Clinton's Latin America Policy: A Look at Things to Come
Burbach, Roger
As the Clinton Administration settles into But this focus on individuals ignores the underlying office, the changeover from the Reagan-Bush continuity in foreign policy in the transition from...
...Even if a relatively tough omic policies NAFTA protocol on the environily benefit ment is drawn up, it is questionable how rigorously it will be enforced...
...But as under Bush, the terms of Aristide's return will severely circumscribe the Haitian leader's ability to implement the social and economic reforms he was initially elected to carry out...
...Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, which formally ended the early twentieth-century policy of gun-boat diplomacy, was actually begun by Henry Stimson, the Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover...
...The Soviets wanted to curtail their assistance to the Nicaraguan Revolution because of their own internal political and economic problems, while Bush and many of the officials around him came to view the Contra war as a liability, especially in view of the political damage they had suffered from the IranContra affair...
...and international leaders who either serve in high-level government positions, or who, as powerful outsiders, try to influence their government's policies in order to stabilize the capitalist world...
...As such, it reflects the lessening importance of the liberal-versus-conservative framework on many foreignpolicy issues...
...In Somoza Falling, he portrays foreign policy failures and crises as often due to a lack of vision and to policy "mistakes" made by individuals in Washington or U.S...
...The Feinberg, who has written extensively over the years Clinton team became concerned that the flood of on the need to avoid seeing Latin America and the refugees would become overwhelming...
...But there is The massi' nothing new or innovative in this section, and its proposals are milder poverty a than those proclaimed by the opment ar Alliance for Progress three decades ago...
...At the start of the Carter Administration, the Linowitz report on Latin America called for a human-rights policy toward the region, and for the renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaties...
...6 The perception in Washington is that the NSC, led by Anthony Lake, will play a pivotal role in formulating the broad goals of U.S...
...investments in Latin America and the Caribbean would foster economic progress...
...linton simply has no new policy agenda for Latin America or the Caribbean...
...The appointment of environmentalist Timothy Wirth, the former Senator from Colorado, to head the new office of Under Secretary for Global Issues in the State Department means that more attention will be paid to environmental concerns in development programs...
...Jordan, a key member of Clinton's transition team, backed Baeza because he was black and an official of the NAACP...
...In 1958, Eisenhower's brother Milton was sent on a factfinding trip to Latin America and returned advocating that more attention be paid to the region, and that more economic aid be given to stave off the growing political ferment he encountered...
...9. Prominent dissenters from the free-trade section include Douglas Fraser, Diane Feinstein, Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva, and Jose Francisco Pena Gomez...
...4 At the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the international banks, Latin American governments enacted severe austerity programs to pay off their debts...
...Then, as now, U.S...
...Ex-presidents of Argentina, Uruguay, Panama and Ecuador number among its members, as do high-ranking diplomats and politicians from the United States...
...Foreign Policy (New York: W.W...
...6. Carla Anne Robbins, "Washington Insight," WallStreet Journal, January 25, 1993...
...Below: Members of the Inter-American Dialogue, an influential moderate-to-liberal thinktank...
...4 The main limitations that both Lake and Feinberg bring to their offices is that, after a couple of decades in and near the seats of power, they have become part of the Washington establishment and operate within its ideological parameters...
...The document's first section is a ringing endorsement of the NAFTA accord, and calls for similar trade agreements with other Latin American countries, starting with Chile...
...Clinton's Bush and Secretary of State James Baker saw early on the need for a into Lati policy that went beyond the insis- policy in thi tence of the far right wing of the Republican Party on all-out war reveals jus against leftist and guerrilla move- he is impel ments...
...concerns in the areas of human here...
...aid during the last year of Bush's presidency because the government of Violeta Chamorro refused to remove Sandinistas from key military posts...
...regime has also not fundamentally changed...
...Bush ardently pursued the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and launched the export-promoting Enterprise for the Americas, thereby moving from an obsession with covert wars to economics and trade as the fundamental concern of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean...
...Peter Bell, Chair...
...that it would Caribbean exclusively through the prism of super- set off a backlash within the United States that would power rivalry...
...policy, while the State Department under Warren Christopher will implement those policies...
...If military regimes do come to power, the document emphasizes negotiations, a la Haiti, in an effort to pressure the military strongmen to return the government to civilian democratic rulers...
...The donations to Clinton may, however, carry relatively little weight since Clinton did not carry Florida, and since Mis Canosa also contributed to the Republican Party...
...ransformed world conditions also explain why the Bush Administration launched its Enterprise for the Americas and negotiated NAFTA...
...Presidents under Kennedy's in countries with political traditions as Alliance for diverse as Mexico, Progress...
...There is no discussion of popular democracy, nor of creating new democratic institutions that would truly incorporate the region's excluded and impoverished masses...
...This is evidenced in the special protocols on the environment and labor that the Clinton Administration intends to draft to complement NAFTA...
...In 1991 and 1992, annual economic growth for the region was 3.2...
...When Nixon and Kissinger embarked on their efforts to bring down the Allende In fact, Clinton's declaration that he will focus on the U.S...
...nals and the In recent years, the Mexican lites of the government, in response to U.S...
...In the case of Nicaragua, Jesse Helms and the Republican Right were able to block the flow of U.S...
...The Inter-American Development Bank was set up and President Eisenhower himself undertook a trip to Latin America First foray n American e case of Haiti st how much led to sustain cies of his or...
...asic changes in Latin America policy have previously been undertaken by Republican administrations and then consolidated by Democratic presidents...
...nother difference between the Clinton and Bush presidencies is the diminished influence and clout of the far Right...
...Chamorro's decision in January to bring several Sandinistas into cabinet positions and to break decisively with the more right-wing parties was also facilitated by the far Right's lack of a patron in Washington...
...Clinton Americas...
...As the Clinton Administration settles into But this focus on individuals ignores the underlying office, the changeover from the Reagan-Bush continuity in foreign policy in the transition from the years seems to mark a turning point in U.S...
...Whatever the next chapter in the long history of conflict and struggle in the Americas is, these popular movements from below will have a great deal of force...
...3. Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean, 1989 (Santiago, Chile: ECLAC,1991), pp...
...In the presidential campaign, the drug war was practically a non-issue...
...The differ- policy changes occurred ences are striking when during Bush's term in one contrasts Alexander office, and from all indiHaig, the aggressive cold cations, the Clinton warrior who served as Administration will do Reagan's first Secretary little more than tinker of State, with Clinton's with these basic changes...
...2. Elizabeth Farnsworth, Richard Feinberg and Eric Leenson, "Facing the Blockade," NACLA's Latin America & Empire Report, Vol...
...The same dynamic of pressure from below will be needed during Clinton's tenure to counteract attempts by multinational corporations to ignore environmental concerns as they intensify their southward expansion with the free-trade accords...
...But Lake has also adopted a more centrist policy orientation in recent years, and it is not anticipated that he or Feinberg will be pushing bold new initiatives in their positions at the NSC...
...Until there is a basic analysis and critique of how the U.S...
...In Latin America policy there is an implicit likely to be conflict between the Administration's concern with the envie the United ronment, and its desire to expand tinues to U.S...
...economic relations with the Third World are inevitably exploitative...
...As the U.N.'s Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) noted, this is a recovery with "potential volatility": the capital that is coming in today could quickly abandon the region...
...During his first month in office, Clinton slashed the size of the "Drug Czar's" office in the White House...
...1 undermine the new Administration's initiatives, particularly in domestic policy...
...8 It is similar in importance to reports drafted for previous administrations at their inception...
...Bush had no interest in discussing it because of the perceived failure of his drug policies, while Clinton largely ignored it because he viewed international drug trafficking as a diversion from his efforts to focus attention on domestic economic and social problems...
...3 He no longer identifies with socialist governments or policies, but he does argue for policies that would try to accommodate the interests of Third World governments...
...Labor and environmental concerns are simply much stronger in the Democratic Party, and Clinton cannot ignore the groups behind these concerns...
...he importance of Latin America in Clinton's grand economic strategy is reinforced by the fact that a number of his Administration's key personnel come from the Inter-American Dialogue, a moderate-to-liberal think tank founded in the early 1980s that focuses on hemispheric issues...
...The Independent Group on the Future of U.S...
...This reflects the reality that the Democratic Party contains some interests and political forces that differ from those of the Republican Party...
...Only a negotiated settlement could end the conflict and bring the military under control...
...Pedro Aspe Armella, Mexico's Secretary of Finance...
...7. Dialogue members include Raul Alfonsin, Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea, Julio Maria Sanguinetti, Nicolas Ardito Barletta, Jimmy Carter, Michael Barnes, Javier Perez de Cue llar, Viron Vaky and Robert McNamara, among others...
...Lake and Fein erg: The appointments of Anthony Lake as National Security Council Adviser and Richard Feinberg as the Council's officer on Latin American affairs are among the best ever made to these posts...
...The document notes that additional steps to improve relations could be taken if they are met with reciprocal measures by Cuba...
...interventions in Latin America...
...It will be interesting to see if the Administration goes so far as to follow the recommendations of a White Paper called "Reinventing Foreign Aid...
...Richard Feinberg, the National Security Council's officer on Latin American affairs...
...The final section of Convergence and Community does call for dealing with "the problems of poverty and inequality" in the hemisphere...
...government increases "the number and influence of career experts in important positions...
...The second basic change in policy cumscribe occurred when the Bush Administration began erecting a new economic framework for exploiting impleme Latin America's human and material resources...
...During the cam- Latin American policy, paign, Clinton staked out there is a clear distinction between Reagan's a clear difference with Bush when he called for a appointees to the Latin American position on the more lenient immigration policy for the persecuted National Security Council, Roger Fontaine and refugees from Haiti...
...The recent report issued by the Dialogue, Convergence and Community: The Americas in 1993, can be seen as a reflection of the issues that are foremost in the minds of many members of the Clinton Administration...
...tourism in the island...
...See the Comisi6n Economica para America Latina y el Caribe, Panorama Economico de America Latina (Santiago, Chile: CEPALC, 1993...
...Upon hearing of Baeza's nomination, CANF launched an offensive against him because he had attended a trade conference in Cuba in 1992...
...economy "like a laser" has its Latin American counterpart in his efforts to make economics and trade the centerpiece of his policy towards the region...
...But even before he took office, he Constantine Menges, both rabid anti-Communists, reneged on this pledge and declared that the Bush and Clinton's appointment to that post, Richard policies on immigration would remain in place...
...The Right in the United States and Latin America has lost some of its clout, and this change opens up political and social space for the growth of popular forces...
...above...
...But such laws do give grass-roots organizations in Mexico and the United States more leeway to pressure for change...
...Watson served as ambassador to Peru and has been a deputy ambassador at the United Nations...
...9 20NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NAC'A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20REPORT ON US POLICY The second section calls for a "collective defense of democracy," but deviates little from the policies of Bush and Baker...
...He called for tougher measures against Castro and he received millions of dollars in campaign funds from Jorge Mis Canosa, the head of the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation (CANF...
...They of course are not responsible for the opinions expressed here...
...Lake in the introduction to After the Wars, published in 1990, surveys the wreckage of the Third World wars that the United States helped create, and recommends an "International Fund for Reconstruction" that would "foster economic justice" and assist the poor...
...In the end, Clinton turned to a senior State Department career officer, Alexander Watson, to fill the post...
...And in the interests of "reconciliation," few if any of the backers and members of the military regime are likely to be prosecuted for the barbarities they inflicted on the Haitian people...
...regime, Feinberg collaborated with Elizabeth Farnsworth and Eric Leenson to write the special NACLA Report, "Facing the Blockade," which exposed the full extent of U.S...
...1. See Richard E. Feinberg, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to U.5 Foreign Policy (New York: Norton, 1983...
...There is no talk of dealing with the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor in the region...
...Indeed, if anything, it has proclaimed its readiness to further the economic policies of the Bush Administration with only minor changes and adjustments...
...3. Richard E. Feinberg, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to U.S...
...Right-wing politicians in VOL XXVI, No 5 MAY 1993 21REPORT ON US POLICY Central America in particular denounced the incoming administration immediately, with one Nicaraguan political leader declaring that "the world is headed for disaster with these homosexuals and Communist-liberals in power under Clinton...
...Due to growing competition with Japan and the European Community, and the general weakening of U.S...
...drug policy towards Latin America will also shift under the Clinton Administration...
...The Dialogue initially served as a source of perspectives at variance with the policies of the Reagan Administration...
...5 Even the Wall Street Journal has accepted him into the fold, anointing him as a "moderate...
...The general policy towards the Haitian military Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for the Study of the regime has also not fundamentally changed...
...And more to the point, Democratic Representative Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, the head of the InterAmerican Affairs Sub-Committee, and Senator Bob Graham of Florida led the charge of a group of influential anti-Castro Congressional Democrats opposed to Baeza's nomination...
...Convergence and Community is less audacious than the earlier reports, and more of a consensus document...
...As under e terms of eturn will cirthe Haitian ability to nt reforms...
...Clinton's Latin America Policy: A Look at Things to Come Special thanks to Bill LeoGrande, Peter Kornbluh and John Ruthrauff for their conversations and help in writing this article...
...18NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18REPORT ON US POLICY the Best and the Brightest...
...4. For a more n-depth discussion of the economic foundations of U S.-Latin Amer can relations, see Roger Burbach, "Ruptured Frontiers: The Transformation of the U.S.-Lat n Amer can System," in Ralph Miliband and Leo Pan tch, eds The Socialist Register, 1992 (London: The Merlin Press,1992...
...Later, in the 1960s, much was made of John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and the emphasis he placed on Latin American development...
...Lake, like Feinberg, comes from the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party...
...Clinton, who has often invited comparisons between himself and John F. Kennedy, is not calling for anything analogous to the reformist policies pursued under Kennedy's Alliance for Progress...
...And because of his independent positions on the Council, Lake, along with Morton Halperin, who now works under Les Aspin at the Defense Department, had his phone tapped by Kissinger...
...Although Feinberg's early political-economic views tended to reflect a liberal-left perspective, his writings in more recent years have become more establishmentarian and often mirror the concerns of institutions like the IMF and the World Bank...
...5. See Richard E. Feinberg, Development and External Debt in Latin America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,1988...
...In the area of Clinton meets in Washington with Aristide, during negotia- sor...
...Clinton's hands-on role on all This approach in essence marks a return to the era of "Dollar Diplomacy" when it was believed that what was good for the United States economically was good for Latin America...
...policymakers argued that U.S...
...The Inter-American Dialogue, in Convergence and Community, did break new ground in calling for a softening of the blockade against Cuba...
...He endorsed the renunciation of the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine-that the United States had the right to police "chronic wrongdoing" in its own hemisphere-which had been used to justify repeated U.S...
...Then, during the first year of the Reagan Administration, hardline conservatives drafted the Santa Fe report which served as the ideological and political blueprint for the offensive launched against the revolutionary movements in Central America and the Caribbean...
...Eisenhower's trip resulted in the Declaration of Bogoti, which called for basic social changes, now with the more immediate goal of containing the spread of the Cuban Revolution which had triumphed in 1959.2 The Latin America policy changes of the Bush-Clinton period are driven by new international realities...
...A large part of the growth has been due to the influx of short-term and speculative capital, much of which has gone into the major Latin American stock exchanges...
...U 1. Richard E. Feinberg, The Triumph of Allende: Chile's Legal Revolution (New York: Mentor Books, 1972...
...New figures are in charge of conditions have changed dramatically in recent years, Washington's diplomacy-figures who, over the past and Bush as well as Reagan was driven to begin alter12 years, have staked out ing many of his policies major ideological and from the late 1980s political disagreements onwards...
...But this is a fragile recovery, just barely ahead of the population increase, and it may be raising far greater hopes than it is able to fulfill...
...He was a NACLA staff member from 1973 to 1980...
...Stimson realized that U.S...
...The Central American wars of the 1980s may be winding down, but political and social explosions cannot be ruled out in any one of a number of countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Brazil and Peru...
...During the past several years there has been an upturn in the economies of many Latin American countries after the disastrous years of the 1980s...
...Alejandro Foxley, Chile's Minister of Finance...
...investors buy up many of the large public corporations that were being privatized in Latin America...
...2. See Milton S. Eisenhower, The Wine is Bitter...
...It would end many old-style aid programs, like direct securityrelated subsidies to foreign governments, and focus on assisting efforts to implement grass-roots development and sustainable agricultural programs...
...The new political alignment and the decline of the far Right were demonstrated immediately after Clinton's electoral victory when Bush released the funds for Nicaragua rather than suffer threatened congressional cuts in some of his pet projects...
...human- cy in the case of Haiti rights policy and an able reveals just how much he practitioner of negotia- is impelled to sustain the tion and cautious diplo- policies of his predecesmacy...
...He joined the Peace Corps and went to Chile in 1969, where he wrote The Triumph of Al/ende: Chile's Legal Revolution, which is unabashedly "sympathetic to the aspirations of Allende's supporters...
...It argues for establishing better mail and telephone communications, and for allowing U.S...
...This overlap in Haitian policy between the two administrations was reinforced by Clinton's retention for an interim period of Bernard Aronson, Bush's appointee as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs...
...The report envisions no fundamental change in the traditional military or political institutions that lead to military takeovers in the first place...
...Vernon VOL XXVI, No 5 MAY 1993 19REPORT ON US POLICY Left: A peasant farm near Cuzco, Peru...
...Under Bush, the Drug Czar was supposed to orchestrate the international campaign against drugs...
...government is involved...
...political and economic system is itself part and parcel of the growing disorder that our world faces, we cannot expect policies to come out of Washington that will fundamentally improve the conditions of the world we live in...
...In the case of Nicaragua, diplomatic reports and documents make it clear that Gorbachev collaborated with Bush to push for an end to the war...
...First, the Bush Administration set a course of searching for negotiated solutions to end the civil wars and guerrilla conflicts, particularly in Central America...
...Drafted and endorsed by a wide range of individuals from Congress, Washington think tanks, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the paper calls for the abolition of the Agency for International Development and its replacement by the Sustainable Development Cooperation Agency...
...During the transition period, the Clinton team put out the word that it was searching for people with strong backgrounds in economics and trade issues to fill the important Latin American policy posts...
...1 0 One of the key areas of tension and debate that will probably come to a head early in Clinton's first term will be over problems how strong an approach to take on environmental issues...
...While Lake and Feinberg are warm and personable individuals not given to arrogance, they both embody the old liberal hope that Washington, with the "best and the brightest" in power, can make the world a better place...
...39,192...
...One can also expect that under Clinton and Gore, the Agency for International Development (AID) will devote more attention to "appropriate technology" and "sustainable agriculture...
...intervention in Central America and the Caribbean had become counterproductive...
...Bush Administration to the Clinton presidency...
...1 (January 1973...
...Feinberg's major work, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to U.S...
...7 Key Clinton Administration officials drawn from the Dialogue include Feinberg, who became the Dialogue's President in 1992, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Peter Tarnoff, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros, and Secretary of Transportation Federico Pefia...
...And then as now most of the elites in the countries to the south were willing collaborators...
...The Clinton Administration has issued no basic critique of this period of economic devastation in Latin America...
...The report calls for Vice-President Albert Gore to head up a Development Coordination Group that would oversee all aid programs and organizations in which the U.S...
...Feinberg now focuses on economics and free-trade agreements as the way to deal with Latin America...
...They have the potential to upset the new framework for Latin American relations that the Bush Administration put in place, and that the people around Clinton seem bent on following...
...Its major proposals differ little from the policies of the Bush Administration...
...markets and investments in the region...
...He resigned from his first position on the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger when Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1971...
...But in recent years, the Dialogue, which contains many members from Latin America and Canada as well as the United States, has become a high-level forum at which political, academic, business and even military elites from the Western Hemisphere meet periodically to exchange ideas and discuss policies...
...Clinton He is currently working on a new book, The New World may be pressuring somewhat more intensively than Disorder Bush for the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16REPORT ON US POLICY Haitian president...
...3 With the continent economically and politically prostrate, a new group of market-oriented politicians and finance Clinton, who has often invited comparisons between himself and John F. Kennedy, is not ministers, many of calling for whom were groomed at Harvard, MIT and anything analogous the University of to the reformist Chicago, came to power in Latin policies pursued America...
...Both have largely non-dogmatic positions, both opposed hardline interventionist policies when they worked in the State Department in the 1970s, and both used their years out of power to criticize Reagan policies and to rethink their own positions...
...During the cam- tions to restore the Haitian president to office...
...policy issues will be reinforced by this approach, since the NSC is based in the White House...
...World foreign policy...
...And in El Salvador, in the wake of the FMLN's November 1989 offensive, and the killing of six Jesuit priests by military officers, the Bush Administration realized that a military victory was beyond its grasp...
...The extreme Right in Latin America also felt orphaned by Bush's defeat...
...Carter implemented both...
...appointee, Warren Chris- Clinton's first foray topher, an early advocate into Latin American poliof a strong U.S...
...From left: unidentified reporter...
...The United States and Latin America (New York: Doubleday and Co.,1963...
...Anthony Lake has an especially striking career among foreign-policy officials in that he has consistently taken stands on principle rather than simply trying to advance his own career or ambitions...
...the multinat hile the core of Clinton's Latin American policy will remain similar to Bush's, there will of course be ve id e il n n ar io economic e hemisr changes in emphasis and approach...
...There he formed part of the more liberal wing led by Secretary of State Cyrus Vane and Under Secretary of State Warren Christopher, which pushed for pro-human rights policies and sought to move the United States away from its historic insistence on seeing all Third World liberation movements as orchestrated from Moscow They were often at loggerheads with then-National Security Council Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who tried to outdo Kissinger with his Machiavellian approach to foreign policy and his like-minded fixation on the Soviet Union, Richard Feinberg is in large part a product of the generation of the 1960s...
...The controversy over Baeza reveals that Clinton is unlikely to do anything to overturn the decades-old policy of trying to isolate Cuba...
...of all the policy issues Clinton is faced with in Latin America, Cuba is the one that has the greatest potential for tearing apart his Administration...
...Development Cooperation, Reinventing Foreign Aid: White Paper on U.S Development Cooperation in a New Democratic Era (Washington, D.C.: Independently published, December, 1992...
...This is, in part, why the Administration selected Richard Feinberg to fill the Latin American post at the National Security Council (NSC) [See "Anthony Lake and Richard Feinberg: The Best and the Brightest...
...embassies abroad.' One of his major conclusions is that future revolutionary crises can be avoided if the U.S...
...But the Clinton Administration's refusal to address the fundamental structural problems that the hemisphere faces does not mean that these problems will go away...
...In the case of with their foreign-policy Latin America, important predecessors...
...Latin America's schools, medical facilities and social infrastructure were gutted while malnutrition and hunger increased...
...Indeed one of the first planks ignored, wh of this section reads like a page out States co of neoliberal economics in its assertion that the bottom line for cultivate eco dealing with poverty is fiscal that primi restraint and keeping government spending "in line...
...Lake resurfaced in the Carter Administration when he became head of the Policy Planning office at the State Department...
...foreign policy, attempting to draw lessons from their own experiences and from the bellicose policies of the Reagan years...
...trade, investments and markets...
...Argentina and Brazil began following the Reagan-Bush economic recipes that called for free trade and the privatization of the public sectors of their economies...
...The attempt to nominate Mario Baeza revealed just how divisive the Cuba issue is for his presidency...
...This was highlighted by Baker's selection of Aronson, a the poli Democrat, to fill the key Latin predecess American post, and to preside over the policy of negotiating an end to Bush, th the civil wars in El Salvador and Aristide's r Nicaragua...
...This is an unstable period, one that is increasingly contradictory...
...But it has generally gone unrecognized that this policy finds its seeds in the second term of Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...8. Inter-American Dialogue, Convergence and Community: The Americas in 1993 (Washington, DC.: The Aspen Institute, 1992...
...But the Cuban issue is one that arouses deep passions within the Democratic Party and the United States as a whole, making it an issue that Clinton is unlikely to broach...
...economic power, the Bush Administration began to look to the Western Hemisphere as the region where it VOL XXVI, No 5 MAY 199317 VOL XXVI, No 5 MAY 1993 17REPORT ON US POLICY could develop a stronger economic base by expanding U.S...
...rights and the environment, has enacted a series of protective decrees, though they are honored more in the breach than in practice...
...Baeza's nomination for the post was also looked upon favorably by the new Administration because he was a lawyer at the powerful Debevoise & Plimpton law firm in Manhattan, where he specialized in helping U.S...
...Norton & Co., 1983...
...5. Anthony Lake, Somoza Falling (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989...
...Often referred to as the "lost decade," the 1980s saw capital and resources flow outward from Latin America, resulting in negative economicgrowth rates...
...The Dialogue plays a role similar to that played by the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s by bringing together key U.S...
...More attention will be devoted to the internal causes of drug abuse and less will be focused on the international drug cartels...
...The number of people living in poverty increased 39%-seventy-one million people-over the course of the 1980s...
...During the 1980s both Lake and Feinberg came out with major studies that scrutinized U.S...
...Foreign Policy, calls for a new "neo-realist" foreign policy...
...The new Administration's focus on trade and economic affairs and its view of the State Department as an implementor of policy explains why it initially picked New York-Cuban Mario Baeza to be Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs...
...The Administration was able to launch this economic offensive in part because Latin America's debt crisis had decimated the region's economies, making the governments amenable to any new economic proposals from Washington which held forth the hope of a renewed flow of private and public capital...
...Lake likewise fails to realize that U.S...
...in 1960...
...At the end of the Carter Administration, he went to work at the Overseas Development Council, a liberal think tank in Washington, where he wrote extensively on Latin American and Third World issues until 1992, when he became President of the Inter-American Dialogue...
...VII, No...
...But Clinton himself undermined his Cuba policy options when he sought the support of the Cuban exile community in Florida during the presidential campaign...
...Bush made two basic changes in Latin America policy that serve as a foundation for Clinton's policies...
...Unlike Bush, Clinton has also given no signs of wanting to use the marines in Latin America against drug traffickers...
...These economic policies are inherently biased in favor of multinational corporations, the same forces that Feinberg once saw as the antagonists of the Allende government...
...U.S...
...The massive problems of poverty and underdevelopment are likely to be ignored, while the United States continues to cultivate free trade and economic policies that primarily benefit the multinationals and the economic elites of the hemisphere...
...economic and political aggression against Chile.2 In 1977, Feinberg joined Anthony Lake at the Policy Planning office in the State Department where he was in charge of Latin America affairs...
...Because of his position, Watson has taken no public stand on Cuba policy, and thus his nomination offered a way for Clinton to avoid additional controversy...
...The first and most important is the end of the Cold War, combined with the failure of the United States to defeat Central America's revolutionary movements on the battlefield in the 1980s...
...4. Anthony Lake and Contributors, After the Wars (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Publishers, 1990...
Vol. 26 • May 1993 • No. 5
