Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 29 2001 (IPS) — Latin American leaders had reason to hope George W. Bush’s election to the U.S. presidency would end the benign neglect practised by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.

Bush not only had been governor of a major border state, he had expressly promised to make Latin America a centrepiece of his administration. “Should I become the president, I will look south not as an afterthought,” he declared before his election, “but as a fundamental commitment.”

Early auguries also appeared hopeful: Mexican President Vicente Fox was chosen as the first foreign leader under Bush to be honoured with a state visit and Bush toasted the occasion by describing ties to Mexico as “our most important relationship.”

In unprecedented numbers – seven in his Bush’s six months in office – Latin American presidents trooped to Washington for White House visits precisely to highlight the priority that Bush said he wanted to give the region.

He insisted to each of his visitors that one of his administration’s top priorities was the negotiation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) accord, a goal he helped move one step closer to reality during the third Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec in April.

Things have changed over the past 11 months, and particularly since the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Aside from Thursday’s announcement that the Pentagon will warehouse suspected al-Qaeda leaders captured in Afghanistan at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Latin America appears to have disappeared from the administration radar screen.

“From Sep. 11, it’s as if we ceased to exist,” says one Washington-based Latin American diplomat who asked to remain anonymous. “I think we resent it more because Bush had raised our hopes so high.”

U.S. critics are harsher, arguing that Bush’s policy, even before Sep. 11, has amounted effectively to “passivity”, “indifference”, “withdrawal”, and “disengagement”.

The greatest symbol of this attitude has been Bush’s failure to nominate anyone other than Otto Reich to the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, the top administration position on Latin America.

Senate confirmation of Reich, a vehemently anti-Castro Cuban- American who was accused by Congressional investigators of running an illegal covert propaganda operation on behalf of the Nicaraguan contras from the State Department during the Reagan administration, has been blocked for months by key Democrats. Even some Republicans have privately appealed to the White House to name someone else.

But Bush, under pressure from the anti-Castro Cuban-American community and other parts of his core rightwing constituency, has refused to budge and is even considering a “recess appointment,” which would install Reich for one year without Senate confirmation.

“Bush is letting himself be held hostage to an extremist political constituency at the expense of U.S. national interests in Latin America,” says one retired senior U.S. diplomat.

“Sticking with Reich is a sign that shows that Latin America is not considered the highest priority,” says Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank here. “Given what’s going on in the hemisphere, it’s terribly important to get that post filled with someone with a real mandate.”

Shifter and others are particularly worried about Argentina and several Andean nations.

In Argentina, he says, Washington played a passive and confusing role as the country’s economy melted down over the past year. After vowing not to bail out the country last spring, it abruptly changed its mind by backing a big loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Then it changed its mind again, precipitating this month’s collapse.

Worse, cavalier remarks about Argentina’s history and responsibility for the crisis by Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill compounded the sense that Washington was essentially indifferent to the plight of its closest political ally in South America and an economy which it had held up as a model of neo-liberal reform during most of the past decade.

Washington is likely to rue its role in the Argentine debacle, according to Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD) here. “What happened in Argentina will raise profound questions about the economic model that has been so much espoused by Washington,” he told IPS. “The political consequences are likely to be great and will certainly ripple across to the Brazilian elections in October and on across the continent.”

In Colombia, the sharp increase in U.S. military aid over the past 18 months appears only have made the civil war there more violent, while increasing the power of right-wing paramilitaries, whom Powell himself designated as a terrorist group earlier this year.

As a result, hopes for President Andres Pastrana’s peace plan appear dead, undermined in part by hard-line Republican lawmakers who filled the policy vacuum opened by the administration’s indifference. At the same time, recent reports from coca-growing regions indicate that the government is fast losing the “hearts and minds” of peasants there while only marginally affecting the overall supply of cocaine.

Across the border in Peru, President Alvaro Toledo – whose election was one considered one of the bright spots of U.S. diplomacy in the region – is rapidly sinking in the polls amid reports of spreading coca cultivation and renewed unrest, including recent attacks by Sendero Luminoso. “There are few signs that Peru is even on the administration’s radar screen,” says Shifter.

Venezuela, on the other hand, has been, at least since critical remarks by President Fidel Chavez after the Sep 11 attacks about Bush’s anti-terrorism war. While Washington recalled its ambassador, in part to signal that it had lost patience with the populist leader, its policy is not yet clear even as oil revenues drop and Caracas becomes more polarized between Chavez and a growing opposition.

As for Mexico’s Fox, the toast of the administration in its opening months, his hopes for a major breakthrough on an immigration accord with Washington as a prelude to far-reaching reforms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were dashed by the Sep 11 attacks.

With his reform programme stalled in Congress and the Mexican economy – so closely tied to the United States thanks in no small part to NAFTA – in a tailspin, Fox no longer seems able to get Washington’s attention anymore, unless it concerns tightening, rather than loosening, the border against possible terrorist penetration.

Even Bush’s success earlier this month to get “fast-track” authority from the House of Representatives to negotiate the FTAA has sent an uncertain and ambivalent message to Latin Americans, if only because, in order to win by one vote, he was forced to grant new protections to domestic steel, citrus, sugar, and textile producers at the expense of Latin American and Caribbean exporters of those products.

Those concessions, as well as the failure of Bush to get Congress to extend the Andean Trade Preferences Act before it adjourned last week, “raises serious questions in Latin America about whether this country is becoming more or less protectionist and what Bush is prepared to do about it,” according to Shifter.