President Obama and Latin America: Next Steps

By Abraham F. Lowenthal
The Miami Herald, May 4, 2009

Among the important accomplishments by President Barack Obama in his first one hundred days has been a major step forward in U.S. relations with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The President’s early meetings with Brazil’s President Lula da Silva and with President Felipe Calderón of Mexico went well, and then Mr. Obama brilliantly accomplished his objectives at the Fifth Summit of the Americas. He conveyed an attractive approach to Latin America that is consistent with his overall worldview: confident, open, genuinely interested in consultation but also committed to expressing U.S. objectives, and ready to move away from unilateralism and presumption without being defensive. The substance and style of his prepared address, his informal comments and his banter and body language, as well as his thoughtful remarks at the final press conference, were all positively received.

The improvement in the atmospherics of official U.S.-Latin America relations is stunning. Criticism voiced by Next Gingrich and others about Obama’s supposed weakness in exchanging friendly smiles and a handshake with Hugo Chávez, in welcoming expressed openness by Raúl Castro, and in reassuring Bolivia’s Evo Morales that the United States will not support the violent overthrow of his government are frozen in outmoded stances from the folks who invented the “axis of evil.” Mr. Obama is right to dismiss them. As a well-known Latin-American saying puts it, “courtesy does not weaken courage.”

But friendly visits, photo-ops and well-crafted statements cannot substitute for implementing the policies that the new Administration now needs to pursue in the Americas.

First, the Administration should move now to gain Congressional approval of the already negotiated Free Trade Agreements with Panama and Colombia; expand the Inter-American Development Bank’s capital, needed to fund infrastructure and energy projects; and provide lending for the microfinance and social development the President announced in Port of Spain.

Second, the Administration should keep focused on the closest neighbors of the United States—Mexico and countries of Central America and the Caribbean—in order to work on the shared concerns posed by their unusual degrees of demographic and economic integration with the United States. The most important issues to address soon are new approaches to the narcotics trade, the related issues of arms and financial flows going south, and a new immigration policy. None of these are easy, but the Administration should tackle them this year.

Third, Washington should further develop strategic cooperation with Brazil, both within the hemisphere and beyond: on energy, especially from renewable sources, and on trade, infrastructure, regional stability and global governance.

Fourth, the Administration should cautiously explore the prospects for rapprochement with Venezuela and Bolivia, by attempting mutual confidence-building through limited and reciprocal steps, starting with the renewed exchange of ambassadors. But the President and all of Washington should be prepared for the likelihood that rising domestic frustration and their personal qualities will push Chávez, Morales, or both, back to invective. If either or both revert to attack, as they well may, the administration should use the rope-a-dope technique that Muhammad Ali demonstrated so brilliantly: avoid being an easy target while contenders flail away.

On Cuba, the Obama administration has begun well, but carefully: not only reversing the hardening of sanctions on travel and remittances the Bush administration imposed, but doing away even with some prior restrictions, and announcing a willingness to facilitate investment in improved communications, including establishing fiber-optic cable and satellite connections between the United States and Cuba. The administration took another symbolically important step by indicting Luis Posada Carriles for his alleged terrorist activities against Cuba, reversing years of previous unwillingness by U.S. authorities to do so. And the President’s simple statement that the United States seeks a new relationship with Cuba was important, precisely because it was not accompanied, as statements by the previous administration had been, by calling first for change in the Cuban regime.

Navigating the next stages in the U.S.-Cuba relationship will be a complex task, for both sides have to overcome years of distrust, mutual hostility, propaganda, and domestic sources of resistance to even symbolic changes. The guiding principles for the Obama administration should be to improve the prospects for healthy relations in the medium term, avoid being trapped into letting Cuba dictate the pace of steps the United States should take in its own interest, and remain true to the basic tenets of U.S. policy, including a commitment to the protection of individual human rights. Letting Latin American nations take the lead, without discouraging their efforts, is probably the best course for now.

Abraham F. Lowenthal, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, is co-editor of The Obama Administration and the Americas: Agenda for Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2009).