Monday, July 5, 2010

 

Democracy Makes Unprecedented Gains in Latin America

 

By Jim Fisher-Thompson

·   State’s Valenzuela cites consolidation of democratic process

 

Washington — U.S. diplomat Arturo Valenzuela believes Latin America is experiencing a wave of democratic governance unparalleled in its turbulent history.

 

“If you go back and look at the long sweep [of history] at a continent that was founded, as was this country, on the basis of the ideals of the Enlightenment … it was very hard to consolidate” the democratic process in Latin America, said Valenzuela, who is assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.

 

But now, he said, democracy is making progress throughout the region. Latin America is expanding its political and economic engagement internally and abroad, he said, and relations with the United States are improving through the Obama administration’s focus on engagement through partnerships.

 

Valenzuela, who served in the Clinton administration and has been a professor at Georgetown University, spoke to a gathering of scholars and specialists at the Brookings Institution in Washington June 29. The event was co-sponsored by the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF), a multibillion-dollar lending institution in Latin America.

 

Democratic penetration in the continent expanded after the 1980s, Valenzuela said, as evidenced by the diminishing number of military coups. “Remember from 1930 to 1980, 40 percent of all changes in Latin American governments were through coup d’états,” he said.

 

Despite periodic political and economic ups and downs, “This is the longest period in the entire history of the Americas … of continuous constitutional rule. We are in a very good time now,” he said.

 

The steady “consolidation of constitutional continuity and democratic governance” is important not only to the region’s citizens, Valenzuela said, but also for relations with the United States, because democracy and respect for human rights are critical foundations on which successful U.S.-Latin American relations are built.

 

Ambassador Craig Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, agreed that democracy was gaining in the region. “We are not in the same place we were in the 1980s,” Kelly said.

 

Kelly, a career diplomat who was U.S. envoy to Chile from 2004 to 2007, said Latin American countries have made enormous strides politically and economically in the past 30 years, helped by “policy changes of their own.”

 

President Obama’s administration has made it clear, he said, that “we want to address these issues in a spirit of partnership … [which] really is the defining principle of our engagement with the region.”

 

“Too often,” Kelly said, “people have judged U.S. policy in the region by using the wrong preposition: What have you done ‘for’ Latin America and the Caribbean? And we want to answer that question explaining what we’re doing ‘with’ Latin America and the Caribbean.”

 

Kelly said the U.S. government has provided $2 billion a year in assistance to Latin America, but stressed, “We’re trying to focus it on facilitating positive policy changes on the part of the governments. If we want to see significant, positive change in the region, this is going to occur after the governments themselves undertake sound policy decisions.”

 

For example, he said, Chile from 1990 to 2006 reduced its poverty rate by 44 percent to under 14 percent “largely through its own policy changes — opening up to the rest of the world, free trade agreements, implementing sound social safety-net programs, education and many other things. It was not done primarily through international assistance.”

 

With U.S.–Latin American trade at $650 billion a year and remittances from Latin Americans living and working in the United States another $60 billion a year, the State Department’s challenge, Kelly said, is to “step back and think about how our diplomacy could leverage that overall [economic] engagement.”

 

One such initiative, Kelly said, is the Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas program, which works to more effectively implement agreements the United States has with trade partners in the region “to achieve our social inclusion, anti-poverty” objectives.

 

This means drawing more people into “the economic integration that is occurring not only within the region but with Asia, the United States and Europe as well,” the diplomat said, and involves such things as customs reform, English language instruction, microfinance and legal reform.

 

This is not a traditional aid program, Kelly stressed. “It is basically a sharing of best practices and putting mutual pressure on ourselves to achieve changes, which up to now have been somewhat difficult … like financial systems reform to help small and medium-sized businesses and people who remained marginalized — women entrepreneurs, indigenous populations, Afro-descendents and others who have not benefitted from world trade.”

 

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Jim Fisher-Thompson is an America.gov staff writer; Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State