Rediscovering Latin America

Almost 500 years after Christopher Columbus found the New World, nearly sixty years after Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, and some thirty years since John F. Kennedy proclaimed the Alliance for Progress, George Bush in 1990 appears to be rediscovering Latin America.

Late in June the president announced an economic initiative-affecting debt, trade and investment-that could signal a fundamental U.S. policy decision of great potential significance: to build strong western hemisphere partnerships for the 1990s. The medium-term future of inter-American relations may well be shaped in the coming months as the president and his administration define in practice how they understand Latin America's importance to the United States in a rapidly changing world.

President Bush came to office at a moment of opportunity in the western hemisphere. After nearly a decade of sharp tensions between Latin America and the United States-and of deep divisions within this country over Latin American policy-a broad consensus was beginning to emerge by the end of 1988 on the immediate steps needed to reverse the deterioration of inter-American relations.

-It was widely accepted that Latin America's massive debt-service burden of some $400 billion had become unsustainable, and that substantial debt relief would be needed to release the region from an excruciating economic trap that might otherwise produce dire social and political consequences.

-It was increasingly recognized that burgeoning drug trafficking from Latin America to the United States was becoming an urgent problem, eclipsing traditional "national security" issues, and that the impulse to export primary responsibility for the problem to the producing and trafficking countries in Latin America was ineffective and counterproductive.

-It was broadly understood that Latin America's democratic openings during the 1980s were extremely fragile. Incumbent governments were being rejected in every election, sometimes by humiliating margins; labor violence was mounting in many countries; insurgent movements were gaining strength in a few; the narcotics network was eroding state authority in some nations; and armies throughout the region were restive.