Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (38 page)

LATIN AMERICA

‘T
here is a huge weapon of mass destruction located just South of the U.S. border, and it’s about to explode. It’s called Latin America.’ Those words, from former Mexican Finance Minister Angel Gurria, woke me up over breakfast in Mexico City in the fall of 2002. At the time, Argentina was in the process of defaulting on its loans from the IMF, unemployment was rising in Mexico, the endless strife in Colombia was intensifying, a coup attempt that looked as if it had at least tacit U.S. backing had failed in Venezuela, and the Brazilian economy was teetering on the edge of disaster as international investors pulled out money in the midst of a turbulent presidential election campaign that might bring a leftist to power. Gurria, lamented that ‘market fundamentalists’ in Washington with little knowledge of the circumstances in Latin America were delaying IMF assistance and making statements about the dangers of moral hazard (essentially enabling policies that are unwise in the long term in order to achieve short-term satisfaction) while paying no attention to the much greater risk of collapse of the whole system. ‘Brazil,’ he said, ‘is being penalized by investors from the democracies for carrying out a democratic election. How do you expect Latin Americans to hold fast to democracy when that happens?’ He also blasted the Washington Consensus for prescribing policies according to the textbook rather than according to the realities of developing country situations. ‘The United States needs a Latin America strategy,’ he said, ‘but it never has had one.’

That was the assessment of one of America’s better friends in Latin America. Given the U.S. record in the region of alternating intervention and neglect, widespread cynicism and suspicion of U.S. motives should be no surprise. The United States is widely seen to have interests but not friends and to be primarily interested in material gain and power. It is in no way seen as peace-loving. Indeed, another Latin American ambassador to the United States asked, ‘Peace loving? Are you kidding? No one believes that nonsense in Latin America.’ Here as elsewhere, there is widespread criticism of U.S. double standards. Yet here, too, the United States is admired for its economic success and its great universities and institutions, and is widely recognized as Latin America’s only hope. But as the Brazilian Ambassador Rubens Barbosa notes, making that hope materialize is difficult because ‘there is no security or nuclear threat in this hemisphere, and as a result Latin America is given a low priority in Washington.’

That low priority has been especially frustrating to Mexican President Vicente Fox, who staked the success of his presidency on the bet that his good friend and fellow rancher George W. Bush would dramatically change the form and substance of the whole relationship. That this doesn’t seem to be happening is beginning to hurt Fox. But leaders I spoke with in the region are still hopeful that Bush will address three major issues in the course of his administration – trade and economic development, drug traffic control, and support for democracy.

Economic development is the most pressing issue, and one on which the region sees Washington failing badly. The U.S. approach is to propose free trade agreements, along with domestic privatization and deregulation. The difficulty is that while NAFTA has brought a dramatic increase in trade between Mexico and the United States, it has not fulfilled many other expectations and forecasts. For example, Mexican salaries and wages have fallen considerably since 1994, and the numbers of those living below the poverty level have risen, along with unemployment and underemployment. Thus the attraction of illegal immigration in search of U.S. jobs remains strong. The problem is not solely due to NAFTA; it is also the result of the financial crisis of 1995 and the ups and downs of oil prices. But NAFTA has not been enough to offset any of this, and has brought its own problems. Mexican access to the U.S. market for products like sugar or services like trucking remains limited. At the same time, as Mexican agricultural markets open to heavily subsidized commodities like American corn, Mexican producers are increasingly faced with extinction. Unlike the EU, which provided substantial adjustment assistance, full market access, and new infrastructure funding when it took in Spain and Portugal, the U.S. under NAFTA has assumed that trade alone will provide the means for taking care of other necessities.

In the rest of Latin and South America outside of NAFTA, the problem is even more difficult. While various free trade agreements have been proposed, only one, with Chile, has been concluded. Brazil, with South Americas largest economy, finds over half its export items under some restriction in the U.S. market. On top of all this comes the challenge of China. Factories that first moved from a U.S. location to Mexico are now beginning to leave Mexico for China, where wages are far below Mexico’s low levels. And what is true for Mexico holds even more for the rest of the hemisphere. China’s entry into the WTO is seen south of the Rio Grande as the beginning of the end of NAFTA, and no one in Washington seems to be addressing this issue.

By far the most troubling issue is drug trafficking, where the U.S. stance resembles its behavior on oil imports. In that case, U.S. addiction to cheap gas has embroiled it in the dangerous politics of the Middle East and led it inadvertently to fund the spread of fundamentalist Islam and terrorists to its own detriment. In the same way, U.S. addiction to cocaine and other narcotics is funding the drug cartels of Latin America and the corruption and corrosion of the societies of Peru, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, and elsewhere. Americans – an estimated 20 million to 25 million marijuana smokers, 6 million regular cocaine users, and half a million heroin users – spend about $64 billion annually on drugs.
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Since 1909, the United States has taken a prohibitionist approach that effectively requires ‘unconditional surrender from traffickers, dealers, and addicts.’ That the surrender has not occurred is evident from the size of the market and the fact that world production of opium and coca more than doubled just between the years 1985 and 1996.
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The U.S. government’s interaction with drugs is complex and often corrupt. When the CIA helped organize the Mujahedin in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, it knew the guerillas were raising money by selling opium. By 1980, 60 percent of the heroin in the U.S. market originated in Afghanistan.
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For many years, former Panama President Manuel Noriega was a CIA operative who also had a long collaboration with the Medellin Cartel of Colombia. In 1989, the first Bush administration invaded Panama and arrested Noriega, who is now in a U.S. prison serving a forty-year sentence for drug trafficking in a U.S. prison. Panama, however, remains a major money laundering and cocaine transshipment center.

The U.S. approach to drug trafficking has been not only prohibitionist but also para-military and highly interventionist. Although U.S. courts and jails are clogged with people arrested on drug charges, major efforts to reduce drug demand through treatment have never really been implemented in the United States. The control effort has been focused on stopping production and interdicting shipments. This effort employs a vast armada of ships and planes to spot, track, and stop the flow of drugs. The United States trains Latin military units and funds them to stop drug production and trafficking in their countries. Spray planes are used to destroy the coca crops planted by campesinos in the jungles and farm lands of Peru and Colombia. Often this spraying destroys legitimate crops as well as coca and also engenders soil erosion. Efforts to help campesinos establish alternative crops have been wholly inadequate and unsuccessful. Moreover, the training given to Latin narcotics control personnel is very similar to counterinsurgency training and has undoubtedly been applied for non-narcotics purposes in the region’s endemic guerilla wars.

A major problem is the annual certification reviews for foreign governments. Every year, the White House has to certify to Congress that foreign governments are cooperating adequately with U.S. efforts on narcotics control. Decertified countries lose foreign aid and face trade sanctions. This peculiar policy effectively means that the war against drugs is waged not in partnership with allies but against them. The United States acts as prosecutor, judge, and jury in determining whether Mexico or Peru is acting properly to attempt to stop the flow of drugs across the U.S. border. The process is humiliating, maddening, and in the eyes of our Latin neighbors, full of U.S. hypocrisy. One bitter Mexican official told me, ‘The United States manages to excuse its banks for handling drug money, and although it can track trucks to the U.S. border, somehow they vanish once in U.S. jurisdiction.’ All over Latin America, people ask about the demand side of the equation. As long as the demand is so great and the trade so profitable, traffickers will find a way to supply. As a consequence, the police forces, judges, armies, and ordinary people of Latin America are being drowned in illicit money that eats away at the fiber of their societies. Yet they have no opportunity to certify us on our efforts to control our insatiable demand for drugs.

Which brings us to the issue of democracy. One of the bright aspects of the past fifteen years has been Latin America’s turn to democracy. Yet there is increasing doubt whether it will work. ‘Policy takes time to show results,’ said one leader, ‘but democracy doesn’t give you any time.’ Said another, ‘Look, the countries that have successfully developed like Singapore, Taiwan, and Chile were not democracies during the development stages.’ These leaders wonder how democracy can be sustained in an ocean of drug money. But most discouraging of all is their view that the United States doesn’t really care that much about democracy in Latin America. Of course, they all note past U.S. comfort with and installation of dictators. But the prime example these days is Venezeuela, where in April 2002 U.S. officials seemed to lend support to the attempt at a coup to oust elected President Hugo Chavez. Of course, Washington backtracked and denied involvement, but no one in Latin America believes the denials for a minute. Here again, U.S. policies have not given much reason for faith.

MIDDLE EAST

I
f Latin America has little faith in the United States, the Islamic countries of the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia have virtually none left. This, too, reflects a great reverse. As deeply religious countries, they naturally rejected communist doctrine and were mostly allies of America during the Cold War despite their discomfort with U.S. backing of Israel. As noted in Chapter 4, Saudi Arabia has had particularly warm relations with the United States going back to the Americans’ first discovery of oil in the Saudi desert when the British and others stoutly maintained the impossibility of any being there. The other key Middle East country, Egypt, has had a more up-and-down U.S. relationship, but after the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 it, too, became a firm friend. Jordan and Lebanon, while small, also played key roles as helpers of and friends of the United States. In particular, Jordan under King Hussein often acted as a moderating influence in the volatile politics of the region.

Today, as the Pew survey data noted in Chapters 1 and 2 indicate, good will has all been washed away. The immediate cause is the Iraq situation, but the longer-term and deeper factor is the perception of U.S. bias for Israel against the Palestinians. Also, undoubtedly an element of frustration and self-anger in many of these countries over their inability so far to cope with modernization gets redirected at the United States. But the loss of good will and respect I particularly refer to here is that of people who bet their careers and built their lives on the basis of being friends of the United States. Saudi Arabia is particularly important in this regard, because so many of its elite have studied and lived in the United States and because the country has, in its own eyes, done so much to be supportive in terms of providing backing for covert U.S. operations around the globe as well as disciplining oil prices. In the wake of September 11, the heretofore friendly, or mostly uninterested, American press suddenly turned a hard eye on Saudi Arabia because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens. After years of ignoring the kingdom or of favorably covering its strong support of most U.S. initiatives, newspapers like the
Wall Street Journal
could find nothing good in the kingdom. Its Islamic law, its veiling of women, its charitable giving institutions, its school system, its lack of democracy, and its support of the Palestinians were all severely condemned as barbaric, medieval, and anti-American. While some of the criticism pointed to real issues with which the Saudis are themselves wrestling, the harsh tone and sudden reversal of previously friendly attitudes stung as it became clear that Americans had forgotten, or perhaps never knew or cared, about the support Saudi Arabia had given them.

The bitterness this attitude caused was explained to me by the owner of a leading Saudi newspaper chain. The graduate of U.S. universities who spends much time at his second home in the United States, he described his shock that suddenly people who he had always thought of as friends now seemed to be suspicious of all Saudis. Even more significant was his description of the reaction of his 21-year-old son. Prior to September 11, the young man had been a student at a leading U.S. university where he had gone after graduating from a top U.S. preparatory school. He had always been a big fan of U.S. football and basketball, listened non-stop to American music, ate American junk food, played computer games, dated American girls, and paid no attention to politics or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As my newspaper friend explained it, his son was for all practical purposes an American. Now, however, in the wake of the sudden reversal of American attitudes, he told me that the son has dropped out of the university and refuses to travel to America or even to meet with Americans in Saudi Arabia. Even more worrying to my friend is the fact that the son has become intensely interested in politics, regularly attends meetings of radical political and religious figures, and is now not only strongly anti-American, but also anti-Israeli.