Biden vowed to be better for Latin America than Trump has been; now, he has to deliver
It’s hard to forecast whether Presidentelect Joe Biden will be good for Latin America. But he knows the region much better than President Trump did when he took office and vows to pursue a much more constructive agenda there.
Between 2009 to 2017, Biden made 13 trips to Latin America when he was President Obama’s vice president. He was Obama’s de facto point man for the region, while former secretary of State John Kerry was mostly busy dealing with Middle Eastern and Asian affairs.
In 2013, Biden made a six-day trip to Colombia, Brazil and Trinidad-Tobago, shortly after delivering a speech at the State Department on the future of U.S.-Latin America relations.
Biden also chaired a U.S.-Mexico government commission on trade and border issues, made four trips to Mexico during that period and headed a Central America aid task force.
Meanwhile, Trump was selling apartments in New York.
Of course, none of that guarantees that Biden will be good for Latin America.
But people close to him say that, as president, Biden will have a positive agenda for the region, focusing on cooperation on issues such as fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, where Trump has pursued a negative agenda focused on illegal immigration.
Biden said in a 2019 article written for the Miami Herald that he would focus on “repairing cooperation and addressing shared regional challenges.” He described Trump’s regional policy as a “wrecking ball to our hemispheric ties.”
Biden’s closest Latin American advisers are his former aides Juan Gonzalez, Daniel P. Erikson and Julissa Reynoso, a former U.S. State Department official and ambassador to Uruguay, campaign sources told me.
Former secretary of State Kerry, who was Biden’s surrogate on foreign affairs during the 2020 campaign, told me in a Sept. 4 interview that, during his years as vice president, BIden had discussions with Mexico and Canada to create a “North American trading bloc.” Kerry added that, as president, Biden may want to “get back to that discussion” beyond existing trade agreements.
On U.S. relations with Cuba, Kerry told me that, “Biden, as president, will clearly want to reinvigorate” U.S. pressures on the regime to address human rights and economic freedoms on the island. Kerry added that “I don’t think that anybody was pleased” with Cuba’s growing repression after the 2014 normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations.
Biden likely will be especially careful not to be seen as cozy with Cuba and Venezuela following his loss of Florida in the Nov. 3 elections partly because of an avalanche of Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American votes for Trump. If the Democrats want to win Florida in 2024, they would be foolish not to try to do better with that key Hispanic vote bloc.
On the economic front, Biden’s promise to pass comprehensive immigration reform that would legalize 11 million undocumented residents would translate into better jobs for them, and more family remittances to Mexico and Central America.
Perhaps more important, the $3 trillion economic stimulus package promised by Biden would boost America’s economic growth. Some economists are predicting the U.S. economy may grow by as much as 5 percent next year, after a 4 percent decline this year.
Alejandro Werner, the International Monetary Fund ‘s Western Hemisphere director, told me that a big U.S. stimulus package “would be good for Latin American countries that export goods to the United States, because a growing U.S. economy means more imports from Latin America.”
Werner added, “It would help Mexico’s car-parts exporters, and South America’s commodity exporters, as higher U.S. growth will contribute to higher commodity prices.”
Some Latin American officials fear that a Biden administration will be much more demanding on labor and environmental rights, demanding conditions that will be hard for the region’s countries to meet amid their current economic crises.
But what almost everybody agrees on is that Biden would be more predictable than Trump, who every now and then threatened to impose tariffs on goods or taxes on remittances. The region’s economies no longer will have to depend on whether Trump woke up in a good mood.
We will soon know whether Biden’s relative knowledge of Latin American affairs will help the region. But it’s time to try a positive agenda with the region, instead of one that focuses on building a wall along the border and insulting Latin American immigrants.
Biden should keep his word, because a rising tide lifts all boats.