Routledge Handbook of Latin America in the World

Jorge Dominguez, Ana Covarrubias, Jorge I Dominguez, Ana Covarrubias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317621843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The Handbook of Latin America in the World explains how the Latin American countries have both reacted and contributed to changing international dynamics over the last 30 years. It provides a comprehensive picture of Latin America's global engagement by looking at specific processes and issues that link governments and other actors, social and economic, within the region and beyond. Leading scholars offer an up-to-date state of the field, theoretically and empirically, thus avoiding a narrow descriptive approach. The Handbook includes a section on theoretical approaches that analyze Latin America's place in the international political and economic system and its foreign policy making. Other sections focus on the main countries, actors, and issues in Latin America's international relations. In so doing, the book sheds light on the complexity of the international relations of selected countries, and on their efforts to act multilaterally.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin America in the World is a must-have reference for academics, researchers, and students in the fields of Latin American politics, international relations, and area specialists of all regions of the world.

Part I
Latin America in the World

1
A Transformed Latin America in a Rapidly Changing World

Abraham F. Lowenthal and Hannah M. Baron

The diverse countries of Latin America and the Caribbean relate with the rest of the world in ways that are quite different from how they did in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and even at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This is so for several reasons. Latin American and Caribbean nations have changed a great deal over these years, in different ways and degrees. The global diffusion of power and wealth and the international policies and relative world influence of the United States have been altering significantly. Nations from beyond the Western Hemisphere that had not been substantially engaged with Latin America before have expanded their presence, while the influence of the US government has been declining in some respects, especially in South America. The number and the impact of Latin American and Caribbean actors, many of them nongovernmental, have radically increased outside their countries and beyond the entire region while international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become much more active in Latin America.

In the 1960s, the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (Cuba excepted) were generally marginal to relations beyond the Western Hemisphere, indeed several were less engaged in international affairs than they had been earlier. In most cases, their main international relationships by far—economic, political and diplomatic—were governmental, and they were primarily with the United States and with international financial institutions greatly influenced by the United States. Many countries, especially those geographically closest to the United States, behaved in effect as client states, following the US lead on many issues in regional and world affairs. They were not without agency, and they often found ways to exercise their sovereignty and influence, but they operated within structures dominated by the United States. From the late 1940s into the 1960s, most Latin American countries comprised a virtual voting bloc in the United Nations General Assembly, almost always supporting US positions. In the Cold War context, only three Latin American countries—Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay—even maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1960, for example.

Many Latin American countries, by contrast, now have highly diverse and often important international ties, not only elsewhere in the Americas but also in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The participation of extra-hemispheric governments in Latin America has been expanding and the activities of nongovernmental actors, both domestic and external, have exploded in the region and around the world. The influence of the US government on many South American governments has declined since the turn of the twenty-first century with regard to both the domestic affairs and the external relations of the countries of the region.¹ The engagement of Latin America with the rest of the world has grown, as have the region’s relevance to the global agenda and the impact of Latin America on global affairs.

Latin American and Caribbean governments are building multiple relationships within the region and beyond. Many are now taking international positions independent of and in some cases directly antagonistic to the US government, reversing the prevailing pattern of the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1990s. They are attracting attention and resources from outside the hemisphere. And they are influencing international issues in ways that in the 1960s or even later might have seemed threatening to the managers of US foreign policy, subject as they were to the hegemonic presumption (Lowenthal 1976).

Most Latin American countries can no longer be counted on to support the international policies of the United States at the United Nations and elsewhere. Despite strong US pressures, only four of thirty-four Latin American countries sent troops in support of US military action in Iraq in 2003, for example: three Central American nations (El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua), and the Dominican Republic, where the foreign minister resigned in protest of his government’s decision. Colombia (then the fifth-largest recipient of US foreign assistance in the world and by far the largest in the Americas) was the only South American nation to support the US decision to go to war in Iraq (Tarnoff and Lawson 2011, 14; and 2012, 14). The two Latin American countries then serving in the UN Security Council, Chile and Mexico, were crucial in blocking the US effort to gain Security Council approval for military action.

Rather than continue to concentrate their regional relationships within the Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered in Washington and largely financed by the host country, Latin American countries have been launching new regional institutions, based in South America and pointedly excluding US participation. These include the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA) and the incipient South American Bank (BANCOSUR).²

The political, diplomatic and economic relationships of many Latin American nations have been diversifying away from close ties with Washington. At the same time, however, human connections between the United States and Latin America, especially the northern countries of the region, have been growing much stronger, mainly because of migration, trade, investment, education and tourism and of transnational business and professional networks. The number and intensity of intimate linkages between the United States and Mexico and with some of the countries of Central America and the Caribbean is unprecedented.

This chapter highlights these shifts in Latin America’s role in the world. It quickly reviews broad tendencies in Latin America’s international relations over some fifty years, concentrates on the sources and nature of changing trends since the turn of the twenty-first century, and emphasizes the multiple ways in which diverse Latin American and Caribbean countries—and their citizens, corporations, civil society organizations, and transnational networks, as well as their governments—are now active across and outside the region.

From the 1960s to the Twenty-first Century: Latin America’s Changing International Relations

In the 1960s, the US government had a paramount position throughout almost all of Latin America and the Caribbean, except in revolutionary Cuba, where Fidel Castro had boldly taken his country out of the US orbit. Battered by World War II, the countries of Western Europe had lost much of their presence in the Americas, except in the small colonial territories in and around the Caribbean. European military advisors in South America had been largely replaced by US military missions and by an inter-American defense system designed and led by Washington. By the early 1960s, almost all military weapons in the region came from the United States. European business enterprises had been displaced by US companies and by nationalizations of public utilities and mining enterprises. US foundations were expanding their influence on Latin American agricultural development, public health and universities. US-based religious organizations were growing in numbers and influence. South America was still significantly shaped by European culture and higher education, but US music, literature, cinema and universities were fast gaining prominence.

The United States was then the main trading partner of most Latin American nations. The share of Latin American exports coming to the United States had climbed from 12% in 1910 to 45% in 1958. The share of US imports coming from Latin America had reached 37% in 1950, a 50% increase over pre–World War II levels, and remained nearly as high in the 1960s. US private investment in Latin America had quintupled in the twenty years after World War II.

The United States was also providing substantial economic assistance, especially through the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), established in 1959, and the Alliance for Progress, launched in 1961.³ For several Latin American countries, the main sources of foreign exchange in the 1960s were US bilateral economic assistance, flows from multilateral institutions—such as the IADB, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (IBRD)—where the US government had disproportionate influence, and exports of primary commodities (especially sugar and coffee) subject to quotas that were determined in part by US political decisions. In these circumstances, maintaining good political relations with US authorities was vital for Latin American governments and elites. Throughout Latin America, the United States was a much more important reference point than any other nation outside the region.

The US government was then also deeply involved in the internal affairs of many Latin American nations. Washington used diplomatic and economic pressures and inducements, public diplomacy and media manipulation, police and military training and equipment, intelligence penetration, trade union development, electoral campaign financing, the provision or suspension of economic and technical assistance, covert intervention and sometimes overt military action, to shape political developments in the region. The main aim was to thwart leftist movements that might be, or might become, linked to the Soviet Union, the Cold War rival of the United States. A second goal, compatible and sometimes intertwined with the first, was to advance the interests of US corporations. The US government had local supporters and even partners, but the main impetus came from Washington.⁴

The apogee of US interventionism in the Americas was the unilateral military intervention in the Dominican Republic in April and May 1965, when more than 22,000 US troops landed to forestall what President Lyndon B. Johnson and some of his advisers feared would become a “second Cuba,” that is, a communist takeover. The United States quickly secured an OAS vote to establish an “Inter-American Peace Force” in Santo Domingo, into which the US contingent could be incorporated under the nominal command of a Brazilian general.

Ten years later the US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee) documented extensive overt and covert involvement by the United States in Chile’s domestic affairs in the 1960s and 1970s. These included efforts to thwart the election and then derail the constitutional accession to the presidency of Chilean Socialist leader Salvador Allende, and subsequently to weaken his government until its overthrow in 1973.

By that time, however, the underlying economic and political bases of US preponderance in South America had already begun to decline. The US share of Latin America’s exports and imports was decreasing, US investment in the region dropped significantly as a share of all US private foreign investment, and the Alliance for Progress was petering out. Washington could contribute to Allende’s fall but could not shape Chile’s course under the Pinochet dictatorship. Nor could the United States get the OAS to establish a multilateral force to negotiate a political transition in Nicaragua from the crumbling Somoza dictatorship to a moderate democratic government. Washington failed to prevent the leftist Sandinista takeover and then could not oust the Sandinista government, despite strong attempts to do so. The United States could not secure the support of fifteen Latin American nations for the US-led boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow or dissuade Argentina from invading the Malvinas/Falklands Islands in 1982. The diver-sification of weapons purchases by Latin American countries caused arms sales to the region from the Soviet Union, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Israel each to exceed those from the United States by the mid-1980s. The economic, political and cultural presence in the Americas of West Germany and other European countries, the Soviet Union and Japan were all rising in the 1970s and 1980s, and US predominance was beginning to diminish.

These trends were reinforced as the increasingly autonomous Latin American nations, especially those in South America, pursued their own international interests, even when that was in direct opposition to Washington’s policies. This was illustrated by Brazil’s recognition of the Soviet and Cuban-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and by the Brazilian efforts to obtain advanced nuclear technology from West Germany, against the express policies of the US government; Mexico’s promotion of the UN Charter on Economic Rights and Duties of States and its activist opposition to US policies in Central America; Venezuela’s leadership in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); and majority Latin American support for the election of Nicaragua to the UN Security Council, even as Washington was trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. It was also clearly evident at the United Nations, where only one country from Latin America and the Caribbean coincided with the US position on more than half the recorded votes in the 1985 General Assembly.⁵

Latin America’s break from easy alignment with the United States was also clear in the increasingly frequent efforts, mainly by South American nations, to counter US influence, both within the region and in broader South–South fora: in the “Group of 77,” the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Latin American Economic System (SELA), the four-nation Contadora initiative to seek diplomatic settlements in Central America, strenuously opposed by US policy, and the formation in the mid-1980s of the “Rio Group,” combining the four Contadora nations with the four members of the “Contadora Support Group” to coordinate policies on international debt negotiations with the United States and other industrial countries.⁶

The efforts that Latin American nations have been making in the twenty-first century to reduce and redirect US influence and to diversify their own international links are thus not at all new. Concerted Latin American attempts to exert autonomy and take distance from the United States eventually decreased over time, however. Military regimes that supported US Cold War national security doctrines ruled in several South American nations. International financial realities after the debt crisis, beginning in the early 1980s, undercut the conditions for South–South cooperation. And the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath in the Soviet Union and in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the decade restored the United States, at least for a time, to virtually unchallenged global and regional stature. Long-standing Latin American complaints of excessive US interventionism in the region gave way in some countries to complaints about US neglect in the post–Cold War world.

In this new era, President George H. W. Bush proposed the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative in June, 1990, offering free trade agreements to all Latin American countries, beginning with Mexico, and negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada.⁷ His successor, Bill Clinton, finished the NAFTA negotiations and got them approved by Congress. In 1994, Clinton convened a Summit of the Americas in Miami and proposed multilateral negotiation of a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). These initiatives, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, attempted to reenergize a central US role in the Americas. The US government returned to activist policies, largely driven by US domestic policies: reinstalling the overthrown, democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 1994; tightening the commercial embargo against and increasing political distance from Cuba; providing a $50 billion rescue package to Mexico to help resolve its financial crisis in 1995; and mobilizing Latin American support for US-led antinarcotics programs through the Andean Initiative of 1989 and Plan Colombia, approved by the US Congress in 2000.

From the early 1980s into the 1990s, many Latin American countries undertook both transitions from authoritarian rule toward democratic governance and a regional turn toward market-opening economic reforms, trends eventually reinforced by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s, most Latin American and Caribbean nations had freely and fairly elected governments, and these were aligned with each other and with the US government in support of democracy and human rights.⁸ Most Latin American governments were also converging on market-oriented economic approaches, adopting balanced macroeconomic policies, undertaking privatization, deregulation and lowered tariffs and welcoming foreign investment; these were the policies prescribed by the so-called Washington Consensus that had become the orthodox canon of the international financial institutions. Latin American and Caribbean countries seemed to be moving at different speeds in the same direction along a common path, led by Chile. The high point of inter-American convergence was registered at the Miami summit in December 1994, when the ambitious goal of free trade from Alaska to Patagonia was adopted, with an announced aim to achieve this by 2005.

From the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century, however, the diverse countries of Latin America h...