Latinos Should Turn Their Attention to Foreign Policy

During the current national debate over Reagan Administration policies in Central America, there has been a disturbing silence from one key sector: this country’s large Latino community.

A few Latino organizations have taken stands on Central America, of course. The heavily Mexican-American League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has been critical of President Reagan, while the Cuban-American Foundation has been supportive. But the fact remains that foreign-policy questions simply do not stir the same level of interest among Latino activists that purely domestic issues, like bilingual education and voting rights, do.

A key reason for this is that there is no national Latino organization devoted to foreign-policy issues. The Hispanic Council of Foreign Affairs, established in Washington in 1980, still exists on paper but is inactive. Former members of the group say that it foundered for lack of financial support and because Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans could rarely agree on foreign-policy positions.

This is unfortunate, because recent history indicates that when Latinos throw themselves into foreign-policy debates with the energy and enthusiasm that they show for domestic political matters they have a significant effect. The most obvious example is the influence that Cuban-Americans have had on the Reagan Administration’s hard-line policy toward Cuba and the government of Fidel Castro. The main reason Reagan prodded a reluctant Congress to create Radio Marti, the special broadcasting service that beams news and anti-Castro propaganda into Cuba from Florida, was to fulfill a campaign pledge that he had made to that state’s influential Cuban community.

Similarly, lobbying by Mexican-Americans has had a significant effect on immigration laws and policies. In the 1950s and ‘60s old political groups like the Mexican-American Political Assn. were heavily involved in the successful campaign to kill the bracero program, under which Mexican farm workers came into this country as contract laborers. They argued that the program contributed to the exploitation of Mexican workers.

Today, organizations like LULAC and the Mexican-American Legal Defenseand Education Fund are in the forefront of the efforts to hold back controversial immigration-reform proposals in Congress like the Simpson-Mazzoli legislative measures of 1984 and 1985. The organizations fear that such laws could lead to discrimination against Latinos and other “foreign”-looking and -sounding U.S. citizens.

Of course, an argument can be made that in both of these cases Latino political influence may not reflect the interests of the nation as a whole. But there is a third case of Latino political influence in which U.S. foreign policy was changed for the better.

Almost everyone remembers the Alliance for Progress as one of the hallmarks of the brief but dramatic presidency of John F. Kennedy. A long-range aid and development program for Latin America, the alliance was Kennedy’s answer to the challenge posed for the United States and its allies in the region by Castro’s revolution in Cuba.

Few Americans know that the initial impetus for la Alianza came from Puerto Rico. It was modeled on the campaign by Luis Munoz Marin, a revered former governor, to modernize the island’s economy after World War II. Munoz Marin called his program Operation Bootstrap, and under its aegis he gave the island a modern infrastructure and an impressive educational system in an effort to encourage investment in Puerto Rico by mainland corporations.

There is still debate in Puerto Rico concerning whether Operation Bootstrap was as successful as it could have been. But Puerto Ricans are clearly better off today than they would have been without it. And when Munoz Marin and his political allies in the Democratic Party convinced Kennedy that Operation Bootstrap was a model for Latin America, they gave hope to an entire generation of progressive leaders, such as Venezuela’s Romulo Betancourt and Costa Rica’s Luis Figueres, who were trying to build democratic alternatives to Castro’s Cuba and right-wing dictatorships like the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua.

The Alliance for Progress is still fondly remembered throughout Latin America as a high point of U.S. relations with the region. It represented the United States’ first official recognition that its security interests in the Western Hemisphere could be guaranteed not just through military power but also with social progress. And it might never have happened without the political influence of Puerto Ricans.

Many thoughtful Latinos in this country fear that an organizational effort to influence U.S. policy toward Latin America is bound to fail as the Hispanic Council on Foreign Affairs did. Perhaps. But the examples of Munoz Marin, Operation Bootstrap and the Alliance for Progress stand as reasons for giving it another try.