The September 11 attacks led the United States to replace its previous engaged and enlightened approach to Latin American relations with a total focus on security matters. This pullback has undermined recent regional progress on economic reform and democratization. To meet the pressing challenges ahead, Latin America needs the United States to be a committed partner.
Jorge G. Castaneda served as Mexico's Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003.
RETHINKING U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN TIES
Free from the strategic and ideological rigidities of the Cold War, Latin America in the mid-1990s looked forward to a more realistic and constructive relationship with the United States. The first Summit of the Americas in 1994, which launched negotiations on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), symbolized the renewal of goodwill and cooperation in the region. The summit led to a series of hemisphere-wide meetings at various levels throughout the 1990s that offered a new model for political relations between the United States and Latin America (most notably the Williamsburg and Bariloche defense ministerial meetings). This new diplomacy for the first time presumed to treat all the region's nations (with the exception of Cuba) as equals. The summitry also sent a powerful message throughout the hemisphere by implicitly stating that the success of the entire endeavor depended on the coordinated progress of all nations in the Americas.
A sign of the times was the lessened rhetorical confrontation between most Latin American nations and their powerful northern neighbor. Some unilateral U.S. policies-such as the process of "certifying" countries' cooperation with the U.S. drug war or the Helms-Burton legislation, which placed sanctions on any country that traded with Cuba-faced firm regional opposition. But Latin American countries felt increasingly more at ease when discussing certain issues with Washington that in the past had been highly controversial, such as democracy and human rights promotion or combating corruption. A consensus developed, stronger than at any time in the past half-century, on what constituted a common agenda for hemispheric relations and how to address it.
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The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which -- as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts -- could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will find new targets around the world after the war ends.
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