignore a central reality: Being on the U.S.’s good side hasn’t been
paying off too handsomely. In Brazil, where President Lula da Silva has
worked to maintain good relations with the IMF and U.S. Treasury
by largely adhering to neoliberal economic mandates, GDP growth over
the past four years has averaged only 2.6 percent. This places Brazil
alongside Haiti and El Salvador among the hemisphere’s slowest growing
economies. As Lula continues to structure his government’s budgets
around massive debt payments to wealthy lenders, he is left with little
funding to devote to his flagship anti-hunger program and other social
initiatives.
Argentina, by contrast, has seen a 45 percent increase in
economic growth since 2002, when it broke with the Washington
Consensus, forced creditors to restructure its debt, and began taking a
hard line with the IMF, whose recommendations had helped to produce
that country’s profound economic crisis in 2001.
Latin American governments are well aware of the numbers. They are
under pressure from the region’s angry and enlivened citizenry to forge
a more independent and egalitarian paths to development than what the
U.S. is offering. That’s what democracy is all about. And it shouldn’t
be considered a foreign policy failure that we must adapt to it.
Mark Engler, an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, is author of the forthcoming How to Rule the World: The New Politics of Fighting Empire in the Post-Bush Era. He can be reached via the web site www.DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance for this article provided by Sean Nortz.
© Copyright 2007 TomPaine.com
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