Turning Up the Heat in Latin America

Though it's been given short shrift in the American media because of the presidential campaign, the disaster of Hurricane Ike, and Wall Street doing its best October '29 impression in quite a while, news out of Latin America in the past week or so is worthy of some serious thought. Thursday, Hugo "Crackers from Caracas" Chavez announced that American Ambassador Patrick Duddy has 72 hours to leave the Venezuela. This move came in solidarity with a similar expulsion in Bolivia the day before, wherein Evo Morales accused the United States of supporting rebel groups in Bolivia's east, declaring that "we do not want people here who conspire against democracy." Honduras also declined to approve the incoming ambassador from Washington. Chavez also said that he had uncovered an American-backed plot to oust him from power. Washington responded with its own requisite ambassadorial expulsions (though it seems unclear which came first, the ambassadors' expulsion from Washington, or their withdrawal by their own governments - they're leaving in any case).

It is an unfortunate testament to our history in Latin America - recent and not-so-recent - that I'm honestly not sure whether or not to believe Chavez and Morales's excuses. It certainly wouldn't be the first time we've tried to overthrow a government in the Southern Hemisphere, and we're generally not very open about it until well after the fact, however transparent our role. Still, any direct move to that end, particularly in Venezuela, would smell so strongly of American orchestration that even the Bush administration would probably find the lack of subtlety to be problematic. But then maybe not. This is the problem with having treated Latin America as a pseudo-colonial playground for a hundred years. Even when we're not doing anything insidious, people believe we are.

In any case, this latest spat in and of itself probably isn't going to produce any seismic shifts in U.S. relations with the nations to its south. It seems, though, symptomatic of a longer-term decline in influence that ought to be worrisome to U.S. policymakers. There are several angles here. First, there's the obvious cyclical resurgence of anti-U.S. leftist politics that has been sweeping Latin America for several years now. That's a storm that we'll just have to ride out. More to the point, though, is the fact that Latin America may well see an increase in its relative importance to the United States in the coming decades. Assuming that energy costs, and therefore transport costs, continue to rise, the margins that make truly global resource and manufacturing networks possible could well decrease, rendering the availability of raw materials and manufactured goods from comparatively close locations economically critical. In other words, it may well start becoming cheaper for companies that wish to market their products in the U.S. to manufacture them in South America, rather than Asia, as transport costs outpace those of labor. All this to say that having productive, reasonably friendly relations with Latin America is in the best interests of the United States.

In my view, such productive relationships are not a lost cause. A change in American leadership, coupled with a change in American behavior, could help put us back on stable footing. We will, however, have to recalibrate the manner in which we relate to our southern neighbors. In particular, we will have to recalibrate the manner in which we deal with the narcotics trade. This is clearly a complex, politically volatile issue, but it is one that will have to be addressed if we wish to effectively treat a cancer that has plagued north-south relations in this hemisphere for decades. A comprehensive strategy for changing the focus of our drug war is the stuff of a book, not a post, so I'll just suggest that we focus more on consumer-end solutions, rather than on destroying the livelihoods of subsistence-level Latin American farmers. More generally, we are going to have to acknowledge that, while we will almost certainly retain significant influence in Latin America in the coming decades, the days of the Monroe Doctrine are unlikely to return, and we'll have to treat the nations of Central and South America with a bit more deference to their political autonomy.