ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL
POLITICAL ECONOMY
August 2002, Number 32
The United States and Latin America: Mutual Disappointments
Sidney Weintraub
Latin America has become a metaphor for U.S. neglect
interrupted by spasms of crisis-driven attention. U.S.
presidential candidates talk up the region, only to pay it
little heed once elected. George Bush’s attention to the
region, Mexico mostly, lasted longer than that of many of
his predecessors, but then the routine inattention set in after
9/11.The best example of presidential scorn is the one that
Sol Linowitz related: Lyndon Johnson asked him on the
airplane to a hemispheric summit conference in Punta del
Este why he was going to Uruguay at all. The one context in
which an indirect focus on Latin America has grown is
electoral, to get the votes of Latinos living in critical U.S.
states, like California, Texas, and Florida.
The Latin American counterpart to U.S. neglect and crisisdriven attention is distrust. The hemispheric countries south
of the United States do not have the luxury of ignoring their
powerful northern neighbor to which they send about 40
percent of their exports (80 to 85 percent for Mexico) and
from which they receive from one-half to two-thirds of their
foreign investment. But Latin American intellectuals do not
hesitate to show their disdain for U.S. promises not kept,
protection that keeps out their goods, attacks that target their
failures to stem drug trade, and lectures on the virtues of
market disciplines even as these break down in the United
States. It was no surprise to hemisphere watchers that
majorities of the population in most Latin countries,
especially the big ones like Brazil and Mexico, did not want
to become too entangled in the U.S. antiterrorism campaign
after 9/11. Nor was it any surprise to watchers in Latin
America that U.S. attention would turn elsewhere.
U.S. disappointments with Latin America are many.
Democracy did not take root in the region until recently, and
even now it is shaky in country after country. Economic
development has lagged, certainly as compared with Asia.
The Latin American region has a more unequal income
distribution than any other region of the world, and this is
not just an artifact of “neoliberalism.” Poverty is rampant. It
is only today that educational opportunity is opening widely.
The word “disappointment” was used because the dominant
culture in Latin America is European, just as in North
America. The cultural legacy, however, obviously took a
different turn from that of North America.
Latin American disappointments with its own performance
took the form of blaming others over many decades. At one
point, the dominant philosophical outlook of Latin American
thinkers was “dependency.” Latin America was part of the
periphery and the United States and other developed countries
were the center, and the periphery did not make great
economic strides because of the behavior of the center. The
dependency theory had no echo in Asia, where growth was
consistently higher than in Latin America. Latin American
development thinkers were export pessimists; their reasoning
was that to the extent that merchandise exports succeeded in
penetrating the markets of the center, action would be taken
to cut off these exports. Japan, Korea, Thailand, and other
Asian countries looked to exports to drive their development
rather than think in pessimistic terms. Other words are used
today to blame others—such as the neoliberal development
model allegedly foisted on them. Yet, the internal exploitation
of populations long antedated these explanations. For all its
talented people, Latin America still struggles with
underdevelopment. Some years ago a Mexican intellectual
asked me: “Do you think that Mexico will ever become a
developed country?” I answered, “yes.” But the process is
interminable.
The disappointments move in the other direction as well.
Americans have deplored the persistence of military
governments that seized power in Latin American countries,
but they forget the role the United States played in supporting
many of these. When Latin American countries elected
leaders disliked by the U.S. government, there was little
hesitancy to overthrow them. Export pessimism was a fact of
life for many decades, but so was U.S. protectionism against
the region’s most competitive exports. U.S. politicians who
fight to keep out goods coming from developing countries are
protecting their constituents, but at the expense of jobs
William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy  Center for Strategic and International Studies
1800 K Street, N.W.  Washington, D.C. 20006  Tel: (202) 775-3292  Fax: (202) 775-3199  www.csis.org
elsewhere. The U.S. Congress shows little hesitancy in
heavily subsidizing agricultural production without much
regard as to how this affects farmers in Latin America. The
United States insists on passing judgment as to whether
other countries are cooperating in the campaign against
narcotrafficking with little thought given to the reality that
others are implicitly passing judgment on the efficacy of the
U.S. measures to fight drug use.
Paul O’Neill, the U.S. treasury secretary, told Fox News a
few weeks ago that he saw no reason to offer financial
support at this time to Brazil and other Latin American
countries, but that what was needed were home-grown
policies that do some good and not funds “that just go out of
the country to Swiss bank accounts.” Then, a week or so
later, a U.S. loan of $1.5 billion was provided to Uruguay as
a bridge until an IMF program goes into effect, and the
United States supported a $30-billion IMF support package
to Brazil. Did the angry reaction to Secretary O’Neill’s
Swiss bank account comment influence the shift in U.S.
policy? My guess is that it did, to some extent.
Hate is not the right sentiment to describe relations between
the United States and Latin America, or between the people
of the two regions. The mutual feelings are more nuanced
than that. The United States, its government and probably a
majority of its population, look down on Latin America and
sees it as a region that cannot get its act together.
Denigration of this sort leads to neglect. There have been
periods when U.S. leaders tried to overcome this bias—and
met with temporary success. The Good Neighbor Policy
under Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Alliance for Progress
under John F. Kennedy were examples of these efforts. In
due course, however, the normal pattern of neglect returned.
The majority of Latin Americans have a high regard for the
open U.S. political system and the success of the U.S.
economy. There is some natural antipathy toward the rich
hegemon, but no more so than exists elsewhere. What does
grate, however, is the hypocrisy that is perceived—lectures
that are ill informed, promises that are not kept, and actions
that display contempt.
To a policy wonk, the natural question that arises is: What
can be done to alter attitudes and behavior? I doubt that the
answer is a better propaganda office operating out of the
White House. On the substantive side, the most important
U.S. action would be to get on with the negotiation and
establishment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA). Latin American development policy is predicated
on export expansion, and if U.S. policy narrows this
opportunity, no amount of verbiage can correct this.
Fortunately, a major positive step in this direction has just
been taken with passage of trade promotion authority, but
the eventual proof will be in the negotiation and
congressional approval of what comes out of that.
Officials must be careful with their words. The
administration, in effect, apologized for Secretary O’Neill’s
derogatory comment, but this does not remove the inner
annoyance of Brazilian and other Latin leaders. When
congresspeople make nasty comments, as they often do, the
administration should openly make its disagreement known.
Most Latin Americans do not distinguish sharply between the
administration and the Congress. For months, in connection
with the preliminary discussions on the FTAA, snide antiBrazilian comments were leaked in an attempt to override
Brazilian resistance to some U.S. proposals. Such behavior is
unworthy, especially when dealing with such an important
country.
There must be no ambiguity as to the U.S. position in support
of democracy. The uncertainty about the U.S. position at the
time of the aborted coup in Venezuela in April of this year
was exceedingly damaging. The July report of the inspector
general that spells out that the behavior of the State
Department was supportive of democracy in Venezuela,
should be made public in order to dispel the widespread
contrary impression.
Latin American issues do not deal with war and peace, as do
those relating to the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and South
Asia. Argentina and Brazil gave up their nuclear arms
pretensions, and this simultaneously eased U.S. problems and
fostered U.S. neglect of the region. If the United States
engages substantively with Latin America, particularly in the
trade arena, this will do much to change regional attitudes as
well. Failing that, the painful and damaging mutual sniping
will continue.
Issues in International Political Economy is published by
the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a
private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international
public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and
nonproprietary.
CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all
views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this
publication should be understood to be solely those of the
author.
© 2002 by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.
William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy  Center for Strategic and International Studies
1800 K Street, N.W.  Washington, D.C. 20006  Tel: (202) 775-3292  Fax: (202) 775-3199  www.csis.org