Neglecting Latin America

Tuesday, May 4, 1999

Once, when asked how important Latin America is to the United States, Henry Kissinger reportedly said derisively, "South America is a dagger aimed straight at the heart of the Antarctic". It was a classic example of the rampant Eurocentrism that has long dominated American strategic thinking, mired in an idealized Europe-only past, with at best a smattering of fears and fascinations with exotic Asia. This narrowness of focus has long blinded this country to the overwhelming importance to it of its closest neighbor, Canada and Latin America. If what are really important are national security, prosperity, and domestic tranquility, it seems a decidedly parochial fixation.

Kissinger's comment, coming as it did at the height of the Cold War, seems especially odd. When he made it avoiding nuclear war was our greatest concern. Yet he blithely dismissed as strategically irrelevant precisely the region that generated the single greatest threat of just such an exchange. It was in Castro's Cuba during the missile crisis, not in Europe or Asia, where we came closest to mutually assured nuclear incineration. Latin America strategically irrelevant? Hardly.

And yet today, decades later, Eurothink continues to drive American strategic decision making. Responding to massive human rights violations in the Balkans involving widespread death, destruction, and an immense refugee tragedy, today we are leading NATO in a campaign to bomb Yugoslavia back to the stone age unless it changes its political policies. Yet just a few short years ago, when radical revolutions in Latin America were killing far more people and generating more than twice as many refugees, many fleeing directly to our own shores, we did precious little. In fact, many of those who today are so vigorously urging on NATO actually supported the authors of these much larger Latin American pogroms against tribal Indians, peasants and even Jews. Is it that Kosovo today is infinitely more important to the United States than Cuba was then, and Macedonia and Montenegro more important than Managua? Or is Kosovo yet one more example of Eurothink run amok. If so, we had best think again. A million Kosovar refugees are indeed a tragedy, but ten million Mexicans hitting our own border during a new revolution would be far more than merely tragic. And bombing Mexico City would not be an option.

It gets worse. When it comes to Latin America, not only do we have our political priorities upside down, we can't even balance our checkbooks. Everyone agrees that trade is good because exports mean income, profits, and jobs, over 20,000 per billion by some estimates. So our newspapers and journals are full of articles on opening up trade with China, resolving Asia's financial mess, and American-European banana wars. Any decent Martian analyst could not but conclude from our Eurasian fixation that Europe and Asia are by far our most important trading partners. But he would be wrong, as are we. Latin America, not Europe, is our best market. Mexico, not Japan, is our second largest trading partner after Canada, before even counting in another $20-22 billion in yearly American border sales to Mexican shoppers. And that just for starters. We sell more to Chile's 15 than India's 920 million people; more to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay [the MERCOSUR] than to China; more to tiny Costa Rica than all of Eastern Europe put together. By 2010, exports to Latin America are expected to reach $232 billion, more than to all of Europe and Japan combined. And unlike Europe and Japan, Latin America imports over 40 percent of all it buys from us. Further, while exports to Europe and Asia remain flat, those to Latin America are rising fast, 66 percent in just four recent years alone. In his Farewell Address, George Washington said commerce is the main business of government. Unless he was wrong, today Latin America should be our top not bottom trade priority.

This is also true for providing for national security and insuring domestic tranquility. Today the United States has the fourth largest Spanish speaking population of any nation in the world; by 2007 Hispanics will be our largest minority; by 2020 they will be the majority in our most populace state, California. Forty years ago Hispanic Americans were mostly rural or small town descendants of Mexicans made Americans by war, concentrated largely in the southwest, save for Puerto Ricans in New York. Today there are also newly arrived Cubans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, South Americans, living everywhere, especially in our major cities, many refugees from the region's wars. With this new influx has come a cultural revolution. Our fourth largest television network is in Spanish, UNIVISION. Spanish newspapers are available almost everywhere. In 1998, Mexican Independence Day in Las Vegas was dominated by Latin stars, most unknown to mainstream America, Mana, Thalia, Alejandro Fernandez, and top mariachi bands playing for Hispanic heavy audiences. Tacos, and chihuahuas, seem as popular here as in Mexico.

To insure domestic tranquility we must adjust to this new reality. When once the Coca Cola-ization of Latin America was widely decried as American cultural aggression today, as our current raging debate over bilingualism suggests, the Latinizing of America seems to many as nearly as big a threat. It should not be. By remaining insistently Euro, if not Anglocentric in an increasingly global environment we are yet again undervaluing Latin America, and missing the point. Yes English should remain our national language. But we should welcome not fear becoming bi-lingual. English first, fine. But Spanish second. With the importance of Latin America to this country growing exponentially, it seems a natural. Further, a stable, democratic, and prosperous Latin America should top our list of foreign policy objectives not languish near its bottom, because it is our biggest and fastest growing market, a dynamic new cultural partner, and increasingly vital to our own domestic tranquility. We should stop gazing wistfully across oceans at shirt-tail European cousins and Asian paramours and take a far closer look at the jealous Latin beauty next door before some more ardent and understanding suitor steals her away.

T. Charles Brown, a former Marine and career diplomat, is Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution specializing in Latin American affairs.