Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Tom Shannon, said at the Inter-American Dialogue a few weeks ago that President Obama will seek to build a “pathway” between G-20 meetings in London and the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Port-of-Spain next week. Shannon emphasized that “our economic recovery not be built on the backs of the poorest, most vulnerable members of society.”
With the G-20 summit over, the landscape around that “pathway” to Trinidad and Tobago is starting to become more clear, but for some, with clarity has come a case of déjà vu.
In a discussion about the implications of the G-20 on Latin America, Mauricio Cárdenas, the director of the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution, says that Mexico’s decision to take $47 billion from the IMF under the recently created Flexible Credit Line may be an indication that other countries, such as Colombia and Peru, will begin to do the same. Cardenas says that, in thinking about Latin America’s relation to the global economy, “the IMF will become the focal point, with almost one trillion dollars in new resources provided in part by the surplus economies, like China.” As Spain’s El Pais writes this means some in Latin America will realize that the “ghosts of Latin America’s past”—institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development—are not really dead. The fact that regional institutions like the Bank of the South have not been able to get themselves up and running yet may push cash-strapped economies back to the same international financial institutions rejected in one Latin American country after another over the last decade.
But it is not just old financial institutions which may reenter Latin America in the wake of the G-20 summit. As Foreign Policy in Focus analyst, Manuel Pérez Rocha, writes, a well known Latin American “intervener”, the U.S., may also be tempted to re-insert itself into the region as the hemisphere’s “natural leader”. Some, like writer Saul Landau, maintain that this may be getting ahead of things. Indeed, the recent visit by Vice President Joe Biden to the region saw the United States doing much listening and little preaching, a much more hopeful sign than those given off by a famous trip to the region by another Vice President, Richard Nixon, in 1958.
It is just this sort of posture that Abraham Lowenthal, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues Obama should maintain in Port-of-Spain. In the Boston Globe, Lowenthal argues that the U.S. must seek a broad, strategic relationship with Brazil, keep promises to a minimum, avoid confrontation, and above all, listen. According to Jeffrey Davidow, President Obama’s special advisor for the 34-nation summit, this is just what Obama intends to do. Obama “is going to Trinidad with the intention of listening, discussing, and dealing with his colleagues as partners,” Davidow recently remarked.
But again, the line between a regional or global cooperative “partnership” and top-down “leadership” will likely remain fine. As a series of articles this week indicate, certain issues like the not-so-pleasant blossoming of non-state international crime syndicates-- perhaps externalities of the global downturn in part-- may be on the horizon. As Michael Klare writes at Tom Dispatch, “from Mexico to Africa, Russia to China, the pool of the desperate and the bribable is expanding exponentially, pointing to a sharp upturn in global crime. As illicit profits rise, so will violence in the turf wars among competing crime syndicates and in the desperate efforts by panicked governments to put a clamp on criminal activity.” Others argue that new spaces within the state are being carved out for criminal groups to carry out economic transactions. And Latin America may be one of the frontlines in this unfortunate global phenomenon as economic troubles deepen.
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