In his first months in the White House, President Bush repeatedly promised that he would work to make this the "Century of the Americas," but after September 11, 2001, the president left behind his neighborly focus. Instead, his new vision evoked a global Pax Americana--the type of U.S. hegemony historically exercised in the Western Hemisphere would be extended to the entire globe.

The president's grand new strategy of U.S. foreign and military policy envisions a world in which U.S. politics, culture, and economics are the coin of the realm, and where there are no existing or potential threats to U.S. supremacy. Conjured up by a small circle of neoconservatives in the early 1990s, this dream of a global imperium draws heavily on the U.S. experience in asserting its power in Latin America and the Caribbean.

U.S. unilateralism, exceptionalism, interventionism, neoimperialism--all of which have come to the fore in U.S. foreign policy during President George W. Bush's administration--are homegrown products of what U.S. policymakers still commonly refer to as America's back yard. For almost 200 years, the United States has been exercised economic, diplomatic, and military policies aimed at maintaining a Pax Americana in the hemisphere-the U.S. dominated the region's economy, ensured that no threats arose, and prohibited foreign interference.

Today, as it attempts to extend this imperium to the rest of the world, the Bush foreign policy team is facing rising opposition both at home and abroad. In the Americas--where Pax Americana has had a long test run--there are new challenges to U.S. hegemony in the form of mounting political resistance to the U.S. neoliberal model, growing and increasingly effective social movements, and the failing drug war.

Perhaps the most troublesome obstacle to Bush's new global vision is that here in the secure base of Pax Americana there is an ever-rising flow of Latin Americans and Caribbean islanders who see no economic future in their own countries. At a time when the U.S. seeks to protect its homeland, these refugees from hemispheric Pax Americana are pushing across the increasingly militarized border separating the imperial center from its troubled hinterlands-not an auspicious sign for the stability of a Pax Americana writ on a global scale.

Consensus of the Americas

Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the U.S. has sought to maintain a Pax Americana in the Western Hemisphere. The first challenge to the assertion of U.S. preeminence in the region came from the European colonial powers. But through gunboat- and dollar diplomacy, the U.S. proclaimed that it had exclusive rights to Latin America's international affairs. After World War II, Washington applied the precepts of the Monroe Doctrine to the threat posed by international socialism--whether in the form of the Soviet Union or in the emergence of guerrilla wars. To maintain the American peace, military occupation gave way, for the most part, to U.S. support for "national security states" in which allied elites and security forces did the dirty work of the imperium.

With the end of the cold war and the accelerating pace of globalization in the 1990s, the Pax Americana in the Americas became a model for a new post-cold war foreign policy anchored in the politics of economic integration among "free trade democracies." Latin America was touted as a success story for the Washington Consensus, which linked economic and political liberalization. Relieved that the leftist threat had been thwarted and that the security forces were returning to their barracks, the region's modernizing elites adopted the neoliberal consensus with a triumphalist fervor. At the semiannual Summit of the Americas launched by Bush the elder, Washington's prescriptions on such varied issues as economic reform, corruption, and drug control were echoed by regional leaders as the new consensus of the Americas.

With the exceptions of pesky Cuba, the emergence of Zapatistas from Mexico's indigenous heartland, and the destabilizing drug trade, the prospects for Pax Americana in the Americas did indeed seem auspicious to most observers of hemispheric affairs. NAFTA was hailed as spurring political liberalization in Mexico and enticing most other countries in the region to follow Mexico's example of tying national development to the U.S.-driven pattern of economic integration. After the "lost decade" of the 1980s, economic growth had picked up throughout the hemisphere as poverty rates abated (dropping from 48% in 1990 to 42% by the end of the decade), and the transition from authoritarian, militarized regimes to democracy was consolidating. Even former leftist guerrilla leaders and nationalists were hailing the new consensus. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas disavowed their own national anthem, which had called the yanquis "el enemigo de humanidad."

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the imposition of Pax Americana was consistently met with "Yankee Go Home" opposition in most Latin American and Caribbean nations, but beginning in the early 1990s, "mi casa es su casa" became the prevailing sentiment. Absent viable development alternatives, the region looked to the booming USA for expanding markets, new investment flows, arms purchases, economic aid, and an increasing influx of remittances from economic refugees who found haven north of the border. In times of financial crisis--notably the Mexican peso collapse in 1994--the region appealed to Washington as the lender of first and last resort.

As the decade progressed, the special hemispheric relationship defined by U.S. hegemony solidified. At the same time, however, Latin American and Caribbean leaders also saw with mounting concern that the U.S. attention to hemispheric affairs was diminishing. With Pax Americana in the region well established, the Bush and Clinton administrations attended the demands of a foreign economic policy focused on securing U.S. leadership over the processes of economic integration across the entire globe.

Cowboy Diplomacy

With no foreign policy credentials of his own, George W. Bush came to the White House intent on establishing credibility as an international statesman, starting with Mexico. Like the U.S. electorate itself, many Latin Americans accepted the political persona that the novice Bush created for himself-a rancher who conducts the affairs of the nation with a smile and a handshake, a fellow uncomfortable with the pretentious rhetoric of foreign policy elites but drawn to commonsense solutions that served U.S. national interests. Initially, there were no presidential declarations that hinted of the Pax Americana ambitions of many on his foreign policy team.

With a sprinkling of Spanish phrases, George W. went to Latin America in the first months of his administration without any foreign policy packages. There was no attempt to win friends with new initiatives that built on policy foundations such as FDR's Good Neighbor Policy or Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. Instead, George W. reached out to Latin America merely as a good neighbor with whom you could solve problems talking over the backyard fence.

But Bush's smile, handshake, and cowboy camaraderie proved false, leaving Mexico's President Vicente Fox dangling, his innovative immigration, drug control, and development proposals dead in the starting gates. And the president's promise to make Latin America a high priority was, as it has turned out, about as empty as his promises to inject more humility into U.S. foreign policy and to reject policies that would make the U.S. a "world policeman." Instead, the down-home cowboy of a president turned into a lone ranger.

Certainly, U.S. foreign policy priorities necessarily changed in the wake of the September 11 terrorism, but the terrorist attacks did not change everything. The old imperatives of Pax Americana bucked and snorted into a bold new assertion of U.S. global mastery. For the first nine months of the Bush presidency, the neoconservatives and militarists had been struggling to put a radical new foreign and military policy into motion. They did get their agenda of American exceptionalism into high gear with campaigns to undermine arms control, climate change, and international justice treaties. On the military front, however, Rumsfeld and Cheney were stumbling, while the president himself felt he couldn't risk the little political capital he had by approving the policy agenda of preemptive strikes, regime changes, and empire building that the neoconservatives advocated. Popular support for the war on terrorism gave the hard-liners the opening they need to implement their plans for a global Pax Americana.

Post-9/11 Policy

The biceps of this radical foreign policy agenda-unilateralism and the preference for power over diplomacy-have not needed flexing in Washington's Latin American and Caribbean policy. Unilateralism and U.S. military interventionism were perfected as hegemonic instruments in this region, but having secured Pax Americana in the Americas, there has been little need to resort to the more blatant tools of neoimperial maintenance since the 1980s.

Like most of the international community, the main forums of diplomatic and military multilateralism in the hemisphere voiced strong support for the U.S. war on terrorism. The Organization of American States (OAS) quickly expressed its solidarity, and at Brazil's initiative, the dormant Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty) was revived to invoke a hemispheric consensus that a terrorist attack on one nation should be considered as an attack on all. Cuba, excluded from these multilateral forums at the behest of the U.S., also condemned the terrorist attacks. Although this strong expression of support for the United States did nothing to win new U.S. commitments to hemispheric cooperation and partnership around nonsecurity issues, the war on terrorism did reinforce the role of the Pentagon as the main manifestation of U.S. governmental presence in the region. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. military has expanded its influence in the region.

The U.S. war on terrorism immediately shifted U.S.-Latin American relations toward a security framework that bears striking similarity to the national security state of the cold war years. This is most evident in Colombia, where the Bush administration's reformulation of the drug war as a war on terrorism coincided with election of the rightist Álvaro Uribe as president. The position of hard-liners both within and outside the Bush administration-that the guerrilla insurgence in Colombia was not just a threat to Colombia's stability and to regional democracy but was also a threat to U.S. national security-suddenly became the position of the White House and most members of Congress. During the Clinton years, the U.S. right wing had successfully popularized the concept that the FARC and ELN guerrillas were narcoguerrillas that needed to be directly targeted by the U.S. drug war.

This shift to a counterinsurgency framework gained new support both in the U.S. and in Colombia after the U.S. and President Uribe began labeling the guerrillas as "international terrorists." In their appeals for increased police and military aid, Latin American countries began to frame their requests in terms of the war against terrorism. Similarly, the Pentagon told Congress that its military training programs, military aid, and bases in the region were fundamental in the fight against terrorism. Within Congress, concerns that the extensive U.S. security aid to the region would negatively impact human rights and the consolidation of civilian rule diminished considerably. President Bush's 2003 budget proposal clearly marked the rapid policy evolution from drug control aid that specifically excluded support for the military's counterinsurgency campaign to a mixed approach to allow drug control funding to aid the Colombian armed forces target guerrillas in areas of the country where coca is being produced to the current proposal that will give the army a blank check to use increased U.S. military aid directly for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns. Today, protecting the country's oil infrastructure and crushing the two insurgent forces (FARC and EZN) have eclipsed the drug war as the focus of U.S. security aid to Colombia.

An early sign of the return to the old national security framework in the hemisphere was the Bush administration's cool reception of President Fox's speech at the OAS headquarters in Washington just days prior to September 11. In marked contrast to Fox's proposal that a new hemispheric security architecture address "common adversaries" such as environmental destruction and extreme poverty, President Uribe has advocated new attention to "common enemies" that pose internal regional threats, such as guerrilla insurgents.

These contrasting formulations of the region's priorities for mutual assistance will likely be debated at the Special Conference on Hemispheric Security to be held in Mexico in 2004-ten years after the first Summit of the Americas set in motion the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations and the parallel meetings of the hemisphere's defense ministers. In the 1990s, the region made marked progress away from the national security doctrines that had shaped hemispheric security matters for the previous three decades. President Clinton-a true believer in the political and economic benefits of economic integration-prodded the defense ministers to join the regional integration process by committing themselves to the peaceful resolution of border disputes, multilateral cooperation in peacekeeping missions, and the maintenance of constitutional governance processes.

The 1990s were the glory days of Pax Americana in the Americas-a time when U.S.-Latin American tensions of past decades subsided, and prospects for a benevolent U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere seemed much improved. But even in these best of times, there were deep contradictions in Washington's argument for a policy of increased integration and hemispheric cooperation shaped largely by U.S. corporate interests. In 1994, the Zapatista rebellion foreshadowed a rejection of the neoliberal consensus by social movements that now appears to be taking a broader hold throughout the hemisphere. Clinton's embrace of the drug war-replete with flows of U.S. military aid and trainers to the region-also cast a dark shadow over the Pax Americana in the Americas prospect of stability, peace, and development. Official rhetoric about the confluence of economic liberalization and the transition to democratic peace was also undercut by the self-serving mercantile policy of improving U.S. exports to the region through the free flow of arms, attack helicopters, and fighter planes.

Imperial Missteps

When Latin American leaders met in Miami for the first Summit of Americas, there was a pervading sense of common purpose and a common future. The U.S. agenda of economic integration, neoliberal reform, democratic consolidation, and a campaign against corruption and drug trafficking enjoyed wide acceptance. Nearly ten years later, a dormant but deeply rooted distrust of U.S. hemispheric hegemonic leadership is once again surfacing. What had appeared to the hemisphere's elites to be a seamless integration of trade, financial, diplomatic, and military policy has broken apart. Instead of an integrated Pax Americana in the hemisphere, U.S.-Latin American relations now face an array of loose ends that will be difficult to synchronize at least in the short and medium terms.

For starters, the contradictions of Clinton's rosy predictions for benefits from political and economic liberalization are now too acute to be ignored. The new tensions evident in U.S. relations with its southern neighbors also arise from the missteps, rightist leanings, and arrogance of the Bush foreign policy team. Rather than enjoying a new era of hemispheric cooperation and respect, Latin Americans have discovered that Bush has tapped a team of rogues, hard-liners, and ideologues to manage hemispheric relations. Over the strong objections of the Latin American diplomatic community and despite bipartisan dissent, Bush appointed the abrasive Otto Reich as the State Department's chief regional officer. Unable to guarantee Senate confirmation for Reich, infamous for his rabid anti-Castroism and his mendacious public diplomacy in support of the Nicaraguan contras, Bush recently nominated Roger Noriega-a former chief aid to Senator Jesse Helms, and a favorite of the militant Cuban-American lobby for his activism in support of the contras and against Castro-for the top State Department job.

Reich now moves to a newly created spot on the National Security Council to coordinate "long-term policy initiatives" in the hemisphere. He will be working alongside Elliott Abrams, a leading neoconservative strategist and another Iran-contra operative who will now be overseeing Middle East policy. Noriega's appointment came despite the opposition of Secretary of State Powell, who had recommended Anne Patterson, a career diplomat and current U.S. ambassador to Colombia, for this important position-yet another sign of the dominant role of hard-liners and the sidelining of moderate conservatives in the administration's Latin America foreign policy.

The presence of other practitioners of Machiavellian politics-such as former ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, who directed the contra operations from his perch in Tegucigalpa, as new ambassador to the United Nations and Vice-Admiral John Poindexter, a prominent figure in the Iran-contra scandal, as director of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project-have signaled that Washington may once again be ready to resort to the nefarious practices of Reagan's White House. Also alarming is the appointment of rightist Asa Hutchinson to direct the Drug Enforcement Administration and former Reagan drug control official John Walters as the president's new drug czar. This new foreign policy team responsible for Latin America raises questions about the depth of Washington's commitment to democratic pluralism in the hemisphere. These fears have been repeatedly confirmed over the last year, as U.S. officials and institutions have meddled in the internal political processes of democratic governments in the region America. These appointments and meddling in domestic politics have served as a sharp reminder to Latin America that the ways of the imperium are not framed entirely within the context of free-trade economic partnerships. When politics in its backyard are deemed a threat to Pax Americana, the U.S. quickly resorts to the imperatives of empire, treating the region's nations not as partners but as pawns.

When U.S. officials speak, Latin Americans listen closely, not necessarily because of the integrity of U.S. pronouncements but more because of the implications for future trade, aid, financial flows, and military action. Voters surveyed in Nicaragua and Bolivia concluded that the criticisms directed by U.S. officials against left-of-center candidates, together with direct or indirect endorsements of other candidates, significantly affected voting patterns. In Bolivia, the U.S. ambassador said that the U.S. would cut off economic aid if the popular sector candidate was elected. Administration executive orders relaxing restrictions on human rights and on U.S. clandestine operations and intelligence gathering also portend a return to the cold war era of U.S.-Latin American relations, when the ends always justified the means. Citing threats to national security, the U.S. may resort to its old dirty tricks to ensure that dissident political and social movements do not threaten its hegemonic hold.

In Venezuela, the U.S. initially blessed a coup attempt in April 2002 to oust the twice-elected President Hugo Chávez. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a neoconservative-created arm of the U.S. government established to promote "free trade democracies," had tripled its programs in Venezuela, with its primary aid flowing to key opposition sectors involved in the coup attempt. The International Republican Institute, one of NED's four core grantees, hailed the coup. When later in the year the anti-Chávez forces launched a general strike, Washington echoed support for the opposition's demand for early elections, even though such a move would violate the Venezuelan Constitution. During both the coup attempt and the general strike, it was commonly observed in the region that the U.S. was more concerned with seeing close allies running Latin American governments than in promoting the democratic process.

The White House, preoccupied with its plans for war and regime change in the Middle East, has found itself stumbling in Latin America and engendering new distrust of Washington. The problems in U.S.-Latin American policy are not merely due to insufficient focus. Increasingly, they are the product of the rigid ideological perspectives of the administration's foreign policy team. At a time when there's a definite shift to the left and a rejection of the Washington Consensus on neoliberal economic policy, the hard-liners who backed and implemented Reagan's aggressive Latin American policy are warning that the U.S. may soon be facing a broad front of hegemonic dissent. Late last year House International Relations Committee Chair Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) warned that candidate Lula was a "pro-Castro radical," joining hardliners in Washington who expressed alarm at the new hemispheric "axis of evil" stretching from Brasilia to Caracas to Havana.

Perhaps even more alarming, according to right-wing strategists, is the rise of antineoliberal, anti-American social movements that unify human rights activists, indigenous communities, farmers threatened by cheap agricultural imports, the downwardly mobile middle class, and workers threatened with job loss due to privatization and government downsizing. Fears of a populist and leftist challenge to U.S. regional hegemony have resulted in statements and actions by Bush administration officials that have heightened U.S.-Latin American tensions. The persistence of the guerrilla movements in Colombia and the overflow of Colombia's civil and drug wars across borders also raise fears among U.S. strategists that Pax Americana and U.S. national security are at risk in Latin America.

The Free Trade Disconnect

Regarding hemispheric economic integration, U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Zoellick, the Bush administration's free trade salesman, has a bevy of numbers and anecdotes to persuade the dubious. The litany of paeans to hemispheric free trade start with the reputed successes of NAFTA: creation of two million jobs in the U.S. and a tripling of foreign investment in Mexico, an increase in bilateral trade with Mexico (which now outranks Japan as the second largest U.S. trading partner), and the post-1994 flow of U.S. investment into Mexico. Touting these achievements, the USTR exalts in the future of a hemispheric free trade area including 800 million "consumers"-the largest free trade area in the world. Having just concluded successful free trade negotiations with Chile, Zoellick has switched his attention to Central America, where he intends to put negotiations on a fast track in order to conclude a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by the end of the year. Focused on this goal, he has El Salvador on his mind.

Zoellick champions El Salvador as the future of successful development strategy in Latin America. One may be skeptical, given that the country's leading source of foreign exchange is remittances from Salvadorans who have abandoned the destitution of their country. But the USTR envisions the possibilities of new industrial development-one, two, three, many maquilas. He points to Sigma, a plant specializing in "luxury packaging" and whose main inputs-paper and machinery-are imported from the United States. Then there is St. Jack's, a U.S.-owned textile sweatshop that supplies T-shirts with Disney motifs to J.C. Penney. Salvadorans provide the cheap labor, and the U.S. supplies the thread, yarn, and Disney images. Snack food manufacturing also has great potential as a base for development, as illustrated by Bocca Deli. Since the disposal income for snacks is very meager in impoverished El Salvador, this homegrown deli exports most of its snacks. These businesses represent the "win-win nature of trade," according to trade czar Zoellick, since the enterprising Bocca Deli "makes its corn chips from the white corn sold by U.S. farmers." Now, that's economic integration!

In the 1980s, restive Central Americans, determined to overthrow their oligarchies and challenge U.S. hegemony, proved a formidable threat to Pax Americana in the region. Today, however, Central America is a pushover for U.S. trade negotiators. As their communities are decimated by emigration to the United States, with coffee prices at record lows, and with no other viable economic models offered by the UN's regional economic development commission, the Inter-American Development Bank, or any other source, Central American governments see no alternative but the free trade model advanced by Washington. They may not fully accept Zoellick's "win-win" argument, but the U.S. market offers the only bit of economic salvation they can see.

More problematic for the realization of hemispheric free trade is winning the support of larger countries and ones further removed from the U.S. market. With their regional market threatened by the kind of free trade agreement signed by Chile and proposed for Central America (which gives the U.S. everything it wants with respect to investor rights, intellectual property rights, and access to government procurement contracts), trade negotiators from Mercosur object that the U.S. is pursuing "unilateralism" in its hemispheric economic integration strategy. Mercosur observes that, rather than negotiating with all 34 Latin American nations, Washington is picking up easy clients, rendering it all the more difficult to create a united front for demands that the U.S. liberalize its own markets for such products as cotton, citrus, textiles, and steel.

Countries such as Brazil and Argentina complain that U.S.-dictated terms of hemispheric integration entail a surrender of their own options for domestic and regional development. But, as Washington knows well, the greater fear by recalcitrant nations is that they will be excluded from the largest consumer market in the world. This paradox explains why the FTAA negotiations continue to march toward conclusion despite all the complaints about unfair U.S. trade practices, such as antidumping measures to protect vulnerable sectors, increased farm subsidies, and arbitrary tariff barriers to deter products produced competitively in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In Latin America and elsewhere, the U.S. is making good headway in implementing its free trade agenda. Under Zoellick's deft negotiating and politicking, the Bush administration succeeded in advancing the stalled WTO process, won "fast-track" authority, and sealed a new trade deal with Chile. With a successful conclusion of the CAFTA negotiations highly likely and encountering no unified anti-U.S. position at the latest trade ministerial in Quito, the Bush administration hopes to usher the FTAA negotiations to a conclusion in the next couple of years.

When proposals for economic integration and neoliberal reform were initially presented to the hemispheric community, they came with a strong philosophical argument: Economic openings would induce and consolidate political openings while creating greater political stability, since new rules for commerce and investment would instill respect for the rule of law. Resulting economic growth would reduce social divisions, thereby reducing internal conflicts and the corresponding impulses for security forces to intervene in civilian political affairs. As the region's trade negotiators sit down with U.S. trade representatives, these remain the underlying assumptions, and to a certain extent they still shape the free trade rhetoric. But outside the negotiating meetings and the region's top economic stratas, these glossy representations of the promise of economic liberalization and free trade operate in a world apart from the Latin American reality.

Although poverty rates did drop in the 1990s from the highs of the 1980s, they are again on the upswing-dramatically, in some countries such as Argentina. According to a 2001 report by the UN-affiliated Economic Commission for Latin America, the region's strides in reducing high poverty rates have come to a standstill. According the World Bank, the Latin American economy in 2002 suffered its worst year in two decades. Poverty rates are again on the upswing, eliminating the gains of the 1990s. Today, 214 million Latin Americans live in extreme poverty-meaning that they do not have the income to cover basic needs, let alone deli snacks.

What is the role for this hemispheric society of the disadvantaged and economically displaced in the Pax Americana of the Americas? Robert Zoellick's answer is two-fold. One, they can sew Mickey Mouse T-shirts for U.S. youngsters. Two, new aid initiatives through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will help improve the benefits of Latin America's economic integration by providing "Trading in Freedom" assistance to train our hemispheric partners "to negotiate complex subjects," give them the "ability to implement the final FTAA pact," and help them make the necessary structural adjustments to their economies. In the new configuration of Pax Americana, even the U.S. agency expressly devoted to "development" addresses the problem of impoverishment only through the prism of trade balances and investment rules. Certainly, Latin America's poverty cannot be attributed solely to free trade and neoliberal reforms. But by now it should also be readily apparent that Zoellick is selling shoddy goods.

At first glance, it may seem that Washington is pleased with how things are going on the economic front of Pax Americana in the Americas. But in the eleven years since the elder Bush first proposed the FTAA, the U.S. has seen Latin American countries respond to U.S. trade initiatives by establishing extrahemispheric trade agreements. Mexico, in particular, has aggressively sought to enter into its own free trade agreements with its southern neighbors as well as further afield. This trend runs counter to U.S. purposes. At the Summit of the Americas in April 2001, President Bush was explicit that he was promoting the acceleration of FTAA negotiations "so we can combine in the long term against the Far East and Europe." For Washington, the overriding goal of integrating the Latin American and Caribbean economies is to improve the competitiveness of U.S. corporations in the global economy by reserving privileged trade and investment access to the Western Hemisphere. Addressing the structural problems of uneven economic development in the Americas is not even a stated objective of the FTAA.

Making Good on the Hemisphere's Pax Americana

Occasionally, the U.S. proves that it is indeed a good neighbor-generous, supportive, and there in an emergency. So too, it has on occasion used its wealth and power to improve living standards and the quality of life for the hemispheric neighborhood. Its own democracy, rule of law, and strong civil society are widely admired throughout the region.

However, as the United States seeks to extend Pax Americana to the entire globe, the failures of its hegemonic leadership in what it regards as its own back yard should not be forgotten. Those U.S. citizens with whom Bush's oratory lauding America's "moral clarity" and the commitment to "modern economies and freer societies" worldwide resonates might take a look at the experience (and consequences) of U.S. interventionism, developmentalism, military aid, unilateralism, democracy building, and regional integration policies in the Western Hemisphere. In the Americas, Pax Americana is no dream of peace and prosperity. Rather it is a nightmare of broken promises that Latin America and the Caribbean have been enduring since the 19th century.

If the Bush administration deems it prudent to extricate the U.S. from its empire building ambitions, there still exist opportunities for the president to resume the good neighbor role he played so well at the beginning of his administration. For starters, he could renew the productive discussion with Mexico about bilateral solutions to the immigration issue. Then, President Bush could acknowledge that he sent the wrong signal to the Brazilian people by dispatching trade negotiator Zoellick to the inauguration of Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva instead of Secretary of State Powell. The U.S. should recognize that Brazil's new president represents not only the Brazilian people but also the aspirations and concerns of the hundreds of millions of Latin Americans who support democratization but also demand broad economic development. Concerned that the world-and particularly the U.S. voting public-- is not seeing his "compassionate conservatism," President Bush has since his State of the Union talked more about his commitment to target poverty and public health threats like AIDS. One good place to start would be to support President "Lula" da Silva's promise to eliminate hunger in Brazil through foreign aid and IMF support that breaks with the poverty-inducing and development-destructive structural adjustment plans that are still standard fare in Washington.

Another opportunity for the U.S. to show good will would be to listen to and support the new Latin American leadership emerging in multilateral forums such as the Organization of American States and the ministerials leading to the Special Conference on Hemispheric Security. In the 1980s, Latin American countries themselves through the multilateral Contadora process and Arias Peace Plan were instrumental in forging peace to Central America, and such models should be encouraged and supported by Washington as Latin Americans themselves attempt to face the deepening crisis in Colombia. Also propitious-and worthy of U.S. encouragement-has been the increased transnational networking of civil society offering citizen evaluations of Plan Puebla-Panama and similar plans to ensure that affected populations have a voice in the infrastructure development projects of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Latin America.

A more integrated economy in which the U.S. functions as leader by virtue of its wealth, power, and political stability is a worthy goal. But such a Pax Americana in the hemisphere would require respectful partnerships, as well as responsible leadership that tackled the problems of uneven development and deepening impoverishment. That would be a foreign policy vision worth pursuing.

Tom Barry <tom@irc-online> is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) where he codirects the joint IRC-IPS Foreign Policy In Focus project. He has written numerous books on Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. For more information, visit www.irc-online.org.

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Published by the Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC). ©2003. All rights reserved.

Recommended citation:
Tom Barry, “Our Backyard Pax Americana,” Americas Program Policy Report (Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, February 17, 2003).

Web location:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/reports/2003/0302paxam.html