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A general election will take place shortly. In October , the American States Summit Conference was held in Costa Rica for the first time in 22 years in an attempt to solidify democracy, with the participation of heads of 16 American States countries including the United States and Canada.
An improvement in the field of human rights has been made with the progress of democratization. Meanwhile, each country has deepened its acknowledgment of the market economy and is pursuing such reforms as privatization of national enterprises and trade liberalization on the basis of the principles of a market oriented economy. However, the serious problem of accumulated debts and other economic difficulties continue to be in causing social unrest.
These problems and deterioration of public peace and drug abuse in some countries are the sources of an ominous threat to the progress of democratization. Regarding diplomatic relations, while making continuous efforts to maintain friendly relations with the United States, Latin American and Caribbean countries appear to diversify their diplomatic ties in seeking dialogues with European countries and directing the greater attention in recent years to Japan and other Asian-Pacific countries.
The moves seem to reflect growing European influences such as the EC integration scheduled for , the recent changes in Eastern Europe, and significant economic development in Asian-Pacific countries which raised their economic status in the world.
Another noticeable development is that Latin American and Caribbean countries are making further efforts to step up their relations with the Soviet Union and other East European countries. On the other hand, U. President Bush, aiming at constructing new relations, announced in June the "Enterprise for the Americas Initiative" whose pillars are expansion of trade, encouragement of investment, and curtailment of debts. Particularly in the area of trade, the United States has already started talks with Mexico over a free trade agreement.
In the Initiative the United States proposes, as a long-term objective, to create a comprehensive free trade zone covering the Western Hemisphere. Within the region, various organizations such as the Organization of American States OAS , and the Rio Group Note are continuing vigorous activities toward settlement of political problems.
In the economic area, efforts are being made to ensure regional cooperation and to attain regional integration through a variety of cooperative bodies within the region and among the countries concerned. Under these circumstances, the debtor countries are pursuing structural adjustments through control of inflation, reduction of government budget deficits, and promotion of exports. In March , creditor countries proposed a "New Debt Strategy" designed primarily to reduce debts as well as interest payments.
It has already been successfully applied to Mexico, Costa Rica and Venezuela. At present, most of the narcotic drugs including cocaine, marijuana, heroin illegally used in the United States are produced and refined in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Mexico. The production of drugs in Latin America is said to be caused by poverty and income disparity prevailing in rural and mountainous areas. Furthermore, drug-related offenses, terrorism, and development of underground economy are regarded as obstructions to political stability, sound economic and social development of all Latin American countries.
In September , U. President Bush announced a national drug control strategy including international cooperation. This was followed by a series of conferences among Latin American countries to confirm their earnest efforts to cope with the drug problem; in October , the drug summit meeting was held in Peru among Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia; in February ; the Cartagena drug summit meeting attended by the above three countries and the United States was held in Colombia; and in April, OAS ministerial drug conference in Mexico.
The Cartagena Declaration issued in February, reaffirmed responsibilities of both producing and consuming countries, as well as the need for parallel efforts for improvement of economic structure and drug control. It then called for a World Conference in In the meantime there has been growing concern about environmental problems in Latin America.
The most serious problem is the loss of Amazonian forests resulting from slash-and-burn farming and regional development. Regarding the problem, the Brazilian government announced "Our Nature Plan" in April , and has taken steps to protect the natural environment in the area, while international cooperation is being promoted within the framework of the Amazon Cooperation Convention and international arrangements including the UNDP. Despite the existence of historical rivalries among several countries, Latin America boasts a long and fruitful tradition of cooperation in diverse issue areas.
Regional cooperation in Latin America saw remarkable progress during the s and s, with the creation of many normative arrangements, particularly in the realm of democracy and human rights. The latter were protected and legalized at the regional level, with the OAS and other regional bodies signing democratic instruments. Despite their imperfections and shortcomings, agreements such as the Santiago Commitment to Democracy , the creation of Mercosur and its democratic clause , the Inter-American Democratic Charter , and the South American Defense Council helped lay the groundwork for an unprecedented degree of cooperation.
The wave of democratization that swept the region in the s disseminated a normative commitment to democratic values. This political shift, though far from comprehensive, helped stabilize political affairs in moments of crisis and created an unprecedented degree of trust between leading policymakers across the region. Similarly, regional leaders helped to ameliorate mounting political tensions that threatened democracy in Paraguay in and Helped by the commodity boom, leaders across the region were able to increase social spending and enjoyed high approval ratings, facilitating frequent reelections.
Since the end of the Cold War, many parts of the world have followed the trend of a greater emphasis on regional integration, and as a consequence regional organizations have proliferated.
Latin America was no exception to this trend. That said, even though regional institutions and platforms have multiplied across Latin America, mounting divisions have caused the region to backslide in terms of the depth of regional cooperation and the capacity to address common challenges.
The struggles of regional cooperation have been most noticeable in moments of domestic political turmoil. As Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador witnessed massive political and social upheavals in , regional actors not only failed to offer help—by acting as mediators, for example—but actually worsened the already volatile situations through untimely, inflammatory declarations.
When large-scale demonstrations erupted in Chile and Ecuador in , authorities from both countries argued that Cuban and Venezuelan operatives were behind the unrest, also without providing concrete evidence for their claims.
Divisions widened further after countries adopted diametrically opposed strategies to tackle the COVID pandemic in early While Peru and Argentina embraced stringent lockdowns similar to European countries, the presidents of Brazil and Nicaragua opted for denialism and refused to acknowledge the severity of the threat. Bolsonaro dismissed three ministers of health in the midst of the pandemic, severely limiting the potential for health officials to articulate broader regional cooperation, including medical research, border closures, medicine distribution, and vaccine purchasing.
At a time when Chile was making rapid progress vaccinating a growing percentage of its population, some other countries in the region, such as Venezuela, had not been able to provide shots even to high-risk groups. Several reasons may explain why regional mechanisms have ceased playing an effective role in the existing circumstances and, more broadly, why multilateralism in Latin America is facing what is arguably its worst crisis in decades.
First, the region lacks leaders who are willing to champion regional cooperation or have the political clout necessary to promote a shared vision for the future. Second, several countries that have been more committed to multilateral approaches and could attempt to fill the vacuum are enduring severe internal crises that have prevented them from taking a leadership role.
This decision was all the more embarrassing for Chile because it had stepped up and offered to host the summit when the previous host, Brazil, had backed out of holding the event.
In the same way, numerous other governments in the region, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, face too many domestic problems to project a coherent strategic vision, or lack the political weight to mobilize others. The few countries that defend multilateralism and enjoy political stability, such as Costa Rica, Panama, and Uruguay, lack the wherewithal needed to set in motion a regional agenda.
Third, decreasing popular support is rendering governments across the region domestically vulnerable and politically paralyzed. This trend derives in part from the end of an unprecedented era of economic growth during the commodity boom in the s, which furnished incumbents with the resources needed to increase public spending on social policies.
In a sense, persistent inequality and the associated political ups and downs pose serious obstacles to building political legitimacy and intertemporal public policies. Regional governance efforts are especially vulnerable under such volatile conditions. In addition, the surge of populist leaders in several countries who railed against the political establishment has reduced the space available to more experienced politicians.
Fourth, marked political antagonism between leaders, often linked to domestic considerations, has made cooperation exceedingly difficult. Given their dependence on ideological alignment, none of these initiatives can be expected to outlive more than one electoral cycle. The exodus has grown to such proportions that no country can afford to remain indifferent anymore.
Unfortunately, however, many decisionmakers have found out that the crisis provides an opportunity to further their objectives and thus many have politicized the matter. Brazil is a case in point. Sixth, weakened states have had to confront ever more powerful organized criminal groups, many of which operate transnationally.
Criminal activity has led to serious deterioration in security conditions across the region, marked by rising levels of violence and human rights violations linked to governments attempts to control crime.
In the same way, organized crime has gained greater political influence by either funding political campaigns or, even more directly, launching their own candidates. Seventh, as will be discussed in the third section, the emergence of great power politics in Latin America adds a further layer to regional dynamics that is unlikely to strengthen multilateralism.
Notably, it risks politicizing foreign policy—as seen in Brazil, where Bolsonaro was one of the first Latin American presidents to be elected on an openly anti-China platform—which makes a rational debate about the subject more difficult.
The more that other leaders embrace one-sided approaches, in either direction, the more difficult it will be to find ways to successfully manage the consequences of the return of great power politics in Latin America. Numerous Latin American countries have stopped growing or did so at lower rates than in the early s see figure 1. When growth did take place, it happened at lower rates than other developing regions. Intraregional trade, for example, grew slower for most countries than extraregional trade.
This re-primarization of its trade does not favor more regional integration, as it is the faltering manufacturing sector that drives regional exchange. Perhaps most telling, trade between Brazil and Argentina declined in relative and absolute terms over the past decade. Only in Central America does intraregional trade show a more positive trajectory.
As a consequence, individuals in many countries who have called for greater regional integration have seen their political influence decline.
Given the important role that the creation of Mercosur played in ending the geopolitical rivalry between Argentina and Brazil that shaped regional dynamics for decades, this omission was remarkable. These eight reasons explain why regional cooperation in Latin America is facing so many difficulties. They also lay out the size of the challenge that policymakers, bureaucrats, and scholars face as they seek to articulate strategies to lessen the damage and identify ways to actually strengthen cooperation in specific areas.
As suggested above, the price of inaction is far too high to simply accept the status quo as a political reality that cannot be changed. The next section unpacks regional cooperation and offers a more nuanced analysis on the main drivers of collective action in Latin America and the alternatives that lie ahead. If the state of intergovernmental organizations is a barometer of regional cooperation in Latin America, then the picture looks bleak.
The OAS, the oldest and most influential regional body, is going through what is arguably its worst institutional crisis since its creation in Divisiveness over thorny issues, in particular how to handle the Venezuelan and Honduran democratic crises, has led to bickering and paralysis.
Other organizations have not fared much better. Acrimony and divisiveness became apparent almost immediately within the newly created body, as Brazil and Venezuela jockeyed for influence and countries such as Colombia and to a lesser degree Chile withheld their support and manifested their reservations.
The worsening crises in Venezuela and Brazil ended up sinking the project in less than a decade. Given its clear ideological tilt, PROSUR cannot be expected to survive the election of a leftist leader in one of its founding member states. However, while political antagonism, mistrust, and opportunism have greatly damaged regional cooperation, a resilient undercurrent of cooperation has continued to flow amid the paralysis in higher political circles.
This cooperation has two main sources. The first is the stock of global multilateral norms that the region has been able to transfer into the domestic domain.
These norms have provided a standardized vocabulary to facilitate regional cooperation. Migration is a case in point: the South American Conference on Migration resulted from the impetus provided by the Cairo Conference on Population and Development. Through these multilateral channels, regional engagement has been able to continue even when national leaders fail to see eye to eye on larger policy questions. The second source of cooperation is the national bureaucracies, experts, and watchdogs in each country that have sought to go beyond the electoral cycle to think of regional solutions.
The following sections, therefore, look at existing cooperation initiatives in six issue areas: migration, health, security, trade, democracy and human rights, and the return of great power politics. For each issue area, there are three fundamental questions about big-picture trends: 1 Why does the issue matter? Why it matters. Migratory pressures are placing great strains on Latin American transit and receiving countries to integrate growing numbers of economic migrants and refugees.
The Venezuelan exodus is second in size only to the migratory catastrophe connected with the Syrian civil war. The state of cooperation. The landmark Mercosur Residence Agreement extended permission for citizens of ten South American countries to reside and work in Mercosur member states for up to two years and offered a path to citizenship in member states and associated countries.
This agreement came out of extensive dialogue and convergence between Argentine and Brazilian technical officials. Once Argentina and Brazil set the spirit and content of the agreement, a normative spillover followed suit in the region.
The process enabled migrants in several receiving countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and as of late Colombia, to secure documentation to regularize their immigration status. Risks and opportunities ahead. The sudden explosion of Venezuelan outmigration caused by the acute sociopolitical crisis afflicting the country has revealed some of the limitations of cooperation in this area see figure 3.
In the beginning, most countries adopted a pragmatic stance and opened their doors to Venezuelan migrants, opting for quick regularization. Peru, for instance, extended its Temporary Permanence Permit, and Ecuador and Brazil offered humanitarian visas. However, as the number of migrants kept increasing, solidarity started to wane. All countries struggled greatly to absorb the sudden arrival of masses of Venezuelans and extend to them critical social services such as housing, healthcare, and education.
Matters worsened further still with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, as most countries decided to close their borders to prevent further transmission of the virus. At the same time, domestic pressure for stricter controls over migration arose as public opinion demanded that governments prioritize nationals for vital social services. A complex context characterized by simultaneous health and economic crises saw the emergence of virulent episodes of xenophobia, which have further strained the relationships between sending and receiving countries across the region.
Free riding in the context of a crisis that ideally would be better tackled through collective burden sharing gave rise to regional tensions similar to those seen in Europe during the Syrian refugee crisis. Relations also have been strained by the creation of humanitarian corridors to expedite the movement of people to bordering countries, as well as unilateral and sudden border closures that have forced Venezuelan migrants and refugees to remain in transit countries, unable to reach their preferred destinations for the foreseeable future.
Quito protested when Lima imposed visas on Venezuelans and temporarily closed its northern border with Ecuador.
Later, Chile prevented Venezuelans from entering its territory via its northern port city of Arica. In other words, the region moved from cooperation to recrimination to the rise of unilateral measures to cope with the difficult international and domestic context of migration.
To start, governments could commit to adopting the same strategy and bureaucratic requirements at their borders, standardizing the process of regularizing migrants for example, school registration for children.
Second, they should develop a single monitoring system. With the help of their embassies in Caracas, it may be possible to collect data to design models that anticipate how many Venezuelans will leave each month—and thus better prepare public services like care centers, schools, hospitals, and police in border regions.
Latin Americans live on farms or in small towns, they foment revolutions, drink rum, and dance the rhumba much less often than we think. Nor do all Latin Americans bloodthirstily attend bullfights when they feel the need of relaxation.
In fact, bullfighting is forbidden in many countries below the Rio Grande. Chilean fight fans tripled in number when Arturo Godoy fought Joe Louis. And so today you will find Latin Americans talking glibly about un noquat a knockout or un K. Soccer has been growing in importance during the last twenty-five years, and Latin Americans are expert at it.
Uruguay once won the Olympic championship and Brazil has been runner-up. The fans back their teams as enthusiastically and as vocally as Brooklyn supports the Dodgers. Maten al ampayer kill the umpire is as familiar a cry in Santiago, Chile, as in any American ball park.
It is important, too, to know that the government and business of many of the Latin-American nations are controlled by men of Spanish and Portuguese descent. In language, religion, ideals, and temperament they are far more sympathetic to Continental Europe than to England or the United States.
For centuries the business and cultural interests of the ruling classes have been centered primarily upon the Continent.
They have usually looked to France as the fountainhead of culture, and often to Germany as the home of science and mechanical excellence. England, of course, has enjoyed much prestige too. In fact European civilization generally was more highly regarded by upper-class Latin Americans than was our culture. Transportation to Europe was decidedly more rapid and comfortable than to the United States, and social and business travel to the Continent greatly exceeded that to this country.
Until recently a considerable proportion of the wealthy aristocracy actually lived in Europe, making only occasional visits to the countries of their birth. Santos-Dumont, the great Brazilian aeronautical pioneer, whom Brazil regards as the father of aviation, was one of those voluntary exiles. It is typical of the past lack of knowledge and understanding between our two continents that Santos-Dumont has been nearly unknown here and the Wright brothers almost ignored by Latin Americans.
GI Roundtable Series. Corey Prize Raymond J. Cunningham Prize John H. Klein Prize Waldo G. Marraro Prize George L. Mosse Prize John E. Palmegiano Prize James A. Schmitt Grant J. Beveridge Award Recipients Albert J. Corey Prize Recipients Raymond J.
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