Latin America Doesn’t Want to Be Forced Into Cold War 2.0

You might not know it by the relatively scant news coverage, but the U.S. congressional delegation, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that visited Brazil, Chile, and Colombia in August marked a big step forward in the development of a new U.S. approach to Latin America and highlighted the important role that the U.S. progressive left has to play in it.

For far too long, the U.S foreign-policy debate has treated Latin America as a source of problems, mainly drugs and illegal immigration, rather than seen it as a region of opportunities and promise. A Wall Street Journal op-ed scoffing at the delegation, which could’ve been beamed in from the 1980s, typifies the clueless condescension that has characterized much of Washington’s discussion about the region for decades, deriding the trip as a “socialist sympathy tour.”

Policy discussions in Washington rarely acknowledge the historic role that U.S. policy has played in exacerbating Latin America’s problems. There are the obvious actions, such as the multiple U.S.-backed coups that stifled democracy and led to enormous violence and corruption, but there is also the neoliberal economic model championed by the United States and other countries of the global north, which pressured developing countries to privatize much of their infrastructure, cut public spending, and saddled them with onerous, ever-mounting debt. All of these policies and their consequences have been major drivers of migration northward.

As described by its participants, the August delegation aimed to address these issues, importantly by deciding not to lecture but to listen.

“We have much to learn from our counterparts in these countries, including how to confront disinformation and violent threats to our democracies,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Los Angeles Times.

“U.S. foreign policy has too often contributed to instability in Latin America. We should be protecting democracy rather than supporting coups, and we should be creating peace and prosperity across the Western Hemisphere rather than replaying the Cold War,” Rep. Greg Casar said in a statement ahead of the trip, which he attended. “Now is the time to talk about our history, jointly fight the climate crisis, and invest in lasting peace. That is why I’m joining this delegation … to meet, listen, and learn from our counterparts and chart a new way forward.”

The Biden administration, to its credit, has taken a few steps toward a more constructive approach to the region. It welcomed the election of leftist (and former guerrilla fighter) Gustavo Petro as Colombia’s president, soon inviting him to the White House. Backed by congressional action, the administration also took a strong, proactive stance in favor of free and fair elections in Brazil, quickly recognized Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s electoral victory, and soon met with him.

This was a shift from the Obama administration’s approach, which kept the outspoken, socialist Lula at arm’s length during his first round in the Brazilian presidency out of fear of domestic political fallout. It’s also worth noting that President Joe Biden has faced zero political costs for his embrace of Lula, showing that there’s more space for such diplomacy.

Unfortunately, the U.S. approach to Latin America, as elsewhere, is dominated by an obsession with China. “Strategic competition” may be the preferred Washington parlance, but it’s essentially as Casar fears: replaying the Cold War, only with a different adversary with which both the United States and the world are far more interconnected.

This was made very clear to me during my own recent trip to Central and South America in June. In Panama, I visited the Darién region, a mountainous and extremely treacherous terrain that marks the border between Colombia and Panama. The 60-mile journey from Colombia can take as long as 10 days, through highly dangerous territory. In addition to natural dangers such as sheer cliffs, mudslides, raging rivers, swarms of stinging insects, and venomous snakes, the routes are run and patrolled by armed gangs, who often rob and rape.

Between 2011 and 2020, about 140,000 people made this journey. In 2021, as Latin America reeled from COVID-induced economic collapse, just under that number crossed in one year alone. In 2022, it nearly doubled to around 250,000. As of the end of July, 2022’s numbers were already surpassed.

I asked a U.S. Embassy official whether there had been interest from Congress in these thousands of migrants, who were suffering enormous hardship in their effort to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. “Oh, members of Congress come,” the official told me, “but they mostly want to know what China is doing. Is China buying up land near the canal? Property in Panama City?”

Similarly, in meetings with analysts and members of the Brazilian government, while there is widespread appreciation for the U.S. approach to the recent election, they note that U.S. engagement is still dominated by concerns about China.

The United States is missing a huge opportunity. Lula has committed to what Brazilian government officials told me was a “civilizational” step toward a green transition. They said they very much hope to work with the United States on this but thus far haven’t seen much in the way of U.S. proposals. They see the Biden administration’s break from neoliberalism as hugely positive but are concerned that the administration’s strong domestic economic focus could simply lead to a new protectionism and the formation of competing economic blocs, squandering the opportunity to formulate a more genuinely equitable global economic order. This echoes a concern I’ve heard from many others in the developing world: They’re simply not interested in choosing sides in a new great-power conflict.

Officials in Brazil’s Finance Ministry with whom I spoke were adamant that international financial institutions must be reformed with the participation of countries in the global south. They are concerned that developed countries (such as the United States) are adopting aggressive industrial policies but that the international financial institutions they still control are limiting development in the global south. They also said there must be a stronger focus on global economic inequality at every level. As Brazilian policy analyst Adriana Erthal Abdenur put it in reference to Chinese investment in the region, “Fifteen years ago, we didn’t have a walkout strategy. Now, if the World Bank won’t finance development, we have options.”

The Biden administration’s announcement last week that it would push for long-overdue reforms at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a sign that it has not only heard these concerns but are taking them seriously. While it’s ironic to hear Biden offer a revamped, and presumably much more equitable, IMF-World Bank approach as an alternative to the “much more opaque, or coercive, method” of development finance offered by China—as the decades of opaque and coercive IMF and World Bank policies are precisely what made China’s financing an attractive alternative in the first place—it’s still a good step.

But U.S. policymakers should dispense with the notion that such steps will entice countries in Latin America, or anywhere in the global south, to sign on to Team America and make Washington’s adversaries their own. Given the United States’ predatory history, building trust in these countries will take time.

And it will need to be undergirded not solely by zero-sum competition with China but by the principle that the security and prosperity of the American people are inseparable from the security and prosperity of all of the region’s people. The administration needs both ideas and encouragement—and, yes, pressure—from its left flank to get this right. August’s delegation was a good move toward making that happen.