Not a Good Neighbor: A Critique of Kerry’s Latin America Policy

by Tom Barry

Americas Program, Interhemispheric Resource Center

(IRC) www.americaspolicy.org

Can we look forward to a "New Community of the
Americas," as candidate John Kerry has promised, in a
Kerry-Edwards administration?

Unlikely.

Will U.S.-Latin American relations improve under a
Democrat administration?

Very likely, given how badly relations have
deteriorated under the current Republican
administration.

When outlining his own policy agenda for Latin America
and the Caribbean, John Kerry charged that the Bush
administration’s foreign policy has been characterized
by "neglect, failure to adequately support democratic
institutions, and inept diplomacy." He criticized
President Bush for his "one note policy" on trade and
for failing to act as a good neighbor. In an address to
the National Association of Latino Elected and
Appointed Officials in late June 2004, Kerry said,
"Instead of being a good neighbor, the president has
ignored a wide range of ills—including political and
financial crises, runaway unemployment, and drug
trafficking."

In contrast, Kerry proposes a "new community of the
Americas" in which "neighbors will look after
neighbors" and will "work together toward shared goals"
and "mutual respect." With his call for social clauses
in trade agreements, a social investment fund, and
increased support for democratic governance, Kerry gave
his Community of the Americas policy agenda a
distinctly liberal cast.

Moreover, he called for a policy of good neighbors,
citing the administrations of Presidents Franklin D.
Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Kerry would do well to
remember that when Franklin Roosevelt first broached
the concept of a "good neighbor policy," initially in a
Foreign Affairs article in 1928 and then in his
inaugural address in 1932, he was proposing what
amounted to a sharp break with the traditional foreign
policy in the region. More than a rhetorical flourish,
Roosevelt counterposed his good neighbor policy to the
existing policy of military intervention and
occupation, and ushered in a decade of vastly improved
U.S.-Latin American relations. During his term,
Roosevelt ended military interventions, insisted that
the State Department end its patronizing and racist
characterizations of Latin America, and dramatically
increased hemispheric consultations.

Such a new departure from past practices is once again
urgently needed. But Kerry’s vision, for the most part,
is merely a collection of platitudes, and offers few
departures from the current policy frameworks that
characterize U.S. policy toward the region.
Nonetheless, Kerry’s "Community of the Americas" agenda
does offer some important openings for dialogue about
the principles and policies around which a hemispheric
community might be based.

Free Trade, Fair Trade

Kerry promises to renegotiate the Central America Free
Trade Agreement, which five Central American nations
and the U.S. government have already signed. Adopting
the populist pitch of his running mate John Edwards,
who campaigned on a protectionist platform, Kerry also
promises to ensure that the negotiations for the Free
Trade Area of the Americas and all future trade
negotiations will include "strong protections for labor
and the environment."

Kerry’s voting record puts him squarely in the camp of
the free traders, having supported all the major free
trade initiatives of recent years, including the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As a candidate,
however, Kerry has adopted a more nuanced position on
trade agreements. He says that increased trade with
"our allies and neighbors in Latin America" will "spark
growth and strengthen ties between our nations."
Appealing to U.S. workers concerned about the weak job
market and stagnant wages, Kerry says that "trade
agreements that do not help workers, here or there, are
not worth the paper they are written on." As part of
his Community of the Americas agenda, Kerry attempts to
garner support from both sides of the globalization
debate in the United States as he promises policies
"promoting free and fair trade."

In contrast to Kerry, Senator John Edwards (D-NC) has
opposed most trade deals in Congress on the grounds
that they take jobs away from U.S. workers. During the
primary campaign, Edwards boasted of his anti-free
trade voting record, noting that he came from a family
of mill workers and that free-market economic
integration was eroding the manufacturing base of his
home state, particularly the textile industry. Edwards,
for example, voted against trade preference agreements
that have given Caribbean and Andean nations increased
access to U.S. food and textile markets. Bringing
Edwards on to the ticket helps Kerry position himself
closer to fair trade activists, labor, and economic
sectors like agriculture and textiles that continue to
benefit from U.S. protectionism.

How would the trade policy of a Kerry administration
differ from that of the Bush administration or the
Clinton administration? The trade position of a Kerry
administration, like that of a second Bush
administration, will depend much on the state of the
U.S. economy, the trade deficit, the job market, and a
new political balance between Democrats and
Republicans.

It’s unlikely, though, that Kerry will take up
Clinton’s strong advocacy of free trade as a force for
global economic development, political liberalization,
and U.S. economic growth and modernization. Unlike
Clinton, Kerry is not a free trade ideologue and true
believer. But like Clinton, and in contrast to Bush,
Kerry is likely to be a stronger advocate for social
clauses in trade agreements, if for no other reason
than to placate labor and environmentalist
constituencies.

During the Clinton years, the U.S. economy was booming.
The free trade philosophy embraced by the conservative
Democratic Leadership Council, together with most of
the political elite, was widely regarded as the only
viable framework for global economic policy. Other
models for economic management—socialism, import-
substitution industrialization, and European social
democracy—had come up short, especially in contrast
with the new economic dynamism generated by the rapid
pace of global economic integration and global
communications systems.

But today, this free trade philosophy is being widely
questioned. No longer can free-market reforms be
credibly advocated as a development solution. One has
to look no further than Latin America to see the havoc
wrought by free trade policies adopted by national
elites and promoted by Washington in concert with the
institutions of global economic governance. So intense
is the backlash in an increasing number of countries—
notably Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina—that the U.S.
Southern Command has identified "radical populism" as
the new emerging security threat in Latin America.

Kerry’s agenda for U.S.-Latin American economic
relations offers no policy prescriptions to address the
underlying structural obstacles to broad development in
the region. Many of these deep-seated problems, such as
landlessness, narrow tax bases, and rural and
indigenous marginalization, demand domestic political
solutions and lie outside the purview of U.S. foreign
policy. But a bold vision for a "Community of the
Americas" would at the very least mention these and
other obstacles to development.

Instead, Kerry is content to repeat the mantra that
social clauses should be integrated into economic
integration agreements and to call for a new social
investment fund. In this respect, Kerry’s trade agenda
mirrors the Clinton administration’s dressing up NAFTA
with side agreements and institutions such as the North
American Development Bank and the North American
Environmental Commission.

Tellingly, Kerry is mum with respect to the main
negotiating demands of Latin American countries: end of
U.S. agricultural subsidies, increased access to
protected U.S. markets, and an end to the U.S.
government’s use of anti-dumping provisions to protect
uncompetitive industries from developing country
exports. Instead, Kerry says that free trade agreements
mainly benefit our trading partners. Nothing about
subsidies to agribusiness exporters that are flooding
Latin American markets with cheap products. Nothing
about how U.S. protects economic sectors, such as the
sugar and citrus industries, that are uncompetitive in
the world market. Taking up on Edwards’ campaign lines
when announcing his new vision for U.S.-Latin American
relations, Kerry said, "We’re gonna stop other
countries from violating those agreements and walking
away with the store." According to Kerry, "If you give
American workers a fair playing field, there’s no one
in the world that the American worker can’t compete
with."

Such nationalist and populist lines may play well in
Pretoria, Illinois or Raleigh, North Carolina—but not
in Latin America. They raise the prospect that the
reflexive protection of all U.S. economic sectors—no
matter how uncompetitive—will be a core principle of a
Kerry-Edwards trade policy.

Clearly, if global or hemispheric economic integration
is ever to enjoy broad popular support at home or
abroad, political leaders must address the issues of
capital flight, environmental degradation, and downward
pressure on wages and labor organizing. But there is
little reason to believe that social clauses inserted
into trade agreements are the cure-all, as many
advocates of fair trade assert.

As Kerry must surely know, any U.S. insistence that
trade agreements include enforceable social clauses
would be a nonstarter in trade negotiations with
developing nations, whether in Latin America or
elsewhere. In the absence of a massive U.S. commitment
to raise living standards in the region, the advocacy
of social clauses would be regarded as a protectionist
ploy by both political elites and popular sectors.

In addition to social clauses in trade agreements,
Kerry has trotted out the old language of a "social
investment and development fund." In the 1960s, the
Kennedy administration, intent on halting the advance
of leftist politics in Latin America, proposed an
Alliance for Progress. In essence a multidimensional
counterinsurgency campaign that included police and
military training, the Alliance for Progress had the
merit of honestly addressing structural causes for
popular unrest and provided funds for agrarian reform,
producer cooperatives, and rural integrated development
programs directed toward the transportation, technical
assistance, and marketing needs of Latin American
peasants.

Today, Latin American society is more polarized
economically than it was in the 1960s. Forty-five
percent of the population is mired in wretched poverty.
In the face of this impoverishment and the rising
political instability, Kerry offers a $500 million
social investment fund mostly geared to promote small
businesses and microenterprises. According to Kerry,
the flow of more resources to "vocational training and
micro-enterprises training and funding" will make
millions of poor people into "stakeholders for reform."

Although tying economic aid to business promotion may
win some converts in U.S. Congress, which might approve
such a program, it’s unlikely that a Kerry
administration could gain approval for increased aid to
Latin America and the Caribbean at a time of huge
budget shortfalls and widespread domestic concerns
about job creation at home. One possibility would be to
divert existing flows of U.S. military and policy aid
into development assistance. However, in his Community
of the Americas proposal, Kerry made no mention of the
fact that since the mid-1990s military and police aid
to the region has increased more than three-fold—from
$161 million in 1996 to $874 million in 2004.

The Politics of Democracy Promotion

The core component of Kerry’s Community of the Americas
agenda is its program for strengthening and promoting
democracy in Latin America. Most encouraging is Kerry’s
promise that the U.S. government will stay neutral in
elections. According to Kerry, "When the United States
picks favorite candidates, we weaken the integrity of
those political processes. As often as not, our support
can cause a backlash within a populace hypersensitive
to meddling by the United States, as it did in
Bolivia." He might have added that it is also true that
voters, cognizant of U.S. economic power, have proved
more hesitant to vote for candidates criticized by
Washington—not necessarily because they share the U.S.
government’s opinion but for fear of U.S. retaliation.
This was the case in recent elections in El Salvador
and Nicaragua.

The Democratic Party’s candidate should also be
credited for the following statement: "We should not
countenance mob rule nor military force or inaction to
oust an elected president." Kerry pointed to the cases
of Haiti and Venezuela, where the U.S. support of coup
leaders violated the principle of support for the
democratic process.

Kerry’s critique of the Bush administration’s role in
the internal politics in Haiti and Venezuela also gives
cause to hope for improved U.S.-Latin America relations
under a Kerry administration. However, Kerry’s
statement that Washington "should support legitimate
democratic dissent," pointing to Cuba and Venezuela as
countries where U.S. support is need, is worrisome,
given the U.S. history of "meddling" in the internal
politics of Latin America.

Underscoring that concern is Kerry’s uncritical view of
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a
neoconservative institution created during the Reagan
administration as a channel for U.S. political aid to
countries considered priorities in U.S. foreign and
military policy. NED itself has established itself as a
meddler in such countries as Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba,
Haiti, and Venezuela. Despite this sordid history,
Kerry proposes to triple NED’s funding. Such funding
would enable the U.S. government to "increase NED’s
work in training and organizing party leaders abroad."
At a time when Latin American societies are
increasingly turning to populist and left-of-center
leaders, such NED funding would surely privilege more
conservative political parties, as it has consistently
done in its two decades of political intervention
abroad.

As president, Kerry may find himself out of step with
the political dynamics of Latin America. In his
Community of the Americas proposal, Kerry focuses on
Cuba and Venezuela. While democracy and constitutional
rule are concerns in those countries, Kerry fails to
move beyond the increasingly stale rhetoric of U.S.
commitment to promote and strengthen democracy. How can
there be an American community when the United States
continues its illegal, counterproductive, and socially
destructive trade embargo against one nation? Critiques
of populist rule in Venezuela would have more weight if
they were accompanied by an acknowledgment that the
Chavez government has earned a good measure of popular
support because of its promises and programs to help
the landless, the destitute, and the marginalized.

If Kerry is serious about trying to make the United
States "a true beacon for democracy and progress in our
hemisphere," if he is serious about having the United
States be respected as a good neighbor, his
administration will need to move beyond platitudes
about democracy and good neighbors. Nowhere in Kerry’s
agenda does one detect more than a superficial
understanding of Latin American and Caribbean
realities.

Common Battles

Kerry has not said much about the pattern of increasing
U.S. military and police aid to Latin America and the
Caribbean despite the constantly revolving rationale
for such aid. For four decades, during the cold war,
the justification for building relations with the
region’s security forces was that such assistance
prevented the rise of communist, socialist, and leftist
political movements. At the cold war’s end, U.S. aid to
the region’s armed forces was dramatically curtailed.
However, the U.S. military, which had previously been
disinclined to involve itself in drug prevention,
latched on to the so-called drug war as the new
justification for its military and police aid and
training.

By the end of the 1990s, the supporters of such aid had
gradually changed the argument for increasing the level
of U.S. aid and involvement—from fighting the drug
war, to assisting the Andean countries (mainly
Colombia), to waging war against the narco-guerrillas.
Today, the arguments for most U.S. military aid are
framed in the context of the "global war on terrorism."
Having moved from a war against international drug
cartels to war against narco-guerrillas, the Bush
administration and the U.S. Southern Command now say
that they are engaged in a war against "narco-
terrorists."

Kerry apparently has no problem with these changing
rationales for U.S. military aid and presence in Latin
America. Instead, he assumes Latin American support for
U.S. national security strategies in the region. "In
the war on terror, in the war on poverty , in the war
on drugs, in our many common battles, we must look to
our neighbors as partners, not as second-class
citizens, so this can truly be the Century of the
Americas," pronounced Kerry.

Such rhetoric is as delusional and dangerous as the
visions of the Bush administration. Kerry is badly
mistaken if he truly believes that Latin American and
Caribbean populace sees the war on terrorism or the war
on drugs as common battles.

A New Good Neighbor Policy

Kerry got much of the language right in his plan for a
New Community of the Americas, but his policy
prescriptions fall short or miss the mark altogether.
For all the faults of his policy vision, a Kerry
administration would likely mean improved U.S.-Latin
American relations. But that won’t take much given how
badly relations have deteriorated under the current
administration.

However, if Kerry is serious about his ambition of
having the United States be viewed as a good neighbor
that treats the region with respect and helps with
problems in the neighborhood, he must commit his
administration to a more coherent set of principles.

Kerry is right to criticize the Bush administration for
its failure to respect democratic processes. However, a
Kerry administration will be vulnerable to the same
criticism if Kerry follows through with his promises to
triple NED’s democratization programs, which use
political aid to support internal actors favored by the
U.S. government. It should not be the role of the U.S.
government to "support legitimate democratic dissent."
Latin Americans can organize their own political
opposition and movements. For the United States to be a
good neighbor it should assure the peoples of Latin
America and the Caribbean that it will end its practice
of forcing their governments, either by itself or
through the international economic institutions, to
apply economic policies that disadvantage the poor and
privilege the elites.

Kerry is right to stress the importance of democracy.
Over the past two decades, the region has made major
strides in transitioning from dictatorships and
military regimes to democratic governance. But his
concerns are misplaced. The main challenges to
democratic consolidation are not Cuba and Venezuela, as
Kerry implies. Throughout the hemisphere, including the
United States, there is deepening disillusion with the
democratic process. Voter participation is slipping
precipitously, while at the same time more citizens are
taking to the streets to make their voices heard. If
the Kerry administration is to be a good neighbor, it
will need to listen to these voices of protest, as
should the region’s political leaders.

As the world’s most powerful nation and the major
influence in establishing the direction of global
economic policy and the policies of the IMF, World
Bank, and World Trade Organization, the U.S. government
has a special responsibility to promote economic
reforms that give land to the landless, provide
technical and marketing assistance to small farmers,
increase taxes on the wealthy, and lay the policy
foundation for living wages and full employment. No
amount of political aid and insistence on the value of
democratic governance will maintain political stability
in the hemisphere if social and economic conditions for
the majority continue to deteriorate.

Kerry has proposed a Council of Democracy to support
the democratic process in the region. No such council
is needed. A new good neighbor policy would instead
commit the United States to strengthening the
Organization of American States (OAS) as a multilateral
institution (that includes Cuba) that is not beholden
to Washington but only to the interests of the entire
hemispheric neighborhood. If political or military
intervention is needed to restore peace and political
stability, it should be the OAS that makes this
decision. By making such a commitment, a Kerry
administration would go a long way toward creating a
new community of the Americas.

Clearly, a new approach is needed to economic
integration that incorporates the lessons learned from
the successes and failures of NAFTA. Kerry is right to
criticize the "one-note" character of current trade and
investment negotiations. But a two-note approach to
economic integration—one that insists on having social
clauses accompany U.S. liberalization demands—would
likely be as bad or worse. Kerry may win some favor
among voters when he says that the United States needs
a "level playing field" to compete internationally.
However, that populist rhetoric will earn him no
respect or credibility in Latin America, where both
governments and societies see themselves on the sharp
downside of the hemispheric playing field in
international trade and investment.

If Kerry is truly interested in establishing a new
community of the Americas, he should look to the
practices of the European Union, which has provided
generous trade preferences and assistance that aim to
raise living standards and economic productivity in
less developed countries like Portugal. The challenge,
or course, is much greater in the Western Hemisphere,
where there are so many more poor neighbors. But if the
United States is to help construct a hemispheric
community rather than building a Fortress USA, it must
commit itself and the international economic
institutions to broad economic development strategies
that keep rural communities on the land and foster
dynamic industrial sectors. U.S. immigration policy
needs reform, but there can be no lasting solution to
immigration issues without policies that encourage
Latin Americans to see opportunity at home rather than
in el norte.

The New Community of the Americas should be a
demilitarized community. If the United States is to be
a good neighbor, it must take the message of
disarmament and demilitarization to Latin America and
the Caribbean. As history has repeatedly demonstrated,
U.S. military aid and intervention is too often
counterproductive. Dragging our neighbors to the south
into our own misguided wars on terrorism and drugs, as
Kerry seems to advocate, will prove just as detrimental
to the region as was the cold war history of propping
up national security states. Providing generous
military aid and training to the region’s armed forces
in the name of promoting democracy, winning the drug
war, fighting the global war on terrorism, or
protecting fragile states against "radical populism" is
not the kind of neighborly support the Latin American
and Caribbean people need.

A new good neighbor policy would be welcome in Latin
America, just as Roosevelt’s dramatically new approach
to hemispheric relations was in the 1930s. Kerry’s
agenda, while an improvement over the current bad
neighbor policy of the Bush administration, is shallow
and formulaic. His vision of a new community of the
Americas represents the caution, compromise, and
hyperbole of a politician—not of a bold leader or a
good neighbor. However, faced with the prospects of
another four years of bad neighbor and arch-
conservative George Bush, Latin America, along with the
rest of the world, will likely welcome a change in the
U.S. administration.

Tom Barry is policy director of the Interhemispheric
Resource Center (IRC, online at: www.irc-online.org).

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Published by the Americas Program at the
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www.irc-online.org).

Recommended citation: Tom Barry, "A Critique of Kerry’s
Latin America Policy," Americas Program (Silver City,
NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, July 26, 2004).

Web location:

http://www.americaspolicy.org/briefs/2004/0407kerry.html

Production Information: Author: Tom Barry Editors:
Laura Carlsen, IRC Layout: Tonya Cannariato, IRC