Washington Fiddles as Latin America Burns--Only We Don’t Feel It

While for the past seven years the Reagan Administration has been attempting to convince the American people that a Marxist-Leninist cabal in a little country in Central America represents a dire threat to the security of the Republic, critical issues elsewhere in the hemisphere have gone largely untended. Periodically a group of leaders from public life and the private sector in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean have made it their business to call attention to these problems and to suggest ways of dealing with them. Calling themselves the Inter-American Dialogue, and chaired by veteran American diplomat Sol Linowitz and former Costa Rican President Daniel Oduber, the group’s 62 members can fairly be characterized as moderate-center.

In their latest report, released a few weeks ago, they warn that problems identified earlier in the decade as a threat to all of our countries’ well-being have only grown worse, and in several cases have assumed crisis proportions.

The most obvious of these is the narcotics traffic that has spread like a plague throughout the hemisphere, destroying lives, spawning violence and subverting the integrity of the state itself. Less dramatic, but no less damaging, is the continuing economic crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean. Saddled with an ever-growing foreign debt, governments have been forced to squeeze their economies in order to transfer staggering sums abroad to pay interest. This means rising unemployment and falling real income. Economic distress has fueled a swelling tide of migration that is sorely taxing the capacity of many recipient countries to cope with the effect on their societies. Those who didn’t emigrate have seen their wages erode by as much as 40% over a few short years. It is a wonder that civil disorder has not been more widespread in the region.

The day of reckoning may not be far off. Most democratic governments that took over from discredited military dictatorships in the early part of the decade are floundering in their attempts to reconcile reductions in private consumption and government spending with the demands of their people for relief from economic hardship. One result noted in the Inter-American Dialogue’s report is a growing popular demand throughout the region for unilateral moratoriums on foreign-debt repayment.

Another result is the spread of disillusionment about democratic government. Moreover, the threat of military intervention in civilian government has not been exorcised: The report points out that, while the military still is wary of returning to power, it has successfully resisted attempts by political leaders to assert civilian control over the armed forces.

The Dialogue’s report offers thoughtful and practical recommendations for dealing with all these problems. What is striking, however, is that all of the solutions presuppose a degree of cooperation between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere that is virtually non-existent. The Reagan Administration’s fixation on Nicaragua, its disdain for multilateralism and its lack of a strategic vision of the hemisphere are largely to blame.

The United States will continue to go it alone at its peril. Each of the problems discussed in the Inter-American Dialogue report poses a danger to this country; none can be solved without working with the rest of the hemisphere on a truly collegial basis. The drug trade’s effects on our society are notorious; yet, as the report points out, the increase in money that we have spent on law enforcement has failed to make a dent in the supply of drugs. Congress’ increasingly strident attacks on the beleaguered governments of the producing countries are provoking a backlash against the United States that will lead to less rather than more cooperation.

Latin America’s depressed economies hurt us, too. As a result of the debt crisis, the Dialogue report tells us, Latin America buys $20 billion to $30 billion per year less from the United States than it would if the region’s growth had not been interrupted. The result is a higher U.S. trade deficit and the loss of American jobs. So far the only U.S. proposal to deal with the debt problem--the so-called Baker plan, which was a unilateral initiative--has been a flop.

If civilian leaders in the debtor countries do not get substantial help soon, democracy in those countries may crumble or become a facade under the tutelage of the military. Should that happen, there will be less common ground between the rest of the hemisphere and the United States on which to build cooperative efforts to solve problems.

The report of the Inter-American Dialogue is aptly titled “The Americas in 1988: A Time for Choices.” It is a year in which the American people will choose a new President. And one of his most important choices will be between letting the hemisphere’s ills continue to fester or trying to provide leadership for the kind of collective attack on the region’s urgent problems that has not been attempted in a quarter of a century.