It's a time of war and depression, and the left is surging in Latin America. Populist leaders have emerged in the region. The U.S. president declares a new era of friendship and equality. The Monroe Doctrine appears to be on its last legs.
Take your pick: the 1930s or today.
In yet another parallel between Barack Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the two presidents are serving at a time of a populist shift in Latin America. FDR responded to the earlier one with a "Good Neighbor Policy" that sharply broke with the policies of past administrations. He removed U.S. marines from Haiti, abrogated the Platt amendment that gave Washington a say over Cuban affairs, and declared that "the definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention." It wasn't altruism: FDR needed Latin America's help in World War II and to pull the global economy out of the trashcan.
Similarly, Barack Obama is repairing fences with points south at a time when the United States could use all the friends it can get. Obama even declared the unthinkable: that the United States could learn something from Cuba. At the recent Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad, Obama noted that Cuba had generated a great deal of good will in the region by sending out medical missions, which (surprise, surprise) has proven more popular than lopsided trade agreements or failed drug wars. This modest nod in the direction of Havana came on the heels of the administration's easing of travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans to visit the island. A recent poll suggests that a majority of Americans favor a new policy toward Cuba that includes a complete lift of the travel ban and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations.
The headline-maker from Trinidad was, of course, Obama's decision to shake hands with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Such is the depth to which U.S. foreign policy had fallen during the Bush years that a handshake could cause such a splash -- and ritual fulminations from the right. "I think we'd be a lot better off drilling offshore in the United States and getting American energy, rather than being nice to dictators," frothed Newt Gingrich on Fox News.
At the summit, Chávez gave Obama a book: Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America. It's an excellent gift for a book-reading president. "I know I can be accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of a novel about love or pirates," Galeano writes in his afterward. But this explains why, 36 years after it was published, Galeano's book is still being read (and hit number one on Amazon after Chavez's endorsement). That's quite an achievement for a book whose essential message is that "underdevelopment in Latin America is a consequence of development elsewhere."
Once he's worked his way through Galeano -- whose poem Window on the Body, by the way, gives our Fiesta! section its name -- Obama should turn to current challenges and recommendations. He couldn't do better than to read the advice of 14 civil society leaders from 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries that Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Manuel Pérez-Rocha collected on the eve of the Trinidad summit. "The U.S. government must respect and attempt to comprehend political developments occurring in Latin America," urges Jorge Carpio, an Argentine human rights activist. "No sane person could seriously interpret these trends as a threat to U.S. security or the establishment of democracy in the region." Other participants recommend the overhaul of U.S. trade policies, U.S.-Latin American cooperation on sustainable energy, and the end of the drug war.
Obama, the renowned listener, should also heed the collective voices of Latin Americans. "In country after country they have elected new leaders with mandates to break with the international financial institutions and to pursue new economic policies," writes FPIF senior analyst Mark Engler in his contribution to our strategic focus on empire. "As a result, even before the current crisis, countries such as Bolivia, which has one of the poorest populations in the hemisphere, have been devising more equitable ways of distributing natural resource wealth -- and more democratic ways of involving historically marginalized indigenous populations in the political process. Countries like Argentina, which suffered tremendously under Washington-backed neoliberalism, have worked to develop alternative, regional financial structures to allow for greater independence."
The Obama administration can begin its new policy toward Latin America by applying Galeano's insights and popular demands for change to U.S. policy toward Peru. FDR stood up to the oil companies that had been robbing Mexico blind. Obama should do the same with extraction companies looting Peru.
"The indigenous peoples of Peru's Northern Amazon have endured over 30 years of oil production and pollution," writes FPIF contributor James Polk in Time to Strengthen Ties to Peru. "Instead of prosperity, it has resulted in malnutrition, disease, and social disruption. For instance, since 1971, U.S.-based oil company Occidental Petroleum has employed practices outlawed in the United States and elsewhere for the purpose of maintaining lower production costs and maximizing revenues."
The Good Neighbor Policy came and went. U.S. interventions in Latin America didn't stop at the end of World War II. Dictators returned to the region in force. Wealth remained concentrated in a few hands. "Good" was simply not good enough. From Venezuela and Peru to Cuba and Bolivia, it's time for the Obama administration to go one step further than FDR and pursue a Great Neighbor Policy that can change U.S.-Latin American relations for good.
Crossposted from Foreign Policy In Focus.
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