Candidate Obama was upfront about his positions on Latin America. He said pointblank that he would maintain the embargo on Cuba. He endorsed the March 2008 Colombian incursion into Ecuador. He made clear his intention to continue funding Plan Colombia—the now decade-old anti-drug and counterinsurgency program—and to expand support for Mexico’s war on drug traffickers through the Bush-brokered Merida Initiative. In short, Obama offered little more than the same old militarized status quo.
But who could remember all that in April, when Obama made his hemispheric debut at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago? “I’m here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration,” he told his counter-parts, to applause. He later added that his administration would condemn “any efforts at violent overthrows of democratically elected governments, wherever it happens in the hemisphere.”
Now Obama’s honeymoon with Latin America is definitively over—largely because of his administration’s efforts to prevent the reinstatement of Manuel Zelaya to the presidency of Honduras, following the military coup in June, and its granting of legitimacy to the coup government. We might have expected as much from Bush, whose well-known support for the Venezuelan coup in 2002 did little to make him popular in Latin America.
Why has the Obama administration’s Latin America policy proved so continuous with its predecessor’s? This Report approaches the question of continuities by examining the institutional and ideological obstacles to progressive policies, as well as the political and economic bases of such tragically failed policies as Plan Colombia.
Alexander Main reads the Obama administration’s decision-making on Honduras as a symptom of the good left/bad left policy paradigm endorsed by various policy think tanks and intellectuals, which reanimates Cold War thinking in the contemporary context of Latin America’s “left turn.” According to this theory, the “radical populism” of Chávez and his close allies, including Zelaya, represent a threat to U.S. interests; they must therefore be contained. Snuffing any possibility that Zelaya could return to power fulfilled this objective.
The U.S. military’s Latin America operations, meanwhile, have been forced to retreat to Colombia, one of the fewer and fewer countries in the region where the government welcomes their presence. As John Lindsay-Poland notes herein, U.S. officials insisted the new agreement granting the military access to seven Colombian bases only formalizes prior U.S. involvement in anti-drug and counterinsurgency operations. But planning documents show that the military was in fact preparing for every “contingency”—including “full-spectrum operations” throughout the South American continent. The military’s strategic vision is one of the most deeply entrenched obstacles to establishing a better relationship with Latin America.
As are the political and economic bases of the War on Drugs, which Suzanna Reiss describes in her article. The Obama administration has embraced and even extended the drug war. Why? According to Reiss, the international drug control apparatus is not a neutral “enforcement” tool but a deeply political project that not only “indefinitely guarantees U.S. military influence in a particular region” but also promotes “certain networks of drug production and consumption” that are classed as legal.
Similarly, Joseph Nevins describes the radical and unprecedented growth of a new “boundary- and immigration-enforcement complex”—exemplified in the ballooning size of the Border Patrol and the some 600 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. The idea of “security” has become so hegemonic in immigration debates that “both sides of the proverbial aisle now embrace a ‘security first’ position that prioritizes strengthening the enforcement apparatus above all else.”
These essays are not intended as blueprints for action so much as critical reflections on how the Obama administration’s approach to Latin America reflects previous patterns—alliances with anti-democratic, repressive governments; military expansionism; and recourse to coercive, violent solutions to social issues. We hope they are useful to readers interested in pressuring the Obama administration to back off from at least its most retrograde Latin America policies in 2010. After all, we were promised “change.”
