Is the Cold War Over?

One wonders if the Bush Administration does when you see the machinations going on behind the recent election in El Salvador. The election pitted Shafik Handal, a 73 year-old former Marxist guerilla leader of the FMLN against António Saca, a 39 year-old conservative and as Marcela Sánchez notes here, the left could not have put forth a weaker candidate. Why, then did the Bush administration feel such a strong need to view this through the prism of the Cold War?

Throughout last week, Republican members of Congress such as Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher, together with White House special assistant Otto J. Reich, made clear in TV and newspapers interviews that a Handal triumph would roll back free trade, affect immigration and put great distance between Washington and San Salvador.

In a teleconference with reporters at ARENA headquarters, Reich suggested that Salvadoran immigrants, some of them under temporary status, could be deported under a Handal administration. Comments by Tancredo about the effects of Handal on remittances -- the more than $2 billion a year that Salvadoran immigrants send to relatives back home -- became "U.S Congress threatens remittances" in the headlines of one local publication.

Salvadoran voters were probably listening and reading closely. Today, one of every four Salvadorans lives in the United States -- 300,000 of them under a temporary status granted by the executive branch. And remittances from the United States will soon surpass El Salvador's entire export revenues. Needless to say, there is substantial personal interest in maintaining good relations with Washington.

Pre-election polls in El Salvador consistently forecasted a Handal defeat despite his party's strong showing in legislative and municipal elections.

One wonders if Karl Rove has been doing their ads as Andrés Oppenheimer relates one:

A typical pro-Saca television spot that aired repeatedly in the closing days of the campaign showed a middle-class Salvadoran couple receiving a phone call from their son in Los Angeles.

''Mom, I wanted to let you know that I'm scared,'' the young man says. ''Why?'' his mother asks. ''Because if Shafick becomes president of El Salvador, I may be deported, and you won't be able to receive the remittances that I'm sending you,'' her son responds.

As Sánchez notes, what may work in El Salvador, probably won't work in other countries in Latin America facing elections this year:

Pre-election polls in El Salvador consistently forecasted a Handal defeat despite his party's strong showing in legislative and municipal elections. But elsewhere, polls show leftist candidates way ahead in Panama and the Dominican Republic for May contests, and in Uruguay for October.

Unlike Handal, Martin Torrijos in Panama, Leonel Fernandez in the Dominican Republic and Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay are not Cold War relics. They are progressive rather than radical leaders, more akin to Ricardo Lagos in Chile than Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Moreover, their countries, even the Dominican Republic that receives more than $2 billion in remittances, are also much less dependent on Washington's good graces than El Salvador.

And that's what makes the Republican message a poor match for those candidates and the voters they attract. U.S. warnings about the outcome of elections in these other nations would probably be futile, if not also counterproductive. In Bolivia two years ago, the U.S. ambassador's admonitions against supporting the leftist candidate for president fueled anti-American sentiment that almost carried the coca leader Evo Morales to power.

Around the hemisphere, voters are asking many of the same questions raised in El Salvador. But the answers provided by those in Washington, who would throw fear around for political gain rather than offer substantive arguments to address legitimate concerns, are unlikely to satisfy.

In the current environment, it is essential that Washington be willing to speak directly to the anxieties that are affecting practically every political contest in the region. In Panama, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, voters are particularly disenchanted by the poor economic performance under their current governments and many fear the ramifications coming from U.S.-touted economic models as adopted by mostly right-leaning governments in the region.

I have long believed that the presence of Otto Reich, Elliott Abrams (even though he is not dealing with LatAm issues) and John Negroponte in the Bush administration was not lost on the public in Latin America. If the president really wanted to show that the relationship between the United States and Latin America was as valuable as he indicated as a candidate, these men would not have such prominent roles in his administration. If they continue to view Latin American-US relations using a Cold War mentality and stick to the same economic model that has not addressed the needs of millions of Latin American citizens, they will be continue to be a miserable failure in this part of the world.

Comments

[xavier]

Randy:
Actually I think the Bush administration's Latin American policy is much more omnious. Think back to when Chile's free trade deal was delayed for several months because it expressed a mild preference for continued inspectionsfor WMDs (and the subsequent revelations that it was one of the country's bugged at the Security council)

To me, the Latin American policy is regressing to that of the 'Fruiteria foreign policy' of 1890s-1941 when the Marines were dispatched to Central America to quell when the campesinos got too uppity or the governments proposed land reform.
Deep down Bush knows that Latin America is the U.S' soft underbelly but has absolutely no clue, no vision, no new ideas but those of the past and to bully those that propose alternatives as these threaten to expose the emperor's nudity. Is it any wonder that sympathetic countries have become so fed up with the U.S.?