The Journey of Obama and Latin America

U.S. President Barack Obama’s first tour through Latina America (not Latin America, where Obama has already gone, which included a visit to Mexico as well as to a summit in Trinidad and Tobago), occurred under unusual circumstances for both the individual countries and the region at large. Since this could justly be the last visit of a U.S. representative to Latin America, Latin American unity for the region will be more difficult to talk about from now on. The region will have to be thought of in two unequal and very different parts.

The nations that Obama has visited reflect the regional split, with Mexico and El Salvador on one side and Chile and Brazil on the other. The agenda topics — the economic performance, the importance of the link with Washington and their peculiar insertion in the world economy — are all factors that separate the two parts of the region: South America on one side and Mexico and the basin of the Caribbean on the other. They are two worlds.

Chile and Brazil are part of the success story of South America that began under the president of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), an organization created with the purpose of excluding Mexico, the United States, and Canada, in contrast to the Organization of American States (OAS). Both countries have benefited enormously from the global boom of primary products or commodities these last few years, even saving themselves from a major disaster in 2009. They export raw materials and food (in relative terms little is manufactured), to highly diverse destinations at stratospheric prices. This is all thanks to the insatiable Chinese and Indian demand for industrial and food imports for their immense population in order to combat poverty.

In addition to Chile and Brazil, there are also countries like Peru, an exporter of iron and copper, Argentina, of soy and more soy, Uruguay, an exporter of soy as well, and Colombia, an exporter of coffee, coal and oil. We return to the golden age of Latin American mercantilism from the beginning of the 20th century, with a big difference: Now these countries are democratic, and therefore, the fruits of the international division of labor are divided up internally in a much more equitable manner. They have a middle class majority; however, some countries — Chile, Brazil, Uruguay — have a more of a middle class majority than others, like Peru and Colombia. These UNASUR countries possess local management, in addition to the global companies that operate there, that afford them a solid base to extend benefits to more of their fellow citizens. Many have today or have recently had center-left governments that insist on socially responsible politics.

For these countries, their relationship with the United States is close, but not decisive. Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner fights with the North Americans every time she can. Chile and Colombia attempt to maintain a narrow link, with the former showing off its free trade treaty and the latter lamenting its almost perpetual postponement. Brazil is close to Washington again, but it maintains its persistent diplomatic schizophrenia, less with President Dilma Rousseff than with the former President Luiz Lula da Silva, but equally undeniable, as confirmed by its abstention in the U.N. Security Council vote about the no-fly zone in Libya. However, in its agenda with Obama there does not appear, more than in a peripheral way, migration, tourism, drug trafficking, borders, economic integration, or security. It is the abyss that divides this region from the other.

For the countries of the other America — Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands, above all the Dominican Republic, but also Haiti in its way and Cuba in the distance — there is not such a boom of primary products, nor such market diversification or the same absence of controversial themes in the agenda with Washington. On the contrary, everything is the opposite. With the minor exceptions of sugar, bananas and coffee in the small countries, and petroleum and some minerals in Mexico, it is about economies oriented more toward exporting manufactured goods — like automobiles in Mexico or maquilas in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador — than primary products. They depend much more on tourism than on the price of copper.

Cuba, El Salvador and Honduras receive much more income in remittance than through Chinese purchases of soy. Consequently, their rates of economic growth since 2003 have been minor, even mediocre. The impact of the crisis of 2009 was major, and the recuperation in 2010 was insubstantial. At the time, this crisis contributed in part to a paradox that is also an element of clear separation between both regions: For these countries, one of their principal sources of divisions and problems is drug trafficking, whether as producers, like Mexico, or as transit countries, like Panama, Honduras, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. The great, if not the immense, proportion of its exchange with the world, from jubilant warm-weather vacationers to undocumented migrants, is with the United States. China hardly exists: Some still even conserve diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

In reality, the relationships with the United States are integrative. For many practical ends, these countries form part — on the level with Canada — of the economic space of North America, for better or for worse. When the North American economy goes well, the economies of these nations do well also. When it limps or implodes, their countries’ economies limp or implode. However, the impact of the peak or of the recession is not only economic. Migration and tourism are also affected, making this economic integration in Latina America a social, cultural and diplomatic issue. El Salvador and Mexico are, along with Ecuador, the three countries with the greatest proportion of their inhabitants residing outside of their territory in the world.

That is why their international agenda is almost always bilateral with Washington. The cooperation against drug trafficking or the search for alternative strategies, the legalization of the immigrant waves and heritages, the obstacles to trade, security for foreign tourists and the opening (or closure) of the borders all depend on negotiations with North America. Moreover, in the case of the small countries, for the exiguity of resources, or for Mexico, with the magnitude of its goals, part of the financing of the solution to many of the education or infrastructure problems, for example, will have to come from beyond the Río Grande. And consequently, the margin of labor or discrepancy of these countries with Washington is logical and inevitably less than for those of South America.

However, it would be absurd to treat this great division as concrete, making it permanent and absolute. Some countries, like Colombia, can find themselves between both regions. Others will be able to pass from one to the other according to the evolution of innumerable factors. Various countries of one zone exhibit characteristics of the other. For example, Ecuador is a country of enormous emigration to the world, and Nicaragua exports only primary products. Overall, it would be aberrant to evaluate the current luck of each country with an unchangeable grade — the success of the South versus the stagnation of the North.

On the contrary, the political and social tendencies, although not economic or international, of the countries of the Caribbean Sea and of Mexico are important to the tendencies of the societies of South America. These tendencies include democracy, the surge of new middle classes, now the majorities, the rejection of populist temptations — with exceptions in the cases of Venezuela and Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba — and the serene understanding with the United States and the rest of the world, with greater or less divergences. The successes of Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil are also those of Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Today it goes better for the exporters of Southern primary products, and less well for the members of the economic space of North America. But tomorrow, if the Chinese and Indian economic successes begin to moderate, and the U.S. economic recuperation becomes assured, the opposite effect will happen.

This is the new unusual landscape that awaited Obama in his first prolonged tour through the region. With so many other things on his mind, it would surprise many if he came to the inescapable conclusions of this evolution of the Americas’ economic landscape. It would be enough to instill it and let it be. If his collaborators also understood that conclusion fully, all would come out winning: the Latin Americans of North America, those of South America, and all of the North Americans.