Partners in conflict
Lowenthal, Abraham F.
PARTNERS IN CONFLICT THE U.S. & THE CARIBBEAN BASIN ABRAHAM F. LOWENTHAL During the first quarter of the twentieth century, U.S. troops landed more than twenty times in Caribbean Basin...
...relations with the region...
...The main items exported from Central America — bananas, coffee, cotton, cocoa, and sugar — are all items for which the U.S...
...A second U.S...
...With regard to the strife-torn nations of Central America, the United States would cut back its intense involvement of recent years...
...the region's oil bill climbed from $189 million in 1973 to about $1.5 billion in 1980, while the prices of the region's main exports lagged...
...On the contrary, the Panama Canal treaties of 1978 suggest that accommodating nationalist impulses in the Caribbean Basin region is sometimes a more effective means of protecting U.S...
...policy would be diplomatic, not military...
...The scale of Caribbean Basin entities is such that even limited U.S...
...From their standpoint, the entire circumCaribbean region (including the Central American isthmus) was of vital significance to the United States because of its proximity...
...stake in the insular Caribbean, and to a lesser extent in Central America, is demographic...
...Nor is U.S...
...Per capita food production has dropped in most of the insular Caribbean, and regional imports of food have risen...
...High prices for petroleum and other vital imports placed additional strains on most Caribbean economies in the 1970s and into the 1980s...
...With regard to the former group of countries, those ready for economic and social development, the United States would extend the provisions for free access to the U.S...
...orbit, having permitted a "second Cuba," would suffer a high domestic political cost...
...Central America has been very hard hit, too, by other consequences of the international recession...
...It would distinguish between those countries ready for significant economic advance (presently most of the Caribbean islands, along with Costa Rica and perhaps Honduras on the Central American isthmus) and those where civil turmoil precludes effective economic progress in the near future...
...The fact that the military opposition to the Sandinista government is made possible by U.S...
...The region's terms of trade have deteriorated severely, by almost 50 percent from 1977 through the mid-1980s...
...market would be more open to Caribbean producers, and it would allow Caribbean producers to take fuller advantage of their proximity on such products as textiles and small electronic appliances...
...The United States does import 85 percent of its bauxite and 25 percent of its processed aluminum from the Caribbean Basin, mainly from Jamaica, but there are other sources for these materials...
...federal deficits, aid transfers to the Caribbean Basin will be much more modest, however...
...The desperate poverty and the increasing concentration of land ownership and income in Central America are part of a syndrome...
...In most respects, however, the islands of the Caribbean are very different from the countries of the isthmus of Central America...
...economic interests in the Caribbean Basin have also declined, both in absolute and in relative terms...
...After a surge in the 1960s, direct U.S...
...Honduras, the poorest of the Central American nations, teeters on the edge of violence...
...With permission of the publisher and author...
...It has also built new military bases and airfields in Honduras and has pre-positioned thousands of tons of materiel...
...The prospect that the United States will eventually have to choose between humiliation and escalation in Nicaragua is built into the activist stance of aid to the contras...
...In particular, Washington would genuinely support the effects of the Contadora nations (Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela) to mediate Central America's conflicts...
...public will surely not long support an expensive effort to transform Caribbean Basin realities...
...Moreover, it has been declining in recent years and is unlikely to expand significantly while conditions of violent instability prevail...
...hegemony...
...A considerable share of U.S...
...The main reason U.S...
...The economic benefits of the Central American Common Market, of considerable importance in the early 1960s, gave way in the late 1960s to intraregional tensions that were exemplified by the 1969 "Soccer War" between El Salvador and Honduras...
...access to the region's assets...
...efforts to reimpose U.S...
...In addition to the operation in Grenada, the Reagan administration has repeatedly undertaken extended military and naval exercises, involving several thousand U.S...
...Each emphasizes short-term political considerations and the aim of countering Cuba...
...even that figure would be much lower if the essentially paper investment in the Bahamas were excluded...
...Indeed, the idea of sustained U.S...
...It would keep the U.S...
...But threatening bases or facilities in the Caribbean Basin would pose some additional danger, at a margin where each increment matters...
...Such an accord would bar both overt and covert attempts to overthrow established governments...
...Although several of the Central American countries are very densely populated — El Salvador's figure of 580 persons per square mile is among the world's highest — their resource base is richer than that of most of the Caribbean islands...
...The Reagan administration has engaged the United States in a prolonged and hardly covert, albeit indirect, war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, overwhelming, or evading congressional resistance to U.S...
...Except for Guatemala, where half the population is Indian (and the Miskito Indian enclave in Nicaragua and the Kuan Indian region in Panama), they are ethnically more homogeneous and less influenced by African immigration than are the Caribbean islands...
...Almost two million Puerto Ricans have come in, as well as more than one million Cubans, about one million West Indians, over half a million Dominicans, and more than three hundred thousand Haitians...
...Except for Cuba and Hispaniola (the island that includes both the Dominican Republic and Haiti), most are very small...
...The total population of all the Windward and Leeward islands is less than that of South Dakota...
...interest in its border region is to exclude tangible security threats — to keep hostile bases, combat forces, and strategic 272: Commonweal facilities out of the area...
...These significant differences should not obscure important similarities between the Carter and Reagan variants of the activist approach, however...
...The challenge for U.S...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy and the U.S...
...The Reagan administration, on the contrary, made it plain from the beginning that it favors regimes oriented toward free enterprise and foreign investment, supportive of U.S...
...This nation's most important overseas military installations were the network of coaling stations and naval bases established to protect U.S...
...The developmental approach to the Caribbean Basin — concerned both with preventing direct strategic threats to U.S...
...banks in Central America is less than 2.3 percent of their total exposure in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it has been declining further in the face of the region's turmoil...
...The region's military importance diminished as new technology (especially intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines) drastically reduced the significance of proximity...
...A low degree of interest in Caribbean economic and social realities was combined with a high degree of concern for maintaining U.S...
...troops landed more than twenty times in Caribbean Basin countries: in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama...
...policy, though often repeated by Washington officials, are or ought to be less important...
...The region wide burst of "industrialization by invitation" during the 1960s reached the limits of import substitution and market scale and quickly ran out of steam...
...As part of the agreement, the United States would assure the government of Nicaragua that U.S...
...direct investment in Latin America, 10 percent of U.S...
...The Carter administration (again, especially at first) gave priority to multilateral economic and technical assistance...
...The Caribbean territories are insular, not just geographically, but socially and culturally, as well...
...Estimates from the UN Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) suggest that 65 percent of Central America's population should be classified as "poor," and 42 percent as "critically poor...
...Grenada is not much larger in area than the District of Columbia or Martha's Vineyard, and its entire population could fit into the Rose Bowl...
...the 8 May 1987: 271 Reagan administration has from the start downplayed multilateral aid, preferring visible bilateral assistance...
...market contained in the originally proposed Caribbean Basin Initiative to all that refrain from military alliance with the Soviet Union — regardless of ideology, domestic social or political organization, and foreign policy...
...But while official discussions of U.S...
...they are like a mirage, receding inevitably as they are approached...
...investment in the countries of Central America, except Panama, slowed again in the 1970s and decreased in the early 1980s...
...economic stake in either of the giants Mexico or Brazil...
...foreign investment...
...The United States would revise its sugar program so that the U.S...
...The activist approach may thus produce a troublesome gap between rhetoric and expectations, on the one hand, and implementation and impact on the other...
...Central America has been wracked since the late 1970s by bitter internal struggles...
...The financial involvement of U.S...
...These four U.S...
...The second core interest of the United States in the Caribbean Basin today is to assure continuing access to the assets of Central America and the Caribbean, primarily the Panama Canal but also the sea lanes...
...Economic and military assistance from the United States to the countries of the Caribbean and Central America has multiplied more than tenfold since 1977, even while overall foreign aid figures have been declining...
...The rate of adult literacy rose from about 44 percent to 72 percent over these years...
...Although they are export-oriented and tied primarily to the U.S...
...The sea lanes that pass through the Caribbean remain important to the United States...
...the ramifications of immigration from these regions into the United States...
...the United States concentrated on its interests elsewhere...
...The much-publicized flight of more than 10 percent of Cuba's population to the United States since 1959 tends to overwhelm 8 May 1987: 269 an even more impressive statistic: the percentage of people from the rest of the Caribbean who have entered the United States during the same period is as high...
...The Reagan administration, on the contrary, made it plain from the start that it might use force as a means of reversing unacceptable developments in this region...
...credibility and prestige of unnecessary, divisive, and ineffectual U.S...
...An alternative approach to Central America and the Caribbean would involve a sustained U.S...
...interest: promoting economic development and long-term political stability in the Caribbean Basin countries so that they can become self-sufficient...
...policy toward the Caribbean Basin was one of intermittent intervention...
...The United States rose to international prominence precisely by exerting its influence in the circumCaribbean region, starting with Cuba and Puerto Rico...
...focus on the problems of the Caribbean Basin that should matter most to us, and that we can best affect...
...This goal is utterly unrealistic, however...
...A powerful, broadly based national opposition to the Somozas grew during the 1970s, culminating in the overthrow of General Anastasio Somoza in 1979...
...almost half of all foreign cargo tonnage and of the crude oil imported into the United States transit them...
...The second assumption of the developmental approach is that the United States will benefit if the countries of the Caribbean Basin are able to grow economically and build effective social and political institutions...
...military intervention in Central America...
...These leaders believe that an administration identified as having "lost" a country previously in the U.S...
...If countries in the Caribbean Basin choose to adopt socialist economics or even to embrace the Soviet Union, that can be tolerated by the United States as long as these countries do not offer military advantages to the Soviet Union or Cuba...
...interests in the Caribbean Basin have emerged in recent years, particularly with regard to the insular Caribbean...
...influence in the world would suffer if hostile states emerged in this country's border region has been widely accepted for many years The costs to U.S...
...response, and by negotiating verifiable and enforceable regional agreements to exclude such items...
...troops remained for years...
...United States officials do not want the United States to be perceived abroad as being unable to maintain dominance so close to home...
...Even Costa Rica, long tranquil, has begun to experience incidents of terrorism...
...What is fundamentally at issue, more than any tangible challenge, may be the psychological or psychopolitical difficulty of coping with loss of control in the border region...
...government more effectively to influence U.S...
...investment stake in Central America, as has been noted, is even smaller...
...The recommendations of the bipartisan Kissinger commission epitomized the activist approach...
...The Caribbean islands — some thirty-two political entities, sixteen of them independent countries, with a population totaling about 30 million people — are remarkably diverse, yet in some ways overwhelmingly alike...
...El Salvador has for several years also experienced an intense civil war, pitting Marxist-led guerrilla groups against the country's armed forces...
...They are larger in territory than most of the Caribbean islands: most are equivalent to small- or medium-sized states of the United States...
...It is reinforced by most U.S...
...The very concept of the Caribbean Basin has been resurrected in recent years from the writings of the nineteenth-century geopolitical, theorists, particularly Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir H. Halford Mac Kinder...
...interests...
...In fact, given the presence of missile-toting Soviet submarines off the Atlantic coast, such facilities or forces would probably not very markedly increase the Soviet military threat to the United States...
...bases and other military assets in the circum-Caribbean region are still useful, especially for training purposes and as listening posts...
...United States policy-makers have considered it important to retain U.S...
...But disengagement is blatantly unfeasible...
...interests in these regions, particularly the diplomatic and demographic concerns, have increased in significance but not yet in salience...
...The U.S...
...It is hard to imagine a credible scenario in which the Caribbean sea lanes would be disrupted...
...Guatemala has experienced prolonged bloodletting, more violent in some years than in others, but with little respite since the 1950s...
...Both show a high degree of concern with socioeconomic development as well as immediate security issues...
...The activist approach to the Caribbean Basin has obvious advantages over both the interventionist and the disengagement options...
...Most of the migrants enter the United States, legally and illegally...
...It may be that the underlying rationale of recent U.S...
...policies toward Central America and the Caribbean are not merely unrealistic...
...One event that could conceivably push Mexico into a strongly nationalist, anti-U.S...
...The Central American Common Market stimulated some foreign investors in the 1960s to set up industries that produced for the expanded regional market, but migration to the cities by landless peasants outstripped industrial employment...
...A primary aim of U.S...
...The primary U.S...
...it comprises only 5 percent of U.S...
...Urbanization increased at a similar pace, from 16 percent in 1950 to 43 percent urban in 1980...
...Both administrations have sought to perpetuate, or to restore, U.S...
...The United States and the Caribbean import from each other music, dance, crime, cuisine, literature, and political ideas and techniques...
...military personnel stationed in the region...
...But the activist approach involves important risks...
...President Reagan's key address to the OAS on the Caribbean Basin Initiative did not even mention migration, for instance...
...Although the United States should support democracy in the hemisphere (see the accompanying comments on page 268), U.S...
...Third, an increasingly interventionist U.S...
...military interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America — all were part of a sustained effort by the United States to secure absolute control of its border region...
...Local family-planning programs would also be supported...
...Some U.S...
...To some extent, recent U.S...
...Trinidad is smaller than Rhode Island...
...It is not vital for the United States that democracy soon emerge in Central America, where (except in Costa Rica) it has never heretofore taken root...
...The causal connections between development and migration are complex, and the United States cannot be confident that pressures for migration from the Caribbean Basin will diminish just as soon as economic development in the region picks up...
...Neglected by Washington for so many years, the Caribbean Basin countries are today receiving lavish attention from the United States...
...Twothirds of the Caribbean islands could fit together into the King Ranch in Texas, or inside the Everglades in Florida...
...national security interest" in the region, the exact nature of the interest is rarely specified...
...orbit, at least in the short run...
...investment...
...Most important, this approach would enable the United States to deal with its border region without distracting this country's attention from the major economic and political issues affecting its relations with Mexico and South America...
...Agriculture is weak and declining throughout most of the region...
...support for the contras is evident, but it is equally incontrovertible that thousands of Nicaraguans are sufficiently disaffected by the Sandinistas to fight a bitter guerrilla war...
...Fifty-two percent of Central America's children, according to ECLA, are malnourished...
...And the United States has sought to retain its overwhelming control, even though the domestic and international costs of perpetuating this stance are increasingly high in the face of nationalists and revolutionary movements...
...Caribbean Basin nations, regardless of their domestic or even their international politics, will send most of their exports to the United States and buy most of their imports from this country as long as they are permitted to do so...
...In several of these countries, U.S...
...foreign aid...
...El Salvador alone receives the fourth-highest amount of U.S...
...interests in the region — especially to assure access to the Panama Canal, constructed at the turn of the century...
...foreign policy, therefore, was to prevent extra-hemispheric powers from expanding their influence in the Caribbean Basin...
...Discussions of U.S...
...He is a professor of international studies at the University of Southern California where he began and directs the Inter-American Dialogue...
...resources is likely to fix the region more firmly in the U.S...
...interests in the Caribbean and Central America changed a great deal...
...Numerous languages and dialects are spoken within the region, including Dutch, English, French, and Spanish and their derivatives, plus the Creole mixtures with African and Indian tongues...
...Their social structures, economies, race relations, and interaction with the external world all bear the mark of centuries of colonial rule and plantation societies...
...The vision that the Kissinger report holds out as the correct aim of U.S...
...policy could soon change these grim realities...
...engagement...
...policy-makers have rediscovered the Caribbean and Central America arises instead from an almost reflexive U.S...
...policy toward the Caribbean Basin, it is essential to define the core objectives of the United States...
...control of Central America and the Caribbean...
...Washington might then be less of a focus for nationalist impulses...
...trade with Central America very significant...
...Leftist groups in El Salvador, like those in Nicaragua during the late 1970s, have received some Cuban encouragement and support (as well as some Nicaraguan assistance since 1979), but the main impetus has been local...
...Rather than increase its visibility in the Caribbean Basin, the United States would gradually lower its profile...
...Large Caribbean communities are visible in Florida, New York, New Jersey, and other regions of this country...
...In this sense, the goals posited by the Kissinger report and other recent official articulations of U.S...
...It urged the United States to play a pivotal role in promoting economic growth, social change, and political democracy, as well as to provide a "security shield" behind which progress could occur...
...This was, in fact, the policy of the Carter administration and is the policy today of the Reagan administration, although each administration adopted different emphases...
...And Central America, without any oil resources except those in Guatemala, was hard hit by the worldwide increase in energy costs...
...aim, but it is no longer a "vital interest...
...relations with the Caribbean Basin often suffer from a tendency to treat ideal visions of the region as realistic objectives of U.S...
...Physical infrastructure in Central America, including roads, port facilities, electrical energy, and mass communications, expanded remarkably...
...Five racial groups (black, white, oriental, native Indian, and East Indian) and their numerous subgroups and combinations mingle with varying degrees of integration and hostility, and with considerable consciousness of color and shade...
...All have limited domestic markets and small local savings...
...their hostility would be irritating...
...commitment, formalized in 1934, to eschew unilateral military intervention, ended this chapter in the diplomatic history of the United States...
...but where a convincing statement of exactly what is, in fact, at stake would have been appropriate, the report trails off into vague generalities...
...None of the insular Caribbean territories is ethnically or culturally homogeneous...
...Repeated presidential assertions of a U.S...
...moves can have an impact...
...An attempt would be made to reverse congressionally imposed restrictions that have reduced the impact of the CBI for precisely those products on which Caribbean Basin nations have achieved a comparative advantage...
...Small groups have monopolized political power (often with U.S...
...Nicaragua's broke out first, in part because of the excesses of the Somoza dynasty...
...The United States would target U.S...
...interests than is resisting such nationalist currents...
...The countries of this region cannot escape the shadow of the United States, whether it be benign or stifling...
...mode would be U.S...
...Under the developmental approach, the United States and other interested countries would provide assistance for infrastructural and human resource development in the Caribbean Basin...
...Assuring access to Caribbean Basin resources is no longer the issue most important to the United States...
...throughout the region, a direct U.S...
...Both administrations have lumped together the insular Caribbean and Central America...
...Equally important, in a world where perceptions can themselves create realities, the United States would appear weak if it could not keep provocative, direct challenges to its military security out of its immediate vicinity...
...involvement to match the stakes...
...stance...
...The improved viability of Caribbean Basin nations would decrease pressure for migration to the United States and would facilitate expanded economic exchange between the United States and those nations...
...Except for Costa Rica, Central America's nations are conflict-wracked, repressive, polarized, economically depressed, and unstable, and they harbor deep resentments of the United States...
...274: Commonweal...
...commerce passing through the canal has declined to less than one-sixth of this country's total ocean-bound trade...
...market is very important to the producers, but on which the United States surely does not depend...
...Although the United States has historically exerted considerable influence on the Central American isthmus, the region is less closely tied to the United States than are the Caribbean islands...
...assistance worldwide...
...access to the Panama Canal remains an important U.S...
...It is also important for the United States to reduce the risk of a regional conflagration in the Caribbean Basin, for such an outbreak would be far more likely than any domestic political change within the individual Caribbean nations to disrupt U.S...
...These include the dramatically increased regional debt of $14 billion and the burgeoning debt service costs, which reached $1.5 billion in 1982, equivalent to 33 percent of the region's export earnings...
...Focusing sustained attention and resources on the Caribbean Basin should enable the U.S...
...involvement in both the internal politics and the economics of the Caribbean Basin countries...
...From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, however, tangible U.S...
...control in a country like Nicaragua, conversely, have rarely been assessed...
...The economic stake of the United States in Central America today is modest...
...intervention in Caribbean Basin affairs has often been counterproductive...
...stance, even if it stops short of direct military action, contradicts the respect the United States must show Latin America if this country is to secure greater cooperation from the hemisphere's major nations...
...A third option, rejecting both intermittent intervention and sustained disengagement would require the active expansion of U.S...
...interests in the Caribbean Basin are fundamental, and other aims of U.S...
...disengagement from the Caribbean Basin, although it has never been attempted, has some abstract appeal, for frenetic U.S...
...On the contrary, part of this country's problem in Central America stems from the paradox that an increased U.S...
...It has historically been important for the United States to maintain secure access to these assets without making a major investment of resources, and this 270: Commonweal objective remains a priority...
...interest in the Caribbean Basin is to decrease the pressure for immigration into the United States, a pressure created by continued economic decline and violent turmoil in the region...
...interest in the insular Caribbean and Central America has declined over the last generation, although they are still emphasized in official documents and discussions...
...In the mid-1970s, however, the economic expansion in Central America slowed and in some countries reversed...
...The disruption that accompanies civil turmoil, moreover, has further clouded economic prospects in most of Central America...
...The process intensified in the 1950s and 1960s, when the oligarchies manipulated their control of the banking and judicial systems (and the local militaries) to cash in on booming world prices for cotton and beef...
...Except for Israel and Egypt, the countries of the Caribbean Basin receive the largest amount of U.S...
...national security concern in the Caribbean Basin have been similarly imprecise...
...shipping, it would be more likely to do so in the North Atlantic than in the Caribbean, where the relative disparity in easily projectable power is so favorable to the United States...
...No U.S...
...Most of the Central American nations experienced very rapid economic growth and social change during the 1960s and until the mid-1970s...
...support) and have used it to reinforce their dominance over the export-based economics...
...Unemployment and underemployment, consequently, are high throughout the Caribbean...
...trade with all of Latin America, about 30 percent of U.S...
...From the turn of this century to the late 1970s, U.S...
...The United States would aim primarily to stop any of the Central American conflicts from providing an occasion for the introduction of extra-hemispheric military threats, and to prevent the Central American conflicts from escalating, broadening, or contributing to a general East-West confrontation...
...One is diplomatic: the Caribbean nations wield many votes in the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and other bodies...
...8 billion in U.S...
...This aim would be accomplished not be controlling the domestic politics of the area, but by making it clear to the Soviet Union or other potential adversaries that the introduction of threatening forces and facilities into this region would trigger an immediate U.S...
...military involvement in Central America are inherent in the policy of direct confrontation with insurgent movements and unrelenting hostility toward Cuba and Nicaragua...
...This massive flow affects the economy, politics, and culture of the United States...
...And the urge to retain tight control is further strengthened by a calculus about international prestige...
...Caribbean religious sects are similarly diverse...
...The developmental approach to the Caribbean Basin would concentrate on long-term economic and social progress rather than on immediate political alignment...
...Most of the islands have only a few known resources, apart from the sun and the sea...
...In most Central American countries, the real per capita incomes of the poorest 20 percent of the population fell during the 1970s and has continued to fall in the 1980s...
...Great powers simply do not behave that way...
...It would do so without engaging the United States unnecessarily in these regions' internal struggles...
...Production of cash crops for export has been crowding out small scale agriculture since the late nineteenth century...
...To fashion a successful U.S...
...involvement...
...This flow is a response both to regional overpopulation and poverty and to the magnetic attraction of the U.S...
...The Carter administration, although willing to commit U.S...
...Moreover, although the United States would prefer that its neighbors share its perceptions of world problems, favor free enterprise and foreign investment, and disdain the Soviet Union and its policies, such regional conviviality is not crucial...
...In a period of massive U.S...
...To a large extent, the Caribbean islands have become demographically integrated with the United States...
...This developmental approach posits that the core U.S...
...Likewise, the Central American nations, independent since the nineteenth century, are more secure in their cultural and political identities...
...Prime Minister Seaga, for instance, called for a long-term program of aid to Central America and the Caribbean at the level of $3 billion per year, and the Kissinger commission called for $8 billion over the next five years...
...Their rate of emigration historically has been considerably lower than that of the insular Caribbean, though it is rising fast as a result of the bitter conflicts now underway...
...But absolute control of each Caribbean Basin country is no longer needed to protect these lanes...
...it is about the size of Virginia...
...electoral cycle...
...security and with the long-term viability of the Caribbean islands and Central America — would protect the core interests of the United States, immediately and in the longer term...
...troops each time, in Honduras and off the coasts of Nicaragua...
...economy...
...policy in Central America, for example, is one of securing and supporting peaceful, democratic, reformoriented, stable, prosperous, and congenial neighbors...
...Whatever policy an administration adopts, immigration from the Caribbean Basin would not stop, tourism would continue, and other business flows would prompt fuller U.S...
...It made and unmade governments, organized elections, trained military units, and fought against insurrectionary movements that were allegedly being aided from abroad...
...While a few plantation owners and ranchers enriched themselves, small farmers lost their lands and were forced to become rural wage-laborers...
...It is more limited than the U.S...
...In many cases, the United States became a predominant actor in local politics...
...policy in the Caribbean Basin are laced with assertions of a vital U.S...
...Caribbean nations are searching for identity and meaning, trying to draw on the shared experience of slavery, migration, and colonialism to derive an acceptable heritage...
...8 May 1987: 267 As income distribution in Central America has worsened, both political repression and insurgency have increased...
...But the removal of Somoza did not end Nicaragua's civil war, for opposition quickly developed to the victorious Sandinista movement...
...It would accept diverse sociopolitical and economic approaches, even Marxist ones, in the Caribbean Basin, as long s no direct security threats were introduced into the region...
...Their economies are more industrialized than those of the insular Caribbean and are more diversely integrated into world markets...
...economic assistance to the region during the ensuing five years, as well as the creation of a new Central American Development Organization, with the United States at its center...
...Nor can the United States escape involvement in the Caribbean, with which this country is so interconnected...
...political leaders' perceptions of domestic public opinion...
...Capital flight has also increased, to an estimated $3 billion since 1979...
...More importantly, people in the United States, both at the attentive public and at the mass level, would feel uncomfortable about Washington's abandonment of these countries to their fate...
...Real per capita income doubled over those years...
...policy, and thus to confuse unattainable preferences with core U.S...
...policy in Central America and the Caribbean in the late 1980s is less a test of national will and credibility than of our sense of perspective and priorities...
...foreign policy and opposed to Cuba, and that it will reward such governments and ignore or punish the others...
...First, it may arouse unrealistic expectations within the region...
...military involvement, and there is 8 May 1987: 265 good reason to believe that the United States government has prepared itself for eventual direct military intervention...
...Rather, the United States has an increasing interest in helping Caribbean and Central American nations use their own resources to achieve regional development...
...What then is really at stake in the region...
...Central America's economic woes have worsened dramatically since the late 1970s...
...interest in the Caribbean Basin, today as in the past, is to prevent hostile extra-hemispheric forces from using the area as a platform for directing damaging activities against the United States or its allies...
...Although otherwise different from each other, the countries of the Caribbean and Central America are similar in one very important respect...
...As economic difficulties have mounted, the striking socioeconomic inequities in most Central Arnerican nations (except for Costa Rica) have become more extreme and have aggravated internal tensions...
...Trying to maintain tight control of the internal affairs of Caribbean Basin nations may no longer be the most effective means of achieving this goal, however...
...Aid to shore up military regimes, moreover, often produces a need for more aid...
...And practically all the Caribbean nations are heavily dependent on exporting a few primary products and are vulnerable to international market fluctuations and to the vagaries of disease and weather...
...The report also suggested making trade concessions, increasing military assistance, offering ten thousand scholarships, establishing a Literacy Corps for Central America, and many other forms of U.S...
...policy can be understood best not in terms of'' national security " as it is usually discussed, but, rather, in terms of "national msecurity...
...Today's aircraft carriers and supertankers are too large to transit the canal, and the share of U.S...
...A Caribbean Basin nation (such as Cuba or Nicaragua) which sought to disrupt the sea lanes would find itself instantly vulnerable to the overwhelming power of the United States, only minutes away...
...From 1950 to 1978, the nations of Central America averaged an annual real rate of economic growth of 5.3 percent...
...military involvement would fuel insurgencies, provoke urban terrorism, and generally stimulate nationalist reactions...
...Two newer U.S...
...Clustered around the Caribbean Sea — America's Mediterranean — they comprise the' 'third border'' of the United States...
...The 1984 report of the national Bipartisan Commission on Central America (the Kissinger report) states, for instance, that preventing the Soviet Union from establishing military bases or facilities in the region is not the sole or even the primary security concern...
...foreign policy...
...Both propose that the United States take the lead in orchestrating regional security and development initiatives in order to combat revolutionary inroads...
...Some 20 percent of legal immigrants to the United States, and an equal or higher percentage of illegal entrants, come from the 266: Commonweal Caribbean...
...The third important U.S...
...Washington's strong interest in retaining absolute control of the Caribbean Basin is axiomatic, having been inculcated ever since the late nineteenth century through years of repetition in internal documents and public pronouncements...
...The activist approach has three other drawbacks...
...Beginning with the Carter administration, however, and with greater attention during the Reagan period, official Washington has rediscovered the Caribbean Basin...
...The volume of Central America's exports has decreased by some 20 percent since 1980, and intraregional trade has dropped almost 35 percent...
...aim to retain overwhelming predominance in the border region...
...Such a development was hardly surprising...
...It called for the United States to lead a process of regional transformation in order to preempt revolutionary movements...
...foreign investment, trade policy, and foreign assistance to foster labor-intensive development in the region...
...Land concentration continued to be high, wage differentials remained great, income distribution was badly skewed, and structural unemployment and underemployment remained a fundamental problem...
...Since World War II, close to five million Caribbeans have entered the United States...
...Second, the more fully the United States is engaged in the internal affairs of the Caribbean Basin nations, the greater is the likelihood that this country will have to absorb larger flows of refugees from the continuing civil wars...
...The proximity of the Caribbean Basin to the United States has been that region's defining characteristic ever since this country burst onto the international scene as a significant power in the nineteenth century...
...In some cases these increasingly large groups of immigrants are a source of local anxieties and tensions: in any case, the United States has an interest in regularizing and regulating migration from the Caribbean Basin...
...Per capita incomes in Costa Rica and Guatemala are down to the 1972 level, and incomes in Honduras are back to the 1970 level, while in Nicaragua and El Salvador — wracked by civil strife — they have fallen to the levels of the early 1960s...
...Although the per capita income in some Caribbean islands is high by third-world standards, poverty is widespread in much of the region, and overall, the regional economies are in deep trouble...
...In theory, a contrasting policy of sustained disengagement might feature a low degree of U.S...
...The consequences throughout South America of such an intervention would also be harmful...
...In contemporary terms, this means assuring that no bases, strategic weapons or facilities, or combat forces are introduced by the Soviet Union or its allies into the border region of the United States...
...Coming on the heels of the Reagan administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative, the recommendations of the Kissinger commission amounted to a brief for intensifying the U.S...
...The commission argued that Central America needs major social security assistance, in order to beat the challenge of Marxist-oriented insurgent movements...
...The United States would consult with Caribbean Basin nations on means of keeping migration to this country within legal bounds and preventing exploitation of illegal aliens...
...In January 1984, the Kissinger report proposed sending ABRAHAM F. LOWENTHAL was the founding director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations...
...But the underlying perception that U.S...
...government's focus on the border region to an extent unprecedented since the 1920s...
...It now 268: Commonweal amounts to less than $800 million: about 2.5 percent of U.S...
...Finally, the United States would work with all the countries of the Caribbean Basin to regulate migration...
...For the next generation, the Caribbean Basin countries no longer received priority in U.S...
...Even Cuba, by far the largest Caribbean island, is smaller in area than Ohio...
...They have an interest, therefore, in avoiding deeply hostile relations with the United States...
...Likewise, the relative importance of Central America and the Caribbean as sources for products and materials has diminished, as the worldwide involvements of the United States have produced multiple suppliers, and synthetics have replaced natural products...
...investment in the insular Caribbean accounts for less than 2.5 percent of the total book value of all direct U.S...
...The region's share of world tourism revenues fell in the late 1970s and has not recovered...
...The developmental approach assumes as well that geography, history, and economics will tie the countries of the Caribbean Basin to the United States as long as the United States does not choose to expel them from its orbit...
...Newer U.S...
...In sum, traditional U.S...
...This interest in stemming the flow of migration from the Caribbean Basin leads to a fourth and broader U.S...
...World demand for two major Caribbean exports — sugar and bauxite — is stagnant, and prices are low...
...control of the internal politics of Caribbean Basin countries, even though the object of this control is far less significant than it used to be...
...The United States would fully back Contadora's attempt to negotiate a regional political solution to protect the territorial integrity of existing states (including Nicaragua and El Salvador) against insurgent movements...
...This article is excerpted from his book Partners in Conflict: The United States and Latin America to be published later this month by The Johns Hopkins University Press...
...That is the heart of the matter in the Caribbean Basin...
...indeed, they are in a sense "a nation divided," for all but Panama once formed a regional unity...
...The easy phase of import substitution was exhausted in most of these countries by about 1970...
...Gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean Basin may win back Grenada or perhaps even Nicaragua, but such "successes" may well alienate Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, and other Latin American nations...
...The annexation of Puerto Rico, the Platt amendment imposed on Cuba, the promulgation of the (Theodore) "Roosevelt corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, the repeated U.S...
...Even if the Soviet Union were to undertake the risky enterprise of interfering with U.S...
...policy cannot create democracy in countries that lack the traditions and institutions required or that are in the midst of civil wars...
...The Caribbean democracies have consistently supported U.S...
...It would also, by regional agreement, keep threatening bases, forces, and facilities out of the Caribbean Basin...
...Foreign assistance would be provided mainly through multilateral rather than bilateral channels, in order to reduce politicization and to extend time horizons beyond the U.S...
...combat forces will not be used, the risks of an escalating U.S...
...efforts to overthrow the Sandinistas would end as long as Nicaragua refrains from attacking or subverting its neighbors or providing a military base to the Soviet Union or Cuba...
...It is clear, however, that worsening economic conditions will heighten pressures for emigration, and that increasing polarization and strife will increase migration, regardless of the results of a civil war...
...Many Caribbean countries are so dependent that an infusion of U.S...
...administrations have been caught in a credibility trap of their own making, as they have voluntarily raised the declared stakes for the United States in the Caribbean Basin and then escalated U.S...
...But while agriculture has declined, so has the push toward industrialization...
...Most of the islands are extremely overpopulated, and emigration from all of them is high...
...positions on a number of international issues...
...commitment to the economic and social development of the nations in the Caribbean Basin without a corresponding attempt to exercise tight control of their internal affairs...
...resources to counter undesired trends in the Caribbean and Central America, respected the sovereignty of the Caribbean and Central American nations...
...The crumbling of Central America's remaining oligarchies and the further polarization of Latin America's most bitterly divided countries contrast with the muted unease of most of the insular Caribbean...
...The main instrument of U.S...
...First, despite the Reagan administration's repeated assurances that U.S...
...The Central American nations are quite different from those of the insular Caribbean...
...The U.S...
...concern with both the socioeconomic and traditional security dimensions of the Caribbean Basin...
...market, they are less exclusively tied to the United States than are the Caribbean islands...
...Geography — strongly reinforced by history, politics, economics, and culture — makes the United States a major presence in the Caribbean Basin...
...The Carter stance toward leftist regimes in the Caribbean Basin area was (especially at first) to tolerate diversity, even in this border region...
...Jamaica is the size of Connecticut...
...investment in the insular Caribbean, and less than 0.3 percent of worldwide U.S...
...Preserving U.S...
...Central America's internal wars during the past decade have killed almost 150 thousand people, displaced at least 1.5 million more, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage...
...These writers emphasized the strategic and tactical importance for the United States, then emerging as a world power, of controlling its border region and of securing the naval passages through the Caribbean...
...presence may well heighten the very nationalist and revolutionary sentiments that make Washington uncomfortable...
...The size of the average plot owned by the highland Indians in Guatemala was cut in half from 1955 to 1978, and the number of landless peasants in El Salvador grew from 11 percent of the rural population in 1961 to 40 percent in the late 1970s...
...trade with the insular Caribbean, and less than 1 percent of the worldwide commerce of the United States...
...The international reputation of the United States, among both allies and rivals, would also be damaged by such a passive U.S...
...economic state in the insular Caribbean, and it is much smaller than the U.S...
...They are all Spanish-speaking, and they have many cultural, economic, and political links with one another...
...As the United States involves itself more deeply in the region, it creates increasing political and moral imperatives to assist the victims of violence...
...foreign investment and trade was then concentrated in the Caribbean and Central America...
...disengagement would prove impossible to sustain...
...Their diminished significance in the 1970s was made evident by the Pentagon's decision to downgrade or close several Caribbean facilities, and by the reduction in the number of U.S...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 9
