Commentary: Obama’s Latin America Policy

Abstract

When Latin America's left presidents watched the campaign of Barack Obama for president in 2008, they thought that they might finally see a U.S. president who would change Washington's foreign policy in the region. It seemed as if another revolt the ballot box was arriving in the Western Hemisphere of the kind that had elected Lula da Silva, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Fernando Lugo, and Tabare Vazquez. Before Obama's election, President Lula da Silva of Brazil expressed this sentiment (Weisbrot, 2008a): Just as Brazil elected a metal worker, Bolivia elected an Indian, Venezuela elected Chavez, and Paraguay a bishop, I think that it would be an extraordinary thing if, in the largest economy in the world, a black man were elected president of the United States. In a sense, the shift in the electorate had similar causes in the hemi sphere. Latin America's swing to the left was largely driven by the failure of neoliberalism: the worst long-term economic growth performance in more than a century, from 1980 to 2000 (Weisbrot, 2007). More than a gen eration of Latin Americans had lost out on any chance to improve their liv ing standards. In the case of the United States it was not so much a growth failure (although the growth of per capita gross domestic product did decline significantly in the neoliberal era [Baker, 2007]) as a vast increase in inequality and, of course, the worst recession since the Great Depression that finally brought voters to demand an end to nearly four decades of rightward drift (Weisbrot, 2008b). A few months after taking office, in April 2009, Obama seemed to raise Latin America's expectations the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. Acting like the former community organizer he was, Obama walked over to shake hands with Chavez—an image that sped instantly around the world and infuriated the right. He made some unprecedented statements for a U.S. president, admitting that at times we sought to dictate our terms (Obama, 2009a). Even Raul Castro was impressed, responding to Obama's loosening of travel and remittance restrictions (for Cuban-Americans only) by saying that he was ready to discuss rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners, everything. He added, could be wrong. We admit it. We're human beings (Carroll, 2009).