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U.S. Relations with Latin America during the Clinton Years: Opportunities Lost or Opportunities Squandered?

2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-114

1527-1900

Philip Brenner,

International Relations in Latin America

President Bill Clinton made his first official visit to Latin America in December 2004, when he attended the Summit of the Americas. Notably, the meeting was held in Miami, Florida, which the president seemed to believe was the capital of Latin America. As David Scott Palmer recounts in this balanced, useful, and readable review of the Clinton administration’s policy toward Latin America, Clinton did not actually set foot in a Latin American country until his second term, when he made a brief 1997 trip to Mexico, Costa Rica, and Barbados.For Palmer, the president’s evident lack of interest in the region, and more generally in foreign policy, during his first term explains much about why his administration “failed to seize the moment to build and sustain an effective Latin American policy around the opportunities available in the early 1990s” (p. xi). Yet Palmer is a careful scholar and his analysis rests on the examination of several factors. Thus he shows how bureaucratic politics, interest groups such as the Cuban American National Foundation, partisan political maneuvers in Congress, and insufficient resources also may have prevented the Clinton administration from achieving its goals.Palmer, a professor of international relations at Boston University and previously the director of Latin American and Caribbean studies at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, conducted more than fifty interviews with former Clinton administration officials and relied on sound primary and secondary data sources. The resulting book provides an accurate overview of the Clinton years, short case studies that highlight the author’s key points, and an evaluation of the administration’s policy based on its four self-proclaimed objectives for Latin America: “deepening democratic practice,” reducing inequality, eliminating poverty, and “securing environmentally sustainable development” (pp. 2 – 3).U.S. policy toward Peru, a country that Palmer has studied extensively, offers a case that demonstrates his larger themes well. By 1996 the small Andean nation was producing more coca leaf than any other country. Though President Alberto Fujimori had restored democracy, after undoing it with an autogolpe in 1992, the legitimacy of his 1995 reelection was tainted by revelations of procedural manipulation. More important, human rights violations were increasing and Fujimori had granted an amnesty to military officers who had engaged in these abuses. This drive toward authoritarianism was orchestrated by Vladimiro Montesinos, head of Peru’s National Intelligence Service, who also directed the country’s counter-drug efforts as he continued to be an asset for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which paid him a regular stipend.Peru thus presented the Clinton administration with a situation where only sustained and firm presidential leadership would enable it to achieve both the promotion of democracy and the eradication of drug production. Instead, in a classic case of bureaucratic politics, the CIA and Defense Department outweighed the State Department, which sought to temper unqualified U.S. support for the Fujimori government with pressure to improve its human rights record. The ensuing single-minded focus on drugs ultimately contributed to discrediting the United States’s claim of devotion to democracy, when evidence emerged that Montesinos had sold Peruvian arms to Colombian guerrillas and Fujimori was forced to flee the country because of corruption.This kind of attention to the consequences of Clinton’s policies as well as to the processes that produced them generates unanticipated gems throughout the book. For example, in examining Clinton’s “apparent success” in restoring Haiti’s democratically elected president to office, Palmer notes (p. 35) that it “was tempered by the loss of 2,000 – 3,000 Haitian lives” that might have been saved had Clinton been less hesitant to use U.S. power a year earlier.Yet this example also hints at a flaw in the study’s final assessment that the Clinton administration failed to achieve its goals. Palmer’s measures are the objective conditions in the region — for example, the number of people living in poverty — at the beginning and end of the Clinton years. This reveals his unstated assumption that the United States, as the western hemisphere’s hegemon, actually had the power and responsibility to change those conditions significantly. To be sure, U.S. policy makers often act as if that were the case. The book would have been even richer if Palmer had probed the views of his interview subjects to discern whether they shared the traditional ideological assumption that a backward Latin America needs the benevolent intervention of the United States.Such a critique, though, is a bit unfair to the author. The book does achieve its intended mission: it helps us to understand why an administration filled with an array of skillful professionals who had considerable knowledge of and experience in Latin America produced a set of policies that disappointed so many.