EARLIER THIS MONTH, the Summit of the Americas took place, hosted by President Biden in Los Angeles. I heard about it through a headline or two, and in the days beforehand I read a couple paragraphs from a daily news briefing. I figured, ‘aha, here we go, Biden’s shiny new Latin America policy is around the corner.’ But two weeks after the summit wrapped up on June 10th I had forgotten it had even taken place. It came and went, seemingly without achievements, bold proposals, or compelling follow-up stories. Surely I had missed something.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, Gustavo Petro was elected president of Colombia, the first leftist leader in the nation’s history. This seemed like a big deal. And yet the entire election only came into view once it was pretty much over. I only heard Petro’s name after he won the first round and was headed into a second round duel against the right-wing populist Rodolfo Hernández, a man who drew comparisons to Donald Trump (aha – there’s a name I know).
Thus a pattern emerged: I am consistently ignorant about major issues of Latin American history, foreign affairs, and contemporary politics. Assuming this was pretty much my own fault, I didn’t initially think much more of it – I needed to broaden my news intake, that’s all.
AS I CONTINUED to read about Gustavo Petro, the Summit of the Americas, and the recent history of the region, however, I began to realize I wasn’t alone – it seems most of Washington shares my ignorance and, what’s more, treats Latin America with indifference.
In all the speeches, strategic plans, and promises of cooperation I came across it was hard to define a single, cohesive narrative, something to make sense of the West’s relationship with Latin America. Are they our friends or rivals? Is it a land of competition and partnership or one in need of development and charity? What do we want of them, and what might they want of us? I venture that most people, and most politicians, have fairly clear (if not necessarily good) answers to these questions when it comes to East Asia, Eastern Europe, or Sub-Saharan Africa. Latin America, meanwhile, is the great blind spot.
I say ‘the West,’ because I think both the United States and its European allies are guilty of this blindness. Both pursue engagement and cooperation – through investment, trade deals, migration pacts, cultural exchanges, and more – but both do so not nearly enough. Since 1993, the European Investment Bank has poured 10.2 billion euros into Latin America. By comparison, in 2020 alone Chinese foreign direct investment in Latin America totaled around $17 billion. And while the United States remains the region’s main economic partner, U.S. influence in the region has steadily declined as a result of consistent indifference and ignorance.
Indeed, because they share a hemisphere and have a uniquely intertwined history, I want to focus on the United States’ policy towards Latin America.
The U.S. has…well…a complicated past in Latin America. Its attitude towards its southern neighbors has lurched and swayed – sometimes nakedly exploitive and imperialistic, other times a “good neighbor” who doesn’t interfere. Sometimes propping up dictators and other times standing up for democratic principles. (Long-time Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz famously quipped: “poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the U.S.”)
More recently, American policy in Latin America has been on a kind of autopilot: curb migration, strengthen trade, crack down on dictators, fight the drug trade, encourage democracy…carry on. These goals are more or less laudable, but together they represent a huge and vague list of priorities. Furthermore, the means by which they are pursed have never been carefully thought out. Republican administrations have typically emphasized stronger border controls, a fervent war on drugs, and combative rhetoric, while Democratic administrations have emphasized investment and cooperation without crafting new mechanisms or following through on promises. When decisiveness by either party is shown, it is invariably undercut before long. Former National Security Council advisor Richard Feinberg put it best:
Take any issue. If you’re talking about trade policy, we can’t decide if trade’s a good thing or a bad thing. Do we want immigrants or not? The root causes of [this] flaccid inter-American diplomacy is dysfunctional domestic politics.
Even more damning, we generally don’t recognize or react to regional changes. Regardless of whether the region moves leftwards or rightwards, we kind of just stumble along, barely changing the script. The recent Summit of the Americas provided blunt proof of this. At a time when Latin America is undergoing tremendous socio-political changes, with new leftist governments emerging in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Chile, and now, with Petro, Colombia, Biden’s team did nothing to craft new language or build a new approach to match new realities. And there was more attention paid on whether or not to invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela than there was careful communication with the new administrations.
An excellent recent piece in Foreign Affairs articulates this problem well:
The United States’ policy toward Latin America remains stuck in the past, too slow to deliver for a region that is in dire social and economic straits and often too patronizing for a region that is also less dependent on the United States, largely because of China’s expanding footprint. […] Although the current administration has recognized that the region is not what it was ten or even five years ago, this sound diagnosis was not accompanied by a redefinition of U.S. policies toward the region.
Of course, Biden has a lot on his plate right now - it is hard to argue that Asia and Central/Eastern Europe are not regions of immediate and dire concern. Besides, every administration has a limited amount of geopolitical bandwidth. Given the current circumstances, I don’t think it would be fair to expect the United States to craft some miraculous Marshall Plan 2.0 for Latin America.
But an effective Latin America policy does not require grand, sweeping plans.
Instead, it requires focusing ambitions on a few concrete, achievable goals and adjusting the rhetoric to embrace a “post-American Latin America.” It could simply involve a shift in tone and emphasis – no longer ‘this is how we will lead,’ but ‘how can we help?’ If an issue is too domestically contentious (like what to do with Cuba and Venezuela) then stop prioritizing it; focus on areas of broad agreement and necessity, like competing with China and offering investment to counter climate change.
IT IS STRANGE that Latin America should be an object of indifference, shrouded, as it were, in geopolitical mist. Its population is growing rapidly, at the third highest rate behind only Africa and Oceania. It is strategically positioned between Asia, Europe, and the United States, and the Panama Canal is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes. The region is a major source of fossil fuels, but also supplies resources that are critical for renewable energy technology. About 66% of the world’s lithium is in South America, while Peru and Chile alone supply around 40% of the world’s copper; both metals are critical for batteries and electrical wiring (which is pretty much the whole ball game when it comes to renewable energy). In the fight against climate change and environmental degradation, everyone knows that the Amazon, acting as a massive carbon sink, is critical. Moreover, South America has the highest biodiversity in the world by far, a haven for countless plants and animals.
Perhaps more important than any of that, though, is the fact that the region is broadly democratic and liberal. Social and political rights are generally guaranteed, and although crime and corruption remain stubborn problems, at least the political culture acknowledges these problems. This is no small thing in a geopolitical landscape dominated by the struggle between democracy and autocracy.
I don’t know what the ideal posture towards Latin America is, or what partnership strategy would work best. But I do know that the West has taken its eye off the ball. The current strategy is ill-defined, and the diplomatic tactics employed are outdated. This matters because facing the challenges of the coming decades – first and foremost climate change and neo-authoritarianism – may depend in large part on how we navigate our relationships with the Latin world.
We better get on it then; our indifference and ignorance grow more costly each year.