Martinez Wants Focus On Latin America, Discouraged By Iraq War
POSTED: 1:32 pm EDT June 10, 2005
KEY WEST, Fla. -- Sen. Mel Martinez criticized the Bush administration and Congress on Friday for paying little attention to growing Latin American problems and lamented the slow progress in Iraq.
While Martinez said the administration is increasingly aware that it needs to pay more attention to Latin America, he said it should have been a focus from the start, given instability in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador and Haiti.
"The administration has been very remiss for the last four years in its direction toward Latin America to their great consternation now," said Martinez, R-Fla. "There is a growing recognition of the administration and in Congress that we have not been paying enough attention to a region that's really in trouble."
Martinez, speaking at the annual Florida Society of Newspaper Editors/Florida Press Association convention, said problems have reached the point where urgent action is needed by the United States.
"We have tremendous problems in Bolivia right now. It's a crisis situation. So is Ecuador, in a little more latent way," Martinez said. "And clearly Venezuela, in partnership with Cuba, are creating a lot of problems for stability, for democracy, for the rule of law. And I think that's going to spill over into the upcoming elections in Central America."
The U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti hasn't been doing its job, Martinez said, expressing concerns that there could be problems with upcoming elections there.
"I'm anxious to go to Haiti. What a basket case it is," Martinez said. "We need for those elections not to be a setback. They're not going to be the full answer, but it can't be a setback."
Martinez, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he's planning a trip to Latin America in August and has asked fellow committee member Norm Coleman, R-Minn., for guidance on who would be truly interested in joining him.
The response, Martinez said, was "You're question is the problem. There's not that many of us."
Martinez, who strongly supported Bush's efforts in Iraq during his campaign last year, also expressed concerns about progress in the war.
"I am discouraged by how long it has taken for us to begin to draw down some forces," he said. "I would have thought by now, and I think in a clearer moment that the president and (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld would have thought that by now we would be in a position to be able to draw down some forces. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case."
He said he has had to write many condolence letters to the families of Floridians killed in Iraq.
"It brings home the importance of the decision to send men and women to go to war," he said. "It has become a foreign fighters' war against us there and the progress seems slow and difficult."
He also said the Bush administration should consider Sen. Joseph Biden's suggestion that the U.S. military's prison camp on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be shut down. Biden, D-Del., made his remarks this week in the wake of a Pentagon report that detailed incidents in which U.S. guards desecrated the Quran.
Last month, Amnesty International called the detention center for alleged terrorists "the gulag of our time."
"It's become an icon for bad stories and at some point you wonder the cost-benefit ratio," Martinez said. "How much do you get out of having that facility there, is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?"
