The Shadow of Latin American Affairs
Article Summary and Author Biography
The Bush administration's foreign policy towards Latin America lacks strategic vision.
Georges A. Fauriol is Senior Fellow and Director of the Latin American Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Third Century: U.S. Latin American Policy Choices for the 1990s.
Last year was a probationary year for the Bush Administration's policy in Latin America. No one expected bold moves, but creativity and reliance on a broad spectrum of experience were assumed. With an understandable desire to avoid the quagmire in which its predecessor found itself, the new administration adopted a low-profile approach to the region-sharp contrast to President Reagan's ideological policies or President Carter's crusading zeal. Then, in the last few days of 1989, the new administration drew a line through its image of reluctant hemispheric activist and took over Panama militarily to overthrow the government of General Manuel Antonio Noriega.
What has emerged is a form of U.S. policy pragmatism. This would be laudable if only it were anchored by an identifiable regional strategic vision. Although the Panamanian operation demonstrated political courage, Washington's Latin American policy process in 1989 failed to develop a four-to-eight-year strategy. U.S. interest in the Caribbean, for example, almost evaporated. Many in and out of Washington therefore watched with some concern the increasingly complex unfolding and execution of President Bush's Latin American policy.
The U.S. policy emphases that gradually became apparent in 1989 had four main features:
-a tenuous bipartisan consensus in the United States regarding Central American policy, built around a truce struck early in the year between the administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress;
-a belief that the debt problem in Latin America, if allowed to fester, would quickly shift from a giant accounting problem to one with political and security implications;
-the immediate priority of U.S. relations with Mexico;
-the rediscovery of multilateral diplomacy by the new administration, with policy subplots involving regional narcotic concerns and Panama; limited initial results of the latter triggered on December 20, 1989, the U.S. unilateral action in Panama...
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