Washington, March 02: Hillary Clinton is midway through a week-long tour of Latin America, as she seeks to rescue the United States’ flagging image in the region. The Secretary of State will wrestle with a host of thorny issues during her trip, most of which offer but a slim chance of success.
Starting out in Uruguay, where Ms. Clinton attended the inauguration of President José Mujica, she may well have bumped into co-attendee and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of the most vocal critics of U.S. foreign policy in all of the Southern Cone.
However any formal interactions with Chavez or Evo Morales of Bolivia were earlier ruled out by Assistant Secretary Arturo Valenzuela who said in Washington that “the only bilateral that is on the books is with Cristina Kirchner, the president of Argentina”.
With Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador precluded from Ms. Clinton’s itinerary the pressure is on the Secretary to make the most of her interactions with the relatively moderate leaders of Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala and Costa Rica.
Yet even within that group her mission is daunting, none more so than the U.S.’s ambition to persuade President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to back its efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. While the U.S. is pushing for tougher sanctions against Iran through the United Nations Security Council, Brazil, a non-permanent member of the Council, has indicated its opposition to this.
“The visit also comes as Brazil gears up for general elections in October, with President Lula’s chief of cabinet Dilma Rousseff and governor of São Paulo José Serra the likely rivals in the race for president.”, according to Peter DeShazo of the Centre for International and Strategic Studies.
Argentina may prove to be yet another disappointment. With the Secretary meeting Ms. Kirchner at the peak of a dispute with Britain over sea-routes access to the Falkland Islands, her unexplained cancellation of a visit to Buenos Aires is likely to have bruised egos further.
In Chile, where Ms Clinton will again meet a newly elected leader, President-elect Sebastián Piñera, post-earthquake recovery is likely to crowd out any prior agenda. Trade may especially be marginalised, a likely concern for the U.S. given China’s growing dominance in this area.
The recent creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a rival to the Organisation of American States marks some of the frustrations with American hegemonic tendencies. The Community is “a regional organization, whose only clear feature so far is that it will exclude the U.S. and Canada”, according to Kevin Casas-Zamora of Brookings.
If there were any hopes here that things would be different under President Obama, they were belied by U.S. hostility towards Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, an ally of leaders like Chavez and Kirchner. The persistent embargo against all things Cuban has not won them any points for popularity either.
If Ms. Clinton is to win hearts and minds in the Lat-Am region, she will have to convince her audiences over the rest of the week that substantive changes in U.S. foreign policy engagement in the region will follow her earnest interlocutory efforts.
—-Agencies