The Warmth of East-West Detente Hasn’t Reached Latin America : Diplomacy: When the Cold War’s end heads south, the U.S. will lose its old pal--the Soviet menace. Military intervention as a policy will fade away.

If the Cold War is truly ending, or even if the remarkable improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations is but a promising transition, the one region relatively unaffected is Latin America.

In this hemisphere, the consequences of what some have called the beginning of the end of the Cold War are barely apparent. True, the warming of U.S.-Soviet relations is, in part, responsible for improvements in Central America. But the main causes of movements toward peace in the region are the result of domestic changes in the United States and Nicaragua. Yet, with time, the passing of the postwar world may mean far more for Latin America than a negotiated solution in Nicaragua or in El Salvador.

The effects in Latin America of a more cooperative U.S.-Soviet relationship will be akin to those occurring elsewhere. Just as Mikhail S. Gorbachev has begun to alter American views and policies toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the better, so will he positively reshape U.S. attitudes toward the more leftward voices south of the Rio Grande. In turn, leftist attitudes toward Washington will improve. By reducing--and eventually eliminating--both the perception and the reality of the Soviet threat to American security in the hemisphere, the superpower’s new relationship is redefining the constraints on change in Latin America.

Indeed, if U.S.-Soviet detente grows stronger, the traditional motives and pretexts used by the United States to oppose nationalistic reform or revolution in Latin America must erode. The United States will obviously continue to intervene in Latin American affairs, as it is doing in Panama. It may also continue to oppose certain kinds of social change. But the United States will no longer be able to do so credibly by invoking the Soviet threat.

One of the reasons why the Bush Administration has been helpless in influencing events in Panama is its inability to exploit old faithful--the communist menace. Alternative justifications for military intervention--drugs, Gen. Manuel A. Noriega’s evil--are either ineffective or lack credibility. For better or worse, then, the defense of U.S. business interests or an American preference for certain Latin American governments or policies will have to be presented for what they are--perfectly legitimate attempts by a major power to further its own aims.

At some point, these geopolitical transformations will open up broad avenues for change in Latin America. Too often during the past 50 years reform experiments either have floundered or been discarded because of actual U.S. opposition--or fear of it. It may be too optimistic to expect that American hostility, real or imagined, to Latin American reform movements will cease as a result of the end of the Cold War. But it will inevitably be tempered by the fading of its ideological, anti-Soviet rationale.

This transformation will come none too soon, especially if the economic and social situations in Latin America continue to deteriorate. Although it has been fashionable of late to construe conflicts between the United States and the forces for social change in Latin America as obsolescent, there is reason to believe that in many nations of the hemisphere the same old causes will produce the same old effects. In countries like Brazil, Peru and Mexico, tensions between rich and poor, between external debt liabilities and domestic social needs are nearing the breaking point.

Many of these nations’ recently adopted economic policies--budget cuts, privatization, trade opening, financial orthodoxy--are not producing results. This may be because such policies cannot be transplanted to Latin American countries, because there is a lack of time or political will to bring them to fruition, or because the financing requirements of foreign debt leave little money for anything else. Less uncertain is the public’s growing support for returning to policies that emphasize social concerns and nationalist aspirations. In many countries, electorates are moving left, even though the governments they elect have not.

Since 1988, voters in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil have chosen what they perceived to be the more progressive candidate. (In Chile’s upcoming elections, the outcome will probably be no different.) Given Latin American history, this is the sort of political shift one might expect after a decade of virtually no economic growth and a dramatic decline in living standards. True, the voters’ sentiments may not translate into actual governance for some time. But the seeds for deep reform in these countries are being sown.

The changes in the attitudes of many of the region’s new leaders on the left, particularly toward the United States, are an initial result of the thaw in East-West relations. Left-of-center nationalist leaders in Latin America are placing a greater emphasis on the need to bring about true democratization in their countries. For starters, that means clean elections and greater respect for human rights. These leaders are also reaching out to their northern neighbor, traveling throughout the United States and engaging American journalists, academics, business and government officials in ways that may have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago.

The best examples come from the continent’s two most populous countries. Brazil’s Luis Ignacio de Silva--known as Lula--and Leonel Brizola have made the cause of electoral reform and representative democracy as important as social justice and national sovereignty in their quests for power. So has Mexico’s Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. These leaders have dramatically distanced themselves from their countries’ political traditions.

Cardenas, Brizola and Lula, as well as other emerging Latin American politicians--Ricardo Lagos in Chile is another--have evidently redfined their relationships with the United States, in deed if not always rhetorically. Just as the United States is moving away from a Soviet confrontation without betraying its national interests, so can left-of-center movements in Latin America become friendlier with America without forsaking their convictions.

In contrast to developments in Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War can mean one of two things for Latin Americans. It can signify one superpower’s acceptance of another’s sphere of influence, locking in current governments and their policies, thereby fostering stagnation. Or it can bring about a true loosening of each superpower’s sphere of influence, since change will no longer imply geopolitical risk or realignment. It is up to the United States, the Soviet Union and Latin America to ensure that the latter will be the regional reward for the end of the Cold War.