The Forgotten Relationship

Jorge G. Castaneda

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003

Article preview: first 500 of 4,984 words total.

Summary:  The September 11 attacks led the United States to replace its previous engaged and enlightened approach to Latin American relations with a total focus on security matters. This pullback has undermined recent regional progress on economic reform and democratization. To meet the pressing challenges ahead, Latin America needs the United States to be a committed partner.

Jorge G. Castaneda served as Mexico's Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003.

RETHINKING U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN TIES

Free from the strategic and ideological rigidities of the Cold War, Latin America in the mid-1990s looked forward to a more realistic and constructive relationship with the United States. The first Summit of the Americas in 1994, which launched negotiations on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), symbolized the renewal of goodwill and cooperation in the region. The summit led to a series of hemisphere-wide meetings at various levels throughout the 1990s that offered a new model for political relations between the United States and Latin America (most notably the Williamsburg and Bariloche defense ministerial meetings). This new diplomacy for the first time presumed to treat all the region's nations (with the exception of Cuba) as equals. The summitry also sent a powerful message throughout the hemisphere by implicitly stating that the success of the entire endeavor depended on the coordinated progress of all nations in the Americas.

A sign of the times was the lessened rhetorical confrontation between most Latin American nations and their powerful northern neighbor. Some unilateral U.S. policies-such as the process of "certifying" countries' cooperation with the U.S. drug war or the Helms-Burton legislation, which placed sanctions on any country that traded with Cuba-faced firm regional opposition. But Latin American countries felt increasingly more at ease when discussing certain issues with Washington that in the past had been highly controversial, such as democracy and human rights promotion or combating corruption. A consensus developed, stronger than at any time in the past half-century, on what constituted a common agenda for hemispheric relations and how to address it.

By the end of the last decade, however, the progress seemed to wind down. And the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington sounded the death knell of what could have become the new Bush administration's more forward-looking, engaged, and enlightened policy toward the rest of the hemisphere. The resulting post-September 11 picture is not pretty from a Latin American point of view, although there is certainly no lack of understanding or even support throughout the Americas for the U.S. fight against terrorism. But the United States has replaced its previous, more visionary approach to relations in the western hemisphere with a total focus on security matters. This disengagement is dangerous because it undermines the progress made in recent years on economic reform and democratization. Rarely in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations have both the challenges and the opportunities for the United States been so great. It is certainly not a time for indifference.

ROLLBACK

The events of September 11 preempted the Bush administration's initial plans to employ a more open approach within the western hemisphere. Indeed, security and counterterrorism concerns quickly, and perhaps understandably at first, overshadowed any other issue. For example, one immediate casualty of the emphasis on homeland security was the initiative to create a comprehensive and long-term solution to the problem of migration flows from Mexico to the United States. Other setbacks swiftly followed. By early 2002, the ...

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