Clinton’s Latin Lesson : Addressing Abandonment Felt by Neighbors to South, President to Focus on ‘Hemispheric Issues’ in 2nd Term

BUENOS AIRES —  Unlike his recent predecessors, President Clinton never crossed south of the Rio Grande during his first term.

The president’s failure to visit Latin America has revived a time-honored lament among Latin American diplomats and analysts: Despite a history of U.S. intervention in its historic “backyard,” despite economies and cultures that are increasingly intertwined, the U.S. government largely ignores the region, critics say.

“Latin America really felt the abandonment” during the last four years, said Newton Carlos, a Brazilian commentator on international relations. “The United States does not have an agenda for Latin America other than the narcotics issue. The rest is very vague. There is no agenda like they have with Europe and Asia.”

Those complaints, according to U.S. officials and other analysts, distort the reality of U.S.-Latin American relations, which in some ways have never been better. Senior Clinton advisor Thomas “Mack” McLarty visited Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay this week bearing a hopeful message that was greeted with enthusiasm and skepticism: Latin America will be a foreign policy priority for the second Clinton administration.

“I truly believe that we stand at a crossroads,” McLarty told business executives in Buenos Aires on Wednesday. “I have visited with President Clinton, and I can assure you that he is dedicated to moving ahead with a full range of hemispheric issues.”

McLarty came armed with good news. U.S. exports to Latin America will exceed $100 billion this year and are projected to reach $240 billion by 2010--greater than the combined exports expected at that time to Europe and Japan. Except for Cuba, dictatorships have tumbled like tin soldiers; democracies are flourishing regionwide, he said.

“Frankly, this has been an area of opportunity,” McLarty said. “You tend to spend your time on the problems.”

Clinton hopes to travel to Latin America soon, but no date has been set, McLarty said. (Clinton did make a brief trip to Haiti last year to visit American troops, but neither critics of U.S. policy nor American officials consider the 11-hour sojourn during a military operation to have been a formal trip to Latin America.)

As a boyhood friend of Clinton and the president’s special representative on Latin America and the Caribbean, McLarty is an influential point man. On the other hand, he speaks little Spanish, does not boast a wealth of expertise on Latin America and has other pressing responsibilities in the White House, critics point out.

They offer additional evidence of perceived neglect: The State Department’s top Latin America experts left the foreign service this year; the exodus was interpreted in some quarters as a sign of disappointment with policy or lack thereof. And the presidential campaign was bereft of Latin American issues other than debates driven by domestic concerns such as immigration, drugs and the North American Free Trade Agreement in regard to Mexico.

Similarly, Cuba surfaced during the campaign because of the crucial Cuban American vote and was “treated like an internal question,” said Carlos, the Brazilian commentator. He warned that the United States risks losing economic and political ground to Japan and European nations that are investing heavily throughout the hemisphere.

Other voices are more pragmatic and less pessimistic.

“The United States has never had so much responsibility in the world as it does now,” said Carlos Escude, a professor at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires who specializes in U.S.-Latin American relations. “So the U.S. is going to be interested in this region for very specific issues. For better or for worse, world history is not being shaped here. It is being shaped in Russia, Japan and other places.”

Nonetheless, Escude said, the Clinton administration took a decisive step in response to the Mexican peso crisis of 1994, which sent shock waves all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Clinton’s approval of a multibillion-dollar bailout package for Mexico--in the face of stiff opposition in the U.S. Congress--was a landmark in U.S.-Latin American relations, according to Escude.

“It was tremendously positive, in terms of regional integration, that the U.S. had to make such a big commitment in Mexico,” Escude said. “The U.S. has become so involved that it would be difficult to retreat now.”

In Mexico and the rest of Latin America, trade tops U.S. priorities for Clinton’s second term. At an unprecedented summit in Miami in 1994, the hemisphere’s leaders agreed to establish a Free Trade Area of the Americas by 2005. That summit “shaped the agenda” for the region, McLarty said.

The road to open hemispheric trade will have to curve among an array of already-existing trade blocs such as NAFTA and Mercosur, a union of some South American economies. Moreover, the Mexican crisis left U.S. politicians and voters dubious about the benefits of expanding trade zones.

But the Clinton administration plans to push forward with the addition to NAFTA of Chile, which has the region’s most prosperous economy. The bridges being built among trade blocs show that regional integration has a momentum of its own, McLarty told his Argentine audience Wednesday. He hailed “a new economic awakening across the Americas.”

Beyond investment opportunities, Latin America presents the United States with a horizon of democracies in various stages of consolidation. Peru and Colombia are among the few places where leftist guerrillas still pose a threat. In most nations, revolutionaries and authoritarian militaries have been replaced by a post-Cold War litany of problems: the power of the drug cartels, corruption that evolves as formerly statist economies open their markets, the chasm between rich and poor.

Apart from the war on drugs, a perennial point of potential conflict, the relationship between the United States and Latin American nations has improved remarkably in recent years, analysts said. As extremists fade away on both the left and right, suspicion of the colossus of the north has been replaced by affinity and even admiration.

For example, Argentina and Brazil are both proud and inward-looking nations with a history of intermittent nationalistic resentment toward the United States. In the 1990s, though, Argentine foreign policy underwent a profound evolution. President Carlos Menem has often led his neighbors in bolstering U.S. initiatives such as the Persian Gulf War and criticism of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

And although Brazil’s size and emerging economic power make it a potential competitor with the U.S. for influence in the region, Ambassador Luiz Agosto de Castro Neves, director of the Foreign Ministry’s Americas department, said: “The relationship between the United States and Brazil has improved quite a bit during the last two to three years. . . . With the end of the Cold War and ideological differences, our long-term objectives are more or less the same.”

And the relationship is not entirely asymmetrical, Escude said. Spanish is the second language in the United States. The business and cultural flow between Latin America and Miami, a city with a bilingual elite, has made Miami “the capital of Latin America,” he said. “There is integration beyond economics.”

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U.S. Policy: Build Bridges in ‘Backyard’

The issues expected to dominate U.S. policy in Latin America during the second Clinton administration are:

* Trade: U.S. exports to Latin America will exceed $100 billion this year, and a projected $240 billion by 2010--greater than combined exports to Europe and Japan. The next proposed step toward regional integration: incorporation of Chile into the North American Free Trade Agreement.

* Democracy: Cuba is still a U.S. priority; also political reform in Mexico. Haiti and Paraguay are menaced by political strife, holdover authoritarian forces.

* Security: The U.S. is still fighting drug trafficking in Mexico, the Caribbean, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Brazil, with the region’s largest economy and population, exerts increasing influence and aspires to be the first Latin American permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.