While Washington Sleeps…

Moisés Naím / El País

A lot is happening in Latin America. The dynamism in business, politics, society, international relations, and even the criminal cartels is obvious. In contrast, U.S. policy toward Latin America is lethargic, unimaginative, and surprisingly irrelevant.

But before discussing the U.S. government’s stated goals in Latin America and how realistic they are, just consider what is going on south of the border. For starters, and to everyone’s surprise, the region—known for its legendary economic mismanagement and frequent financial crashes—weathered amazingly well the global financial storm. It is now posting economic growth rates only exceeded by those of Asia.

In politics, a new cohort of presidents has been elected through fair and free elections. All of these newly elected heads of state come to power with broadly positive attitudes toward the United States. While just a few years ago Hugo Chávez enjoyed the admiration of the vast majority of Latin Americans who detested George W. Bush, today Chávez’ popularity has plummeted.

Meanwhile, like everywhere else in the world, the election of Barack Obama as president was widely cheered in the Western hemisphere. Yet, like others, Latin Americans feel disappointed as the new U.S. president—challenged by domestic problems and distracted by international emergencies—has failed to meet their high and clearly unrealistic expectations about a major redefinition of U.S. policies toward its southern neighbors. They are right. President Obama would be hard pressed to describe the fundamental ways in which his government’s policies toward Latin America differ from those of his predecessor.

Nonetheless, Obama’s personal standing and popularity in the region remain very high. Despite the opportunities created by the U.S. president’s good standing, the many new Latin governments eager to engage constructively with the United States, and the possibilities created by the rapid changes taking place south of the border, the U.S. government’s presence and influence in its own backyard continues to be subdued and constrained. Meanwhile, other countries are enlarging their footprints in Latin America.

China and Iran, for example, were once remote and unknown in the region. Today, China has gained a significant economic influence in Latin America and Iran has forged an unprecedented political presence with several countries there—notably Venezuela and others in the Bolivian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) group. Russia has also made unprecedented strides as a supplier to the armed forces of countries that, mostly in the past, relied on U.S. companies for their arms procurement.

The region is also rife with political and economic change—even in places where politics and economic policies have been stagnant for half a century or more. In Cuba, Fidel Castro recently acknowledged to a visiting U.S. journalist that the island’s economic model no longer works. While he quickly recanted his indiscrete comment, facts spoke louder than his words. Just three days after Castro explained that he was misunderstood and misquoted, the Cuban government announced the dismissal of 500,000 government employees (10 percent of the country’s workforce). According to the government, layoffs are necessary because the economic ways of the past are no longer sustainable.

Yet, in today’s Latin America, macroeconomic failure is more the exception than the norm. While the economies of Cuba and Venezuela rank among the worst performers in the world, those of Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and other countries are booming. Even Mexico—which suffers from chronic slow growth and was hard hit by narcotics violence, pandemics, and other major shocks—is recovering at an uncharacteristically fast clip.

The voracious global appetite for the region’s natural resources spurred growth while good economic policies kept inflation and deficits in check. The favorable external economic environment, good macro-economic management, and more effective anti-poverty policies have had enormously positive social impacts. In recent years, tens of millions of Latin Americans were able to improve their economic situation and leave the ranks of the poor. A fast-growing middle class is an important and welcome novelty in a region where middle-income groups were not only relatively small but were regularly pushed back into poverty by bouts of declining wages, unemployment, inflation, and banking crises that vaporized their savings.

Of course, all of this does not mean that the traditional problems that plagued the region have been solved. Bad schools and universities, poor health care, corruption, and inequality are still endemic. And new tragedies have emerged: the car bombs, torture, and the beheading of rivals we saw on the news from Iraq and Afghanistan now come instead from Mexico. More people are killed in a weekend in Caracas than in Kabul or Baghdad. Latin America is one of the most criminal regions in the world in terms of murders and the percentage of its economy related to illicit trafficking. This is not a problem with an easy solution.

But Latin America has also given us a good surprise: Colombia proved that progress in the fight against drug cartels and violence is possible. If Colombia could, others can. Unfortunately, progress on this front will always be curtailed by the allure of unimaginable profits available to those who dare to bypass the U.S. prohibition on drugs and feed the insatiable appetite that that the United States has for narcotics.

In short, for better and for worse, Latin America is rapidly changing in almost all respects. Where nothing is changing is the way in which the U.S. government relates to its southern neighbors. This is not new and, for decades, experts have complained that Latin America only attracts the attention of the State Department and others in Washington when there are wars or natural disasters. In 2006, I published in Foreign Policy an article entitled The Lost Continent, where I argued that Latin America was the new Atlantis, the continent that mysteriously disappeared from the map or, at least in this case, the mental maps of top Washington politicians and bureaucrats. U.S. leaders are always too distracted by other priorities (which currently include two wars, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, the global financial crisis, health care reform, China, or the midterm elections, among many others) to worry about Latin America.

But the fact that Latin America does not figure in the calculations or conversations of top U.S. decision makers does not preclude some of them from giving speeches about U.S. policy toward the region that are as disconnected from reality as those given by Fidel Castro in Cuba. According to the State Department, U.S. policy toward Latin America has four priorities: “promoting social and economic opportunities for all, securing a clean energy future, ensuring the security of all citizens, and building effective democratic institutions.” How can anyone disagree? But this is an agenda better suited for an economic development agency, not the State Department.

The goals the United States declares as its top diplomatic priorities in the region are in fact challenges for the government of each country, not for the diplomacy of another nation, regardless of how large and powerful it is. Washington would never dare say to Asia that one of the main goals of its diplomacy is “promoting opportunities for all Asians.” Moreover, the current foreign policy toward Latin America suffers from another flaw: neither the State Department nor the entire U.S. government has the money, knowledge, or human resources to implement it effectively. Need evidence of this? See: Iraq; Afghanistan.

Talking about these illusory policy priorities toward Latin America allows U.S. diplomats to avoid mentioning other very real—and politically explosive—issues: the useless barrier on the border with Mexico, the paralysis of policy on immigration and free trade agreements, the Castro-boosting embargo on Cuba, the missed opportunities of building a strong alliance with Brazil in its new role as a key global player, or the stagnation of the war against drugs. Regarding the latter, it should be noted that the only thing stagnant is the U.S. government policy. Stagnation is not exactly what comes to mind when one thinks about the drug cartels or their U.S. customers. According to data released by the White House, last year the consumption of marijuana, ecstasy, and methamphetamines increased in the United States. That “war” is not going well.

From this perspective, perhaps one of the top priorities of Latin America’s policy toward the United States (if there was one) should in turn be to “help the citizens of the superpower to get high less often.” No one would take it seriously, but it sounds good—much like the current U.S. official policy toward Latin America. Well-sounding, well-meaning, but cliché-ridden and, ultimately, irrelevant.