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To mangle a popular Spanish proverb, there’s no worse blind person than the one who doesn’t want to hear. If the past serves to figure out the future, Latin Americans, particularly South Americans, are right now seeing George W. Bush’s victory as negative for them, because their view has always been that it is only with a Democrat at the White House that the region can expect understanding and help for the region’s needs and aspirations.
Nobody knows how this nonsense got started. Certainly not on the basis of the Democrat presidents’ record. Once the United States won World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” policy, launched to keep Latin America providing the oil and raw materials which were crucial for the American war effort, turned into the “forget thy neighbor” policy; John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was all speeches and no action; for Jimmy Carter there was no Latin America south of Panama; the Free Trade Area of the Americas that Bill Clinton so loudly proclaimed disappeared overnight when he declined to fight Congress over the “fast track” that was necessary to negotiate treaties (he did fight over China); and, if Al Gore had made it to the White House, he would have been so much in debt with labor unions that even Nafta, the trade treaty first proposed by Reagan, then revived by Bush and concluded by Clinton, that includes Mexico and is the only seed of a common market with Latin America would have been at risk.
Lost to Latin Americans is that last August the present president-elect said “if I become president I will look towards the south, not as a circumstantial occurrence but as a fundamental commitment of my presidency . . . In the same way in which we have put an end to the great divide between East and West, today we can overcome the great division between North and South.” Thus he gave a prominent place in his agenda to the issue of U.S. policy towards Latin America.
In a speech to an audience of American business leaders at Florida’s International University, Bush did what no candidate from either party aspiring to the White House had done in half a century: he assigned a high priority to relations with Latin America, providing sound reasons for the policy he would follow if elected.
This has nothing to do with Bush trying to get the Hispanic vote. With their low-level income, Latin Americans in the United States basically vote for the candidate that in their judgment best takes care of their immediate interests here, which they share with other non-Hispanic voters of their same socioeconomic level, such as insdiscriminate access to jobs, welfare and health insurance, and the show no great concern for the countries they come from, except Cubans, who are numerous in Florida. For them Bush had a special message, promising he would not soften the economic sanctions against Fidel Castro until he institutes democratic reforms. “La libertad no es negociable”, he said in Spanish.
Bush stated that “those who ignore Latin America do not understand the United States itself. And those who ignore our hemisphere do not wholly understand American interests. This country was right to be concerned with a country like Kosovo, for example, but there are more refugees from the conflicts in Colombia. Tthe United States is right to be worried about Kuwait, but more of our oil comes from Venezuela; the United States is right in welcoming trade with China, but we export about the same to Brazil.”
Charging Bill Clinton’s administration with having “lost the opportunity” of improving trade with Latin America, Bush said: “We were promised fast track authority to negotiate, as every U.S. president has obtained for 25 years and, nevertheless, this administration has not obtained it. We were promised a free-trade area in the Americas and, nevertheless, this never happened. Chile was promised association to Nafta, and it was delayed.”
Bush accused the Clinton administration of carrying out in Latin America a strategy lacking in direction, of “summit meetings without substance,” referring to the Miami meeting six years ago now and the one in Chile in April 1998.
In a call seldom heard from an American presidential candidate, Bush said: “We do not only want good neighbors, but also strong partners. We do not only want progress but a shared prosperity”.
Was anybody listening in Latin America? Not if you judge by the comments of the outcome of the U.S. election, which consider George W. Bush’s victory as bad for the region.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com