Crises make Latin America an unwelcome guest for Joe Biden
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Like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, Latin America has made an unwelcome appearance before Joe Biden’s administration at an inopportune moment.
Crises this month in Cuba and Haiti, unpredictable populist presidents, environmental destruction and a migration crisis in Central America are competing for the attention of a US president who would prefer to spend his political capital at home.
“These are headaches Biden didn’t anticipate and isn’t very comfortable dealing with,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think-tank. “The domestic political pressures are paramount and becoming ever more so.”
A record 188,829 migrants reached the US southern border last month, mostly Mexicans and Central Americans. The surging numbers are doubly uncomfortable for Biden: they expose him to Republican attacks of weakness, while increasing pressure from leftwing Democrats for a more humane approach to US immigration.
Turmoil in Haiti following the assassination of its president and the most serious political unrest in Cuba for decades have raised the possibility that a fast-deteriorating situation in the two Caribbean nations could trigger a fresh wave of migration.
“The biggest [regional] issue they’re dealing with is migration from Central America and potentially also Cuba and Haiti,” said Shannon O’Neil at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “This is not just US/Latin America policy but plays straight into the domestic agenda.”
Risa Grais-Targow at the consultancy Eurasia said Biden had Latin America “pretty far down the list” of foreign policy priorities when he took office, but the surge in migration had pushed it up the list. “Haiti and Cuba come as additional challenges forcing him to pay attention to a region he’d really prefer not to be paying attention to at all.”
The formidable challenges to the US in its traditional area of influence come when it is not best equipped to handle them. Since the 1990s, Latin America has steadily slid down the priority list in Washington. Bill Clinton’s $20bn bailout of Mexico in 1995 and his unrealised vision for a Free Trade Area of the Americas gave way to the war on terror, Iran, Russia and more recently China as foreign policy preoccupations.
China, meanwhile, has greatly increased its sway in Latin America, becoming the biggest trading partner for Brazil and Chile, investing tens of billions of dollars across the region and strengthening its diplomatic muscle.
Six months into Biden’s term, key Latin America positions still await Senate confirmation, such as the top Americas job at the state department and the US ambassador to Mexico. A replacement ambassador for Brazil has not been chosen. As host, Washington has yet to name a date for this year’s Summit of the Americas.
Latin America has not helped its own cause. Its two biggest countries are governed by idiosyncratic populists, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Both worked well with Donald Trump and have not shown enthusiasm for the Biden agenda. A rapid rise in Amazon deforestation under Bolsonaro has so far gone without a response from Washington, despite Biden’s emphasis on fighting climate change.
“The administration seems to want to avoid conflict with Brazil for the time being,” said Monica de Bolle at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “However, conflict will emerge eventually on the environmental front.”
Unlike Africa or the Middle East, Latin America lacks a unified regional body of its own. This has been a particular weakness during the coronavirus pandemic, which has had a bigger combined impact on Latin America than any other region.
After a slow start, the Biden administration has started sending big shipments of US vaccines to Latin America, offering a counterweight to China.
“Vaccine diplomacy has certainly been a major driving factor for greater US involvement,” said de Bolle. “The Biden administration is not ignoring Latin America completely, which is certainly an improvement over previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat . . . But much more could be done on the public health front.”
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