The Melding Americas : Trade, Democracy Bridge Old Barriers : Cultural Ties Mend Continental Divide

By WILLIAM R. LONG

Sept. 27, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Latin American countries that once nationalized U.S.-owned businesses are now pushing for more U.S. investment and commerce. They can’t wait to follow Mexico’s footsteps into a free-trade agreement with yesterday’s “Yankee imperialists.” And U.S. companies are rushing south.

The Americas are coming together, melding--and not just economically. Although Washington has often been the hemisphere’s hated bully in the past, its affinity with Latin America today is flowering.

“As the number of Latin American migrants and refugees in the United States increases, and as the reach of telecommunications becomes broader, we’re really becoming knit together,” said Mark Rosenberg, a Latin America specialist at Florida International University in Miami. “So you have at one level a governmental interest, and at another level you have a social fabric that is getting knit even more closely together.

“There’s just a whole set of influences that are growing,” Rosenberg added. “There’s a whole set of things that are taking place now that I think are positive in terms of greater harmony in the hemisphere.”

Mexico, historically wary of American arrogance and dominance, has embraced the United States as a brother; the struggling nations of Central America, more peaceful and more democratic since the turbulent 1980s, no longer are a major source of U.S. heartburn and headaches, and on the vast continent of South America, elected governments from Colombia to Argentina actively seek a future of profitable inter-American unity.

For decades, both Central and South America seemed to rumble and shake with political conflict: revolutions, guerrilla wars, coups and countercoups. Widespread poverty deepened with the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s. Today, poverty remains worrisome, while residues of extremism and militarism also persist in some countries.

But political and ideological differences between America and Latin America have dramatically narrowed with the endorsement by nearly all Latin American governments of democratic forms and free-market reforms.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are learning Spanish, and English-language schools are booming from Mexico to Argentina. Increasingly easier international communications and travel further strengthen hemispherical ties. More and more Latin Americans watch CNN, ESPN and MTV as cable television and dish antennas multiply throughout the region. In the United States, growing communities of Latinos tune in on Spanish-language radio stations and television networks that carry programming from their homelands.

Even food tastes are mixing and merging. An appetite for tacos and burritos has spread through the United States; in Latin America, cheeseburgers and Southern fried chicken have become popular fare.

Many Latin Americans still fear Yankee imperialism, whether economic, political, cultural or culinary. And some worry about the sovereignty of their countries when the Colossus of the North wields its “coercive diplomacy,” as it did this month in Haiti.

But all in all, as the century nears its close, the United States and Latin America are drawing closer than they have been since the century began. There has “never been a better time” for inter-American cooperation, said Paul Boeker, head of the La Jolla-based Institute of the Americas. “It really is a golden era historically in terms of convergence of not only political and economic values, but practical approaches to how you generate growth and social progress.”

Democracy has become a common denominator between the United States and Latin America since the pendulum of power began swinging away from the widespread military rule of the 1970s. In contrast to earlier periods, elected governments reign in all but one of the region’s 18 Spanish-speaking countries as well as Portuguese-speaking Brazil.

Communist Cuba is the exception. Only in Cuba does an entrenched Latin American government now stridently reject the basic political and economic principles of the United States. In recent regional summit meetings, other Latin American leaders have repeatedly urged Cuban President Fidel Castro to make democratic and market reforms.

Outside Cuba, the region’s civilian governments are harmonizing their economic programs to favor free enterprise and open trade. This is music to the ears of Washington, which has long encouraged Latin America’s departure from policies of state enterprise and protectionism. Free-trade alliances are developing vigorously in several areas of the region, and economic ties with the United States are growing stronger by the year. U.S. exports to Latin America, for example, grew by 64% between 1989 and 1993.

“These are historic developments,” Boeker said. “Not everyone in the U.S. Congress has absorbed this yet, but U.S. trade and investment with Latin America is growing faster than with anywhere else in the world.”

The end of the Cold War, the decline of militarism and growing political stability have helped take the edge off of traditional Latin American nationalism and anti-Americanism. Many leftist parties in the region have become more centrist.

At the same time, anti-communism and great-power rivalry no longer color Washington’s view of Latin America, observed Manuel Antonio Garreton, a professor of social sciences at the University of Chile.

Until the Soviet Bloc dissolved, he noted, “Latin America was just a place of competition with the Soviet Union.” Now Washington has other priorities in the region.

“That means approaches can be made in terms of conveniences, interests, aspirations--without prior ideological definition,” the Chilean scholar said.

During most of the 1980s, U.S. interest in the hemisphere focused on what Washington depicted as a grave Marxist threat in Central America. Washington lavished military and development aid on the area, often intervening in political affairs of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras.

As peace came to Central America, Washington quietly backed away. Official relations now are more distant--but also less intrusive and more likely to focus on trade and investment that can lead to more solid and fruitful economic ties.

In the late 1980s, U.S. concerns segued from the waning menace of communism to the waxing threat of cocaine. As a result, Washington has dedicated billions of dollars and the time of hundreds of officials to anti-drug cooperation with Latin American authorities.

Those efforts so far have failed to curtail the flow of cocaine from the region into the United States, but they have taught the lesson that more effective inter-American cooperation is needed.

Drug trafficking by Panama’s Gen. Manuel A. Noriega was given as a major reason for U.S. military intervention in that country in December, 1989, an invasion that recalled numerous previous episodes of U.S. intervention, political meddling and heavy-handed pressure in Latin America throughout this century. Traditionally, they have fed anti-Yankee sentiments.

The current intervention in Haiti may be different. With its French-Creole culture and its almost uninterrupted history of despotism, Haiti is a singular case in the hemisphere. Also, the nature of U.S. intervention has changed.

Earlier in the century, U.S. action often favored American investors, right-wing elites and dictators. In both Panama and Haiti, the action was aimed at ending military dominance and supporting democratic government.

The Clinton Administration’s policy toward Latin America has no catchy title similar to the forgotten Good Neighbors Policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the forsaken Alliance for Progress envisioned by John F. Kennedy or the short-lived Enterprise for the Americas pushed by George Bush.

Still, President Clinton has followed through on Bush policy, which emphasized free trade and private investment, and also on Jimmy Carter’s policy of actively promoting democracy and human rights. With his military move into Haiti, however, Clinton has put a tougher edge on the policy than Carter did.

Despite events in Haiti, Latin American authorities today seem less interested in old issues of imperialism and sovereignty than in trade and investment.

The United States accounts for about 60% of all goods imported by Latin America and the Caribbean, a region with a growing population of 460 million. Total trade between the United States and Latin America was worth $141 billion in 1993.

“What Latin Americans feel will put things on the kitchen table is economic growth,” said Peter Cleaves, director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas. With some exceptions, Cleaves said, “there is a consensus throughout the region that the bread, if it’s going to be buttered, will be buttered through the relationship with the United States.”

Clinton has invited Latin American and Caribbean leaders to a hemispherical summit Dec. 9 and 10 in Miami. The agenda will include efforts of many kinds to strengthen inter-American relations, and trade is expected to be one of the key items.

Both the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration before it have endorsed the ideal of a hemispherical free-trade zone. The concept is attractive to Latin American countries that fear being left out as Asia, Europe and North America form powerful trade blocs that could dominate world commerce.

Former President Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, now secretary general of the Organization of American States, has said a hemispherical free-trade zone is one of his major goals.

“The hemisphere must become sooner rather than later an economic force,” Gaviria said.

Other advocates agree that it would make sense to add all of Latin America to the North American Free Trade Agreement linking the United States, Mexico and Canada.

That will not be easy. Latin America has a long history of unsuccessful attempts at economic integration. Common markets can’t work if their would-be members have incompatible governments, unstable economies and contradictory economic policies, as many Latin American countries did in past decades. Protectionism and nationalism also have helped foil earlier attempts at free trade in the region. Although those obstacles have been reduced substantially, there is no guarantee that they will not rise again.

On the U.S. side, labor leaders and environmentalists are dragging their feet. Unions worry that with free trade, low-wage workers in Latin America could siphon off American jobs and undermine U.S. pay standards. Environmentalists voice concerns about trade pacts with Latin American countries where protections are lax.

Some free-trade advocates say the influence of labor and environmentalists in the Democratic Party has cooled the Clinton Administration’s enthusiasm for expanding NAFTA. Earlier this month, the Administration withdrew a bill from Congress that would have authorized “fast-track” procedures for negotiating free-trade agreements with other countries.

Finance Minister Eduardo Aninat of Chile, the leading Latin American advocate for a NAFTA-like trade pact, called withdrawal of the fast-track bill “an unnecessary delay that does not satisfy our expectations.”

J. Michael Combes, manager of an American-owned company in Chile and former president of the Chilean-American Chamber of Commerce, warned that such hitches in progress toward hemispherical free trade could cool North-South relations.

“This fast track looked positive, and now it’s being put back, and eventually the countries will get frustrated,” Combes complained in an interview. “If something doesn’t happen fairly soon, you’re going to get, I think, a very severe cooling down, and then possibly some resentment.

“I think that would be a great shame, I mean a great shame for the U.S.,” he said. “This is becoming a dynamic continent. Things are really happening.”

In the 1980s, most of Latin America suffered through an economic slump, with high inflation and unmanageable foreign debt. The crisis has passed, inflation is under control, and the regional economy is growing at a moderate rate. Trade is expanding, and foreign investment is pouring into many countries, more than half of it from the United States.

To a great degree, Latin American countries have abandoned old policies of protectionism and “import substitution,” which shielded national industries from the foreign-import competition. One problem with import substitution was that protected industries often became comfortable and fat, producing inferior goods at inflated costs. Now, market policies are opening Latin American economies to foreign goods. That helps keep prices down and forces national industries to compete or wither.

“It’s not only the Latin Americans trying to accede to the U.S. market, but Latin America has become a very important market for the U.S., and I think the economic interdependence that can be developed over the next few years is to everybody’s benefit,” said Guatemalan economist Gert Rosenthal.

Rosenthal said the trend in Latin America should encourage efforts to create a hemispherical trade bloc. “What’s going to happen probably is that we’re going to have four or five sub-regional trading blocs within Latin America, which will tend to converge.” Eventually, they could converge with NAFTA.

Judging by figures since liberalization of U.S.-Mexican trade began under NAFTA Jan. 1, both sides can profit. U.S. exports to Mexico in the second quarter of this year expanded by a robust 17% over the same period last year, while Mexico’s exports to the United States grew by 19%.

Meanwhile, communications, which goes hand in hand with trade, has become a unifying force in the Americas. Plans are being discussed to link the hemisphere with an information superhighway of fiber-optics. Satellite communications have already brought what Rosenberg, the Florida educator, calls the “CNN-ization of hemispheric information.”

With more communications, distorted stereotypes tend to break down. On one hand, Latin Americans find it more difficult to view Americans as arrogant, dollar-crazed imperialists. And Americans learn that there is much more to Latin America than poverty, guerrillas, cocaine smuggling and heavy-handed generals.

Great political, economic and cultural differences between the United States and Latin America remain undeniably real. But just as real are today’s opportunities for bridging the gaps between these lands and peoples who already are connected by history and geography.

Nowhere is the opportunity more obvious than in Miami, the Southwest and Southern California--the frontiers between Anglo and Latino America. Greater Miami’s population is almost equally divided between Latinos and non-Latinos, and both have prospered as their ways of life have blended.

The U.S.-Mexican border is becoming more a transit area and “zone of economic development and opportunity” than a boundary, Rosenberg observed.

“And that’s what is going to happen with a lot of boundaries in Latin America,” he said. “What’s going on on the Texas-Mexican border is a harbinger of things to come in Latin America.”

Hemispherical Immigration to the U.S. 1993 Immigrants (Legal)

From Mexico: 126,561

From Central America: 55,797

From the Caribbean: 97,843

From South America: 53,036

The 10 Latin American countries with most emigres to the U.S.:

Mexico: 126,517

Dominican Republic: 44,886

El Salvador: 25,517

Jamaica: 16,969

Cuba: 13,650

Colombia: 12,512