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Special Report

U. S. Policy in Latin America
Problems, Opportunities, Recommendations

Contents:
l Obstacles to Democratic Consolidation
l Fast Track Derailed
l The Looming "Threats" to U.S. National Security
l International Drug Control
l Cuba
l Opening the Floodgates for High-Tech Arms
l Toward a New Policy

by Coletta Youngers
    Senior Associate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). WOLA Executive Director George Vickers also contributed to this essay.

Foreign Policy In Focus, a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, sponsored this special report and series of charts about Latin America as part of its effort to set forth a new vision of the role of the United States in global affairs. The report will appear with other foreign policy essays in Global Affairs 2000, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. The project is circulating a draft policy agenda for Latin America, based on this essay and the project’s numerous In Focus policy briefs on the region. We invite your comments on the Latin America Affairs Agenda, which is available at http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org

Comparing conditions in the Western Hemisphere today with the situation fifteen years ago, there appears to be much room for optimism. The armed conflicts in Central America, which were at the center of policy debates in the United States, have all ended with negotiated solutions, and the authoritarian dictators that ravaged South America were one-by-one replaced by elected civilian officials. Massive government-sponsored human rights abuses have declined dramatically as a result, and economic growth has resumed after a lost decade.

Upon taking office, senior Clinton administration officials painted this rosy assessment of regional trends and proposed a foreign policy agenda for Latin America centered around the concept of “enlargement and engagement,” based on the now-familiar arguments that open economies foster growth and allow greater political freedoms and that democracies make more reliable allies. With the exception of Cuba, they point out, every country in the hemisphere is on the same economic and political track, headed toward the completion of a free trade alliance from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego to be established by the year 2005. Waving the free trade banner, the Clinton administration has made promoting U.S. economic interests its number one priority in U.S. policy toward the region. In an interview with the New York Times just prior to beginning his second term in office, President Clinton boldly proclaimed that pursuing free trade agreements with Latin American countries would be among his highest priorities during his second term.

Clinton, however, did not live up to his word, and shortly into his second term Latin America faded from the administration’s agenda (with the important exception of the “war on drugs”). More importantly, the Clinton administration’s message rings hollow for the vast majority in Latin America and the Caribbean who have failed to benefit either from democracy or economic growth, which has not trickled down as promised. Elected civilian governments remain fragile and are threatened by continued military impunity and weak institutional guarantees of fundamental civil, political, and individual rights. Today there is mounting evidence that the obstacles to democratic consolidation are growing and that the neoliberal economic model is simply not capable of addressing fundamental problems like the lack of employment opportunities and the inequitable distribution of income and resources. Moreover, it fails to take into account the very real danger of sharp reversals in the positive regional trends of democratization, demilitarization, and greater respect for human rights.

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