Hemispheric threads

The Washington Times ^ | January 16, 2006 | Susan Segal and Eric Farnsworth

[hedgetrimmer]

Just as markets tend to overshoot, so does political analysis, and recent commentary on Latin America is exhibit A.

Conventional wisdom is that the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and the recent elections in Bolivia late last year indicate that the United States and Latin America have parted company, definitively reversing the positive trends of the 1990s. Some have even accused Washington of "losing" Latin America, as if the region were ours to lose.

Certainly, challenges do exist in the hemisphere, some of great consequence, but before we either overreact or, just as harmful, turn our backs and walk away, a reality check is in order. From both the left and the right, the pendulum has swung too far toward pessimism, clouding the important strategic U.S. interests that exist in the hemisphere and hampering our ability to pursue them effectively.

Energy security. Border protection.Economic growth. The fight against transnational threats including terrorism, counternarcotics, environmental degradation, and nuclear proliferation. Global peacekeeping and disaster relief. All of these are strategic U.S. interests. And all require an active, healthy, collaborative partnership between the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean.

[hedgetrimmer]

Second, U.S. policy has wrongly but effectively been positioned by opponents as all about trade.

In fact, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, first agreed at the Miami Summit of the Americas in 1994, was actually the demand of hemispheric leaders themselves as a grand bargain for their other commitments in good governance and the rule of law, human rights, education, and the like

A "free trader" and globalist admits that "free trade" isn't about trade.

[hedgetrimmer]

Merging the hemisphere ping, or why does an NGO like the Council of the Americas and Americas Society have more sway over the US government than US citizens?

[IronJack]

NAFTA and the proposed CAFTA had very little to offer the US. NAFTA certainly hasn't improved relations between the US and Mexico or Canada. Even with CAFTA, we've got Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Vincente Fox in Mexico, Ignacio Lula de Silva in Brazil, and now Michelle Bachalet in Chile. Granted, all but Fox are South American, but the appeasment strategy doesn't seem to be working.

The forces arrayed against America are not just military. There's an economic war afoot, with as much or more at stake.

[hedgetrimmer]

The forces arrayed against America are not just military. There's an economic war afoot, with as much or more at stake.

Thanks for pointing this out.

[rundown73]

"...we've got Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Vincente Fox in Mexico, Ignacio Lula de Silva in Brazil, and now Michelle Bachalet in Chile"

There's a lot of apples and oranges there. I'd throw Chavez and Morales together and call them lefty radicals. Lula de Silva is slightly closer to center, but a leftward shift for Brazil. Bachalet is really not. She's part of the same party that's been in power since Pinochet stepped down (reasonably centrist). Fox is by no means a sign of a lefty movement in Mexico.

[GAB-1955]

The purpose of NAFTA and CAFTA are not to improve diplomatic relations between the member states. The purpose is to integrate the states into a larger market, with efficiencies of scale. It has nothing to do with human rights, security, or immigration. Overall, NAFTA has been successful--or rather, all three countries are equally unhappy with the deal.

One could argue soundly that by providing economic opportunities to Mexico, one stabilizes our southern neighbor. Unfortunately, China has undercut Mexico as a low-cost factory source. Furthermore, it is in Mexico's national economic and political interest to allow unlimited exmigration into the United States, both for the money sent back and to serve as a outlet for frustration with conditions in Mexico.

This is something that economics won't solve. It's a political issue in both countries, though the U.S. can act unilaterally and upset the balance in Mexico. Do we want to do that? Would Mexico in chaos -- as it was in the early 1900s -- be worse than now? I think so.

I don't think Michelle Bachalet is a drastic change to the left with Chile. She had already been in the government as Defense Minister, and she is not going to risk the destruction Chile's well-established free markets for short-term political gain in the same was Chavez is ruining Venezuela and Morales is going to ruin Bolivia. Bachalet is more like Lula de Silva, and Chile's economy (agriculture and mining), like Brazil's, is more diversified than Bolivia's (cocaine) and Venezuela's (petroleum). Stable and mature economies withstand political change better than single-crop economies.

Latin America isn't a united region in detail. We can't apply universal templates to every nation and assume they will be the same. However, we can assume generalities. Free trade improves both nation's economies. However, people who make their living based on the inefficiencies in economies -- tarriffs and labor, transport, and manufacturing costs --are going to be hurt. The adjustment period will be painful. But it will be better in the long run.

[untenured]

I don't think Michelle Bachalet is a drastic change to the left with Chile. She had already been in the government as Defense Minister, and she is not going to risk the destruction Chile's well-established free markets for short-term political gain in the same was Chavez is ruining Venezuela and Morales is going to ruin Bolivia. Bachalet is more like Lula de Silva, and Chile's economy (agriculture and mining), like Brazil's, is more diversified than Bolivia's (cocaine) and Venezuela's (petroleum). Stable and mature economies withstand political change better than single-crop economies.

Remember that Ms Bachalet is actually the second consecutive Socialist president. The last one didn't do much with the Pinochet miracle but tinker around the edges. Some of my Chilean students told me that he had reintroduced some rigidities into the labor market, but there has certainly been no wholesale nationalization, massive increases in public spending or anything like that. Chile has consolidated a lot of prosperity in the last twenty years, and there is a lot of institutional memory of the madness of the early 1970s.

There is a risk that, having seen no damage during the last presidency, Chileans would accept more incremental change, and suddenly one day they would wake up and the frog would be boiling. But I don't think that's likely.

[monkeywrench]

"One could argue soundly that by providing economic opportunities to Mexico, one stabilizes our southern neighbor. Unfortunately, China has undercut Mexico as a low-cost factory source. Furthermore, it is in Mexico's national economic and political interest to allow unlimited exmigration into the United States, both for the money sent back and to serve as a outlet for frustration with conditions in Mexico."

Mexico should be providing economic opportunities for their own. We are doing them no favors, here. One can see how unstable it is with so many of the productive people here and the flotsam left. What does one call an "economic policy" that depends on the producers and workers to flee the country and send back money? Shameful...

[RegulatorCountry]

"Unfortunately, China has undercut Mexico as a low-cost factory source."

When did it become written in stone that we *must* chase the absolute bottom dollar? To listen to the most adamant of free traders, you'd think it would be impossible to have a thriving economy without doing so. But, close to a century of the greatest prosperity the world has ever seen occurred in the United States, with varying degrees of protectionism throughout the period.

So, there's something else afoot with so-called free trade, and it smells like more socially engineered wealth redistribution, with us as the primary donors.

[IronJack]

I didn't mean to imply that South America is an economic monolith, or that the leftward shift in all the forementioned countries was identical in either quality or degree. But there IS a leftward shift in South America, and one that CAFTA didn't seem to affect at all. (Not that it was directed specifically at South American countries, but it certainly indicated a willingness of the US to appease its economic rivals. To no avail.)

As to the notion that economic charity stabilizes Mexico, I'm not seeing much evidence of that. And if the cost of "stabilization" is the bankruptcy of American workers, then we should cut Mexico loose and let it crumble.

NAFTA has not lived up to any of its promises, at least not to Americans. In any closed system, energy flows from highest to lowest. If capital is energy, it isn't going to flow from Mexico to the US, but in the opposite direction.

This strategy of economic diplomacy is a sinker for America.

[IronJack]

so-called free trade ... smells like more socially engineered wealth redistribution, with us as the primary donors.

YOU go on to the bonus round!

[hedgetrimmer]

More on the fraudulently named "free trade" system.

[B4Ranch]

Because the citizen voters were not asked to participate in the discussion about what we want. We are only being told to pay for it....... in too many cases with the lives of our sons and daughters.

[B4Ranch]

What you are not remembering is that the New World Order Plan doesn't include sovereign borders. We are to be "the people of the continent", free to travel anywhere we want on the continent, free to grab any opportunity that will support the United Nations definition of socialism.

[raybbr]

What does one call an "economic policy" that depends on the producers and workers to flee the country and send back money?

It's called building the "new America".

We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.

Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey ... and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende.

For years our nation has debated this change -- some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.

George Bush from a campaign speech in Miami, August 2000.

[monkeywrench]

Whoa, I missed that quote! I'm not done with "old America", yet.

[Designer]

Here we go again:

"The purpose is to integrate the states into a larger market, with efficiencies of scale. It has nothing to do with human rights, security, or immigration."

Wrong.

Henry Kissinger said of the (then proposed) NAFTA; "it is the architecture of a New World Order"

NAFTA, CAFTA, and of course, the proposed FTAA are NOT primarily about "trade", free or otherwise, but about CONTROL. That is control of everything and everyone in the hemisphere.

Commerce, (trade for those of you in Rio Linda) of course, but also; banking, the environment, labor, human "rights" (LOL), transportation, health care, and anything else they can think of.

WAY to many FReepers just bite onto the name which cleverly included the word "trade", and see nothing else. Why, trade is GOOD!, they say, completely ignoring the warning signs in the agreement's proponents' own phraseology.

Once you finally accept the fact that it is not about simply "trade", but all about control, then you can begin to decipher the rhetoric being spouted by them.

Good luck to you.