Despite its proximity to the United States, Latin America has gradually lost its prominence in the minds of U.S. policymakers. In the early 1960s, the region was viewed as a vulnerable but promising soil for the consolidation of prosperous democracies, prompting President Kennedy to offer $20 billion — just under $200 billion in today’s dollars — in development assistance over the course of ten years. In the late 1960s, these promises fell short as the failing Vietnam War captured the full attention of American strategists, and no comparable amount of aid would ever be offered to the region. The following decades would see a mixed record primarily motivated by narrowly focused energy, maritime, anti-narcotics and migration interests. While this often unprincipled approach has yielded atrocities in the Southern Cone and Central America during the second half of the Twentieth Century, it has also produced some outstanding successes such as the 1989 U.S. liberation of Panama and the Plan Colombia aid program of the early 2000s. On both counts, U.S. actions enabled states where drug cartels wielded impressive power to grow into relatively stable democracies.
Over the past twenty years, even these narrow interests have failed to sustain the attention of U.S. policymakers, causing one cynical analysis from Foreign Policy Magazine to declare that far from earning a seat in the geopolitical stage, Latin America is too irrelevant to even be “on the menu.” Lacking the massive economic significance of Europe and East Asia, the turbulence and energy reserves of the Middle East, and the colossal population boom currently underway in Africa, Latin America is often perceived as an afterthought in U.S. geopolitical strategy, most prominently considered in the context of the Hispanic vote in Florida. This perception obscures the fact that, perhaps now more than ever, U.S. actions in Latin America have the potential to be uniquely significant.
Latin America’s relationship to democratic principles makes it indispensable in the struggle to promote global democracy. Most of the region gained its independence, as did the United States, during the Atlantic Revolutions of the 1760s-1830s, and most of its countries have conceived of themselves as heirs to that tradition for longer than any other region in the world. While its adherence to democratic ideals has been far from perfect, it has in some ways surpassed that of the United States — by the outbreak of the American Civil War, all Latin American republics except for Paraguay had abolished slavery. To this day, despite persistent democratic backsliding from 2008 to 2021, Latin America remains the most democratic region in the developing world by a broad margin, lagging behind only Western Europe and North America if all regions are considered, according to The Economist’s Democracy Index. Indeed, with the glaring exceptions of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all deemed more autocratic than Putin’s Russia, every Latin American state is either a democracy worth preserving or a hybrid regime with some potential for reform.
Despite its declining significance in the global economy, Latin America also remains particularly significant to U.S. trade given its proximity and abundant resources. In 2019, the region accounted for over 18% of U.S. imports and more than 20% of its exports, surpassing China and Canada, respectively. The Caribbean Basin in particular remains the largest market where the U.S. continues to hold uncontested trade dominance with respect to China. As of 2018, every country in the basin except for Cuba traded more with the U.S. than with China, and of these, all but Colombia and a few of the Lesser Antilles traded over twice as much with the U.S. as with China. Outside of Latin America, only Ireland, Belgium, Israel, Lesotho, and Bhutan meet the latter condition.
Perhaps most crucially, Latin America will be central to any effort to defeat climate change. Its geography lends itself especially well to the development of renewable energy — indeed, in 2020, the region generated about 735 TWh of hydraulic energy, more than the 626 TWh produced in the U.S. and the European Union combined. This alone has enabled many of its largest economies, including Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru, to be far more carbon-efficient than the both developed world and their developing peers elsewhere. Other, far more recently developed renewable sources are also promising. For instance, the Central Andes of Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia possess the world’s highest potential for solar energy in the world, as much as 15-20% higher than similar areas in the Middle East and North Africa. Thus, Latin America is especially well-suited to expand the global economy while minimizing carbon emissions.
Beyond that, any comprehensive decarbonization efforts will rely on lithium-dependent technologies, and 58% of the world’s lithium reserves are concentrated between Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. An increasingly electrified world will have to contend with these countries for the foreseeable future.
Moreover, as the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest continues, the preservation of an irreplaceable carbon sink must be regarded as a matter of global security. Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and all other steward countries must develop their economies and enforce their environmental policies in such a way to ensure this, and the United States is particularly well-positioned to aid these countries in that task. U.S. advocates for democracy, economic policymakers, and defenders of the climate alike should place their sights on Latin America, a region that, despite the failures of its institutions and the unique challenges it faces, retains an under-appreciated significance to the fate of the rest of the world. The U.S. is, just as it was in the early 1960s, especially well-positioned to do good in the region. Despite some encouraging proposals by the Biden Administration to that end, the risk remains that the prevailing mindset will be that of Latin American insignificance — the same one that, in the mid-1960s, contributed to the failure of a development plan for a region of over 200 million to pursue a futile war in a country of less than 40 million.