Vital neighbors
U.S. cannot take South America for granted
U.S. policy toward South America gets little attention from the public and the federal government, in spite of the importance of trade and immigration issues in U.S. domestic politics.
Ecuador just held successful multiparty democratic elections. The Socialist candidate for president, Lenin Moreno, won, with 51.16 percent of the votes. Ecuador, with a population of 16 million, has a reasonably successful multisector economy, depending largely on oil and agriculture.
Another about-to-be success story is Guyana, a former British colony on the east coast, which has just discovered large deposits of offshore oil and gas, the income from which should transform it from a basically poor country, with a population of under a million, into one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest petroleum producers. The American companies Exxon Mobil and Hess will be doing the drilling. Production should commence in 2020.
Guyana was previously known sometimes as a political battleground between the Indian- and African-origin portions of its population, nearly enough balanced to produce sometimes violent conflict. It was also the location of Jonestown, where 905 Americans died in a 1978 mostly suicide incident.
Other long-standing problems remain in South America. These include uproar in Brazil, which experienced a painful change of presidents last year, Colombia where the war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) continues to stagger toward an end, and Argentina, where presidential politics and financial probity continue to armwrestle each other unproductively.
The real sore thumb of South America remains Venezuela. It has enough oil wealth for its 32 million population to live well. But they don’t, facing scarcity in critical areas — nutrition, education and health — because of serious misgovernment. First they had Hugo Chavez, who did some good but more bad. He took steps that helped Venezuela’s poor, but he did so injudiciously, wasting the country’s money and giving some of its oil away to other Latin American countries whose leaders he considered brotherly. These included Cuba, Bolivia and others.
Now the president is Mr. Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, a former bus driver and bodyguard who has no idea whatsoever how to govern a country, but who is hard to get rid of. He has loyal supporters; he also has control of the country’s security forces so far and is ready to use repressive measures to stay in power, in spite of the general growing misery of Venezuela’s people.
President Donald Trump and his foreign policy team, if ever it is put together, will need to pay some attention to South America as important neighbors and trading partners, as well as potential sources of immigration and drugs to the United States. Literally for centuries, there has been an unfortunate tendency for U.S. presidents and governments to take South American countries for granted. The Trump administration should not perpetuate this bad habit. Mr. Trump inherited relations with Latin American countries that had been improved by his predecessor’s steps toward Cuba. Good neighbors in general can be very helpful in world affairs.