By Dan Restrepo 

With each passing day the United States grows closer and more interconnected to the more than 300 million people with whom we share the Americas. Lacking a coherent strategic vision for our place in the Americas, we do so at our unnecessary peril. From our country’s rapidly expanding Hispanic population to the $45 billion in annual regional remittances to burgeoning transnational criminal organizations to two of our top three global trading partners to the popularity of shows like ABC’s Ugly Betty the convergence of the Americas is evident at nearly every turn.

Unfortunately, the importance of the rest of the Americas in the daily life of the United States is not met with recognition of its strategic importance. The Americas are treated as a backwater ignored, monopolized by narrow interests, or subjected to incongruous policy approaches formulated in different contexts.
The United States does, however, have clear interests in the Americas. It is imperative that we end our current strategic drift and begin to pursue them in a clear-headed way.

Square Pegs in Round Holes

Today’s U.S. policy toward the Americas is replete with examples of what happens when extraneous factors are allowed to color policy decisions. From the misapplication of the Global War on Terrorism to an obsession with an outmoded view of the Americas, U.S. policy is led in counterproductive and potentially dangerous directions.

That U.S. policy toward Colombia is couched in counter-terrorism terms highlights the kind of distortion that plagues U.S. policy toward the Americas. International terrorist organizations exist and prosper in pockets of the Americas. Among the most lethal actions ever allegedly executed outside the Middle East by Hezbollah occurred, for example, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.1 The lawless tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay long provided, and may well still provide, an effective fundraising and operational base for Hezbollah and other international terrorist organizations.2

As a result of clever post-9/11 political marketing and a lack of an independent strategic vision for U.S.-Colombia policy, U.S. anti-terrorism policy and resources in the Americas are focused primarily on combating armed groups in Colombia.3 Colombia’s armed conflict, however, has persisted for more than forty years and is fueled largely by drug trafficking revenues, not international terrorist designs in the Al-Qaeda sense of the term.

An undeniable key to promoting Colombia’s long-term stability is riding our society of the scourge of drug addiction. Viewing Colombia’s conflict as a function of international terrorism distracts from the policy prescriptions that would best serve our long-term interests. Neither Colombia’s long-term stability nor long-term U.S. interests can be achieved through a military enforcement-only approach; sustainable, alternative development and demand reduction must be parts of the equation. Neither, of course, fits comfortably in a distorted counter-terrorism construct.

Applying the GWOT prism to Colombia is not the only incongruous mindset misshaping U.S. policy in the Americas today. An obsession with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, born of a Cold War era mentality, has distorted U.S. policy toward the Americas throughout the past six years.
Having spread from its well spring of ideologues in the Bush Administration, the Chávez pathology has overwhelmed nearly all discussion of the Americas in the United States. From this perspective, Chávez and his domestic, regional, and global machinations present a profound threat to the U.S.4 U.S.-Americas policy, the theory goes, must serve as a counterbalance to Chávez.5

U.S. policy should not, however, be built to counteract a Chávez-led, unified, anti-American, “lurch to the Left” in the Americas as no such movement exists. Notwithstanding Venezuela’s massive oil industry, Chávez’s sphere of effective influence in the Americas is nearly as overblown as his rhetoric. From December 2005 through December 2006, ten presidential elections were held in the Americas.6 Not counting Venezuela’s own election, a dyed-in-the-wool Chávez ally Bolivia’s Evo Morales prevailed in exactly one. Ranging from socialists to conservatives, none of the victors in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru can properly be understood as Chávez’s ideological soul mates.
Beyond his relative political impotence, Chávez also does not wield as much influence as his oil reserves might suggest. An almost complete reliance on U.S.-based refining capacity robs Chávez of any leverage he could otherwise exercise over an oil-addicted United States.

Profound political, social, and economic changes are afoot in the Americas, but Chávez is neither their animating nor sustaining cause. Instead of seeking to “counteract” Chávez and thus inviting the suspicions of leaders throughout the Americas who cling steadfastly to the ideal of non-intervention, the United States should be formulating its Americas policy to address these changes and advance the national interests that lie at the heart of our interconnectedness with the rest of the Americas.

Of Anachronisms and Narrow Interests

The centrality of Chávez in U.S. policy toward the Americas is not the only ideologically-driven regional folly stemming from a lack of a strategic vision. U.S. policy toward Cuba is the most obvious vestige of Cold War tactics anywhere in the world today.

The misguided nature of this remnant has been compounded by the virtual surrender of U.S.-Cuba policy to narrow domestic interest group politics. Bound by anachronistic laws bent on promoting regime change in Cuba enacted at the behest of a deeply committed, but narrowly focused interest group, the United States has systematically isolated itself and has helped the decrepit Castro Regime garner wholly undeserved international sympathy.

As Cuba begins life without Fidel Castro, it is time to allow national, and not narrow, interests to create the policy flexibility that will be crucial in the months and years to come. A smooth, stable transition to a free and democratic Cuba would serve both the narrow interest of the United States of avoiding instability and a massive out-migration that could come with it as well as the broader interest of promoting democracy throughout the Americas.

The Dissonance of Indifference

Nowhere is the lack of a strategic vision for the Americas more evident than in the immigration debate currently transpiring in the United States.

More than half of the foreign born population in the United States was born elsewhere in the Americas.7 Nearly 60 percent of the approximately 12 million undocumented individuals in the United States today are from Mexico and an additional 22 percent are from the rest of the Americas, with most coming from Central America.8 Nearly 1 in 7 of those born in El Salvador resides in the United States.9 Despite these staggering figures there has been next to no mention of U.S. policy toward Mexico and Central America in the course of the immigration debate. Instead, the debate has been driven by domestic political considerations and electoral calculus.

Regardless of what is done to reform our admittedly broken immigration system, the underlying dislocations both at home and abroad that make the immigration reform debate so volatile cannot be resolved absent sustained economic growth and development in our closest southern neighbors. Truly comprehensive immigration reform must recognize the unique place the United States plays in the Americas and adjust our domestic and international policies accordingly.

Toward A Strategic Vision

As evidenced by both the economic mass migration that is fueling the immigration crisis we face and the changes reshaping the political landscape of the Americas, the primary challenge facing the Americas today is a staggering level of social and economic inequality.

To refocus its Americas policy, the United States needs to make its commitment to the socio-economic advancement of broad swaths of the populace throughout the Americas unmistakable. It must do so not only to firm up the ground beneath fledgling democracies and to advance the moral imperative of the common good, but also because such a commitment would serve our most basic national interests.

Confronting a relative lack of growth and gaping inequality in the Americas requires an abandonment of the false “trade, not aid” dichotomy of the 1990s. Smart trade policies and social investment, in fact, must go hand and hand. Smart trade policies should provide significant gains for U.S. workers, consumers, and businesses and support growth, development, democracy, and the rule of law in our trading partners. Because trade agreements inevitably create losers as well as winners, smart trade policy requires that steps be taken to ensure economic opportunity for all those who may be displaced or missed by trade. Agreements should be negotiated with a full cognizance of their potentially adverse effects on poverty and certain economic sectors, and a desire to minimize that impact. Effective social investment must help ensure economic opportunity for those displaced by or who are beyond the reach of smart trade policy.

President Bush’s FY2008 budget request seeks $1.6 billon for assistance to the countries of the Americas, with approximately one-third of that being for police and military assistance to Colombia.10 The budget request seeks only $197 million in social investment in the form of development assistance.11 Aside from the massive funding provided to Colombia, the level of U.S. assistance to the Americas mocks the notion that the United States is committed to improving the daily lives of the people of the Americas.

Pursuit of our national interest compels that we change course. A down payment in such a process would be bringing to fruition the Social Investment and Economic Development Fund for the Americas, first proposed by Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey. Importantly, the Fund proposal calls on an increased U.S. commitment to social investment in the Americas $1.25 billion over five years as well as increased participation by the Inter-American Development Bank in that endeavor. Establishment of the Fund would add substance to the rhetoric of standing with the people of the Americas.

The complimentary interests of revitalizing our economy, enhancing long-term U.S. energy security and combating global climate change should be central to a new strategic vision for the Americas. Seizing the transformative opportunity presented by new energy sources and technologies would reinforce rather than contradict U.S. interests in the region.

Moving toward a U.S. economy built upon renewable fuel sources and technologies would, for example, alter the dynamic surrounding the key hemispheric impasse on trade the stalemate between the United States and Brazil. A new era in U.S.-Brazil trade relations could help usher in a new era in hemispheric relations.

Although the Bush Administration has begun playing lip service to this notion, bold action is needed. It is time to take concrete steps to help create the kind of global market that biofuels need to be competitive with carbon-based fuels. Among those must be creating greater U.S. market access for Brazilian ethanol and joining with the Brazilians to create alternative fuel infrastructure and production capacity throughout the Americas, beginning with our poorest neighbors.

Seizing the energy opportunity would also begin to harmonize our trade and sustainable development agendas. Doing so would help foster the common good both at home and abroad and spur economic development throughout the Americas while advancing the interests of U.S. workers, farmers, consumers, and businesses. Diversifying the fuel base for the United States also would alter the geopolitics of energy in the Americas.

In short, it is time to end the strategic drift that has defined America’s role in the Americas for too long and to embrace the opportunities inherent in the convergence already well underway across the hemisphere.

Dan Restrepo is director of the Americas Project at the Center for American Progress.

Endnotes
1. On March 17, 1992 a suicide truck bomb destroyed the Embassy of Israel in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and wounding 242. On July 18, 1994 another truck bomb destroyed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Aid Association, leaving 86 dead and more than 300 wounded.
2. Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, July 2003, p. 1-2, http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/pdf-files/TerrOrgCrime_TBA.pdf.
3. Although anti-terrorism program funding is a small slice of assistance to Colombia, the preponderance of such aid going to that one country is indicative of a broader counter-terrorism lens applied to Colombia policy in general. In FY2003, the United States provided $3.6 million in anti-terrorism funding to countries in the Western Hemisphere. Of that, $3.3 million was directed to Colombia. In each of FY2005 and FY2006, Colombia received $3.9 million and the Tri-Border region $0.5 million.
SeeMark P. Sullivan, Latin America: Terrorism Issues, Congressional Research Service at pp. 4-5 (Washington, D.C., March 29, 2005), http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/crsreports/crsdocuments/RS2104903292005.pdf.
4. Stephen Johnson, Is Hugo Chavez a Threat?, Heritage Lecture #938, May 1, 2006, http://www.heritage.org/Research/LatinAmerica/hl938.cfm.
5. See R. Nicholas Burns, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs,
Future Engagement and Partnership with Latin America, Council of the Americas, Nov. 20, 2006, http://www.state.gov/p/us/rm/2006/76431.htm.
6. Bolivia (Dec. 2005), Chile (Dec. 2005), Costa Rica (Feb. & Apr. 2006), Peru (Apr. 2006), Colombia (May 2006), Mexico (July 2006), Ecuador (Oct 2006), Brazil (Oct. 2006), Nicaragua (Nov. 2006), and Venezuela (Dec. 2006).
7. Slightly more than 19 million of the approximately 35.7 million born outside the United States living here today were born in Latin America.
See 2005 American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau.
8. Jeffrey Passel, The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the United States, Pew Hispanic Center, at p. 4 (Washington, D.C., March 7, 2006), http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf.
9. The 2006 estimated population of El Salvador was 6.8 million. See Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book, El Salvador (2006), https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/es.html. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that nearly 1 million persons born in El Salvador currently reside in the United States. See U.S. Census Burean, Hispanic Heritage Month 2006, Press Release (Sept. 5, 2006) available at http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/007173.html.
10. See Department of State, Summary and Highlights, International Affairs Function 150 (Feb. 5, 2007), http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/80151.pdf.
11. See id. at 91-92.

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