Last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a coterie of senior US officials piled onto a plane to Mexico City to try to stop Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from giving a planned fiery speech that alleged US violations of national Sovereignty of Mexico condemned. A trade dispute has erupted between US and Canadian officials and their Mexican counterparts over perceived Mexican favoritism in contracting local energy companies. Under normal circumstances, the disagreement would have been resolved through mechanisms in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But Mexico’s president is no standard institutionalist.
Also in Latin America are a growing group of governments. In Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, elections have produced presidents and administrations willing—if not driven by a desire—to buck past commitments to the United States.
For decades, Washington has been Latin America’s leader on issues of immigration, trade, drug policy, democracy, and human rights. The US leadership has produced a number of free trade agreements and bilateral programs that address these issues. But in recent years, the United States has become a hostage to this framework of engagement with the region. Hoary platitudes and inconsistent policies have challenged professional notions of the US partnership, all while escalating domestic US concerns about immigration and drugs.
Last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a coterie of senior US officials piled onto a plane to Mexico City to try to stop Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from giving a planned fiery speech that alleged US violations of national Sovereignty of Mexico condemned. A trade dispute has erupted between US and Canadian officials and their Mexican counterparts over perceived Mexican favoritism in contracting local energy companies. Under normal circumstances, the disagreement would have been resolved through mechanisms in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But Mexico’s president is no standard institutionalist.
Also in Latin America are a growing group of governments. In Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, elections have produced presidents and administrations willing—if not driven by a desire—to buck past commitments to the United States.
For decades, Washington has been Latin America’s leader on issues of immigration, trade, drug policy, democracy, and human rights. The US leadership has produced a number of free trade agreements and bilateral programs that address these issues. But in recent years, the United States has become a hostage to this framework of engagement with the region. Hoary platitudes and inconsistent policies have challenged professional notions of the US partnership, all while escalating domestic US concerns about immigration and drugs.
Once dominant in the Western Hemisphere, Washington finds itself an unexpectedly weak partner – trying to woo other countries instead of the other way around.
In the 1980s, the American scholar Abraham Lowenthal applied the term “inter-mestic” to describe how the US was managing domestic imperatives for immigration, balancing the concerns of US unions with new free trade agreements, and the northward flow of Drugs have driven their foreign policy. Towards Latin America. Nowadays, intermestic could also be used to describe the opposite: the extent to which US domestic politics has been constrained by its relations with partners in Central America, South America and the Caribbean.
Take the case of the June Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. The agenda for the hemispheric meeting was underdeveloped and full of bureaucratic fumbles. But most humiliatingly, Washington had to scramble to secure the presence of some of his closest allies.
Just a few weeks before the event, López Obrador – correctly predicting that the US would exclude undemocratic Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela – said he would refuse to attend if Cuba was not invited. Honduras, Bolivia, and St. (El Salvador and Guatemala also didn’t participate; it’s unclear whether they were excluded by Biden or just decided to sit it out.) Then, two months after announcing he wouldn’t show, López Obrador got a much-wanted Invitation from the White House to meet with US President Joe Biden. The message was clear: If you rigidly impoverish the United States on a hemispheric platform, but remain critical to securing US domestic interests, you don’t just get a pass—you get a hold.
US leverage in other countries has also weakened, including in some of the Central American nations that have joined Mexico’s boycott of the summit. The sub-region that was once the victim of covert and overt US interventions – often with damaging consequences – is now seemingly unmoved by US efforts to punish official corruption and violations of democratic checks and balances. There are hundreds of targeted US sanctions on public and private sector officials in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. But the sanctions have failed to stem these countries’ drifts toward autocracy or force the prosecution of corrupt officials.
Since his election in 2006, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega (and later his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo), has steamrolled independent institutions, such as the Supreme Court; amended the Nicaraguan constitution to abolish presidential term limits; jailed opposition and civil society leaders; peaceful protesters cracked; and – in 2021 – an election stolen. Before that sham vote, the United States imposed sanctions and other sanctions on hundreds of Nicaraguan officials who undermine democracy — to no avail.
Last year, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele stacked his country’s Supreme Court with loyal judges. The body then gave him the green light to amend the Salvadoran constitution to allow consecutive presidential terms, which had previously been prohibited. Although the United States imposed visa and financial sanctions on some court members in response, Bukele officially announced his 2024 re-election bid this September.
A similar inefficiency can be seen with US sanctions on members of the Guatemalan government, which came after President Alejandro Giammattei’s attorney general fired a special prosecutor investigating Giammattei last year. Biden also declined to invite Giammattei to his December 2021 Summit for Democracy. Neither sanctions nor isolation brought about a change.
It was no surprise when neither Bukele nor Giamttei attended the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Their absence was particularly noticeable because one of the key topics of the summit was immigration, and El Salvador and Guatemala are two of the primary sources of immigration to the United States.
In the US fiscal year 2021, US Customs and Border Protection encountered 1,734,686 people trying to cross the southern border, a nearly 278 percent increase compared to the previous year. By August 2022 fiscal year, that number was already 2,150,639 people. Of the migrants intercepted in fiscal year 2022, the majority were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
That none of the presidents of these countries attended the summit is a political problem for Biden, especially as the midterms approach. Immigration policy is a red-hot issue for Republicans, as the public stunts to cruelly demonstrate the anti-immigrant sentiments of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The White House needs the cooperation of the Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan and Mexican governments to return undocumented immigrants, reintegrate them into their local economies and create incentives for them to stay.
Early public efforts by the Biden administration to show high engagement with Latin America have not only failed, but turned politically toxic. The appointment of US Vice President Kamala Harris as the White House envoy for immigration produced a trip to Central America that consisted of a series of inconsistent meetings with Giammettei and Honduran President Xiomara Castro, who later attended the Summit of the Americas. At the summit, Harris announced a promised $2 billion in private investment in Central American countries whose governments are failing.
Hard-nosed sanctions not only undermine migration cooperation, but they also undermine US development policies of the kind Harris has pledged. The two issues are of course deeply connected: Viable local economies reduce push factors for migration. But corruption concerns and sanctions against public officials in Central America mean that most US development aid now flows to non-governmental organizations. Creating the macro and micro economic environment necessary to attract sustainable investment and development requires local governments; without their cooperation on the rule of law, working conditions, property rights and social investment, private bilateral development aid is just a band-aid.
Central American countries and Mexico have also become major shipping points for drugs flowing north, including methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl and cocaine. In some cases, those have fed into the growing opioid crisis in the United States. The US government must collaborate with countries and public officials it has labeled as corrupt and autocratic to stem this drug flow. But those ties have been weakened as a result of a seemingly random US naming-and-shaming program.
There may be a new opening, however, as the new Colombian President Gustavo Petro has pledged to rethink US-Colombian cooperation on drug policy. Until now, this has been guided by Plan Colombia, which was introduced during the Clinton administration and tried to reduce the supply of cocaine in the United States, and its successor programs. Although the original program officially ended in 2015 during Colombia’s peace process, its legacy remains in place, and US drug policy in the country continues to focus on reducing drug supply by eradicating coca plants, d ‘Destroying cocaine processing warehouses and disrupting cocaine supply lines.
But, as Petro acknowledges, this approach has largely failed. Instead, Plan Colombia – for all it has achieved in reducing the number of narco-guerrillas in Colombian territory – has displaced Colombian farmers already living on the margins, militarized government security policies in rural areas and disrupted local ecosystems. Now the new leader has proposed decriminalizing some drugs, allowing small-scale coca production, and offering economic incentives to farmers who refrain from planting any crops in the rainforest.
Petro’s backlash – while potentially a welcome corrective to decades of failed policies – would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. With such an initiative today, Bogotá put the reform on Washington instead of the other way around. In Colombia last week, Blinken appeared to be open to letting Petro take the lead, telling reporters that the United States “supports the holistic approach that the Petro administration is taking.”
Blinken’s trip to South America — which also included stops in Peru and Chile — demonstrated the United States’ willingness to work with a new generation of elected leaders in the region. Many of these countries share domestic challenges similar to those of the United States, including inequality and migration. But it is unclear whether the US will use this opportunity to develop meaningful and modern cooperation with Latin America or whether it will continue to settle for poorly attended summits, occasional high-level visits, and largely impotent sanctions.
