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Latin America and the Caribbean has not been a priority for President Biden’s foreign policy team. Nor could it be: the region has no front-burner inter-state conflicts, no nukes (¡Gracias a Dios!), no threatening international terrorist organizations. China and Russia are distant rivals. Even so, Latin America impacts the United States more directly and tangibly than any other region of the world.
In a self-inflicted wound, our dysfunctional Senate has allowed two recalcitrant opposition senators to deprive the administration of leadership in key positions. For many months, the Senate held up the nomination of the State Department’s top Latin American diplomat, Brian Nichols, a career foreign service officer. The chair of the U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) remains vacant. The same is true for ambassadorial residences in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, and Honduras.
Recognizably, many U.S. approaches toward the region are embedded in domestic policies with international dimensions. But much of Biden’s domestic agenda has been bogged down in the polarized U.S. Congress or in internecine disputes within the Democratic Party. Responsibilities for removing these roadblocks—on such intermestic matters as immigration, infrastructure, energy, and trade—lie largely outside of the foreign policy team, even less within the domain of those diplomats whose writ is inter-American relations.
Biden’s omnibus Congressional packages—funding infrastructure, renewable energy, and social welfare—include components that could benefit Latin America. But much of the Build Back Better World (B3W) project remains stalled in the Senate. That has handicapped the administration’s capacity to compete with China’s Belt and Road infrastructure investments, including in the Western Hemisphere.
Yet, even a better staffed, legislatively more successful administration would still encounter difficulties in addressing inter-American relations. Effective foreign policy requires capable, willing partners. Today, Latin America is badly fragmented, and many of its leaders—including in Brazil and Mexico, the two largest nations—have shown scant interest in international collaboration. Consequently, in Latin America, any U.S. administration must look to issue-specific modular coalitions to make substantive progress on matters of mutual interest.
In this difficult context, the Biden Latin American team has taken some positive first steps. Time will tell whether the administration can build on these early initiatives.
Biden anointed his vice president to help stem the illegal immigration flowing from the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). Given a thankless task, Kamala Harris is squeezed between the grassroots, pro-immigration wing of her party and the president’s domestic political advisers, who fear appearing ineffectual on border security.
Harris is correctly focusing on the “root causes” of unauthorized migration: unemployment, criminal violence, corrupt governments, climate change, and rural poverty. In her “Call to Action,” Harris has rallied large multilateral firms—including Microsoft, Mastercard, Nespresso, and Chobani—to invest in the region, to generate good jobs and, just as importantly, renew hope in a better future.
Mired in cronyism and ineptitude, the Northern Triangle governments are hardly effective partners for her. In response, she has turned to local civil society organizations, rich with expertise and commitment. But short on resources and influence, social movements cannot substitute for political authority. In Honduras, the recent election of Xiomara Castro, whose promises of structural reforms are welcome in Washington, opens a door to government-to-government cooperation.
The U.S. government lacks the leverage it once possessed to influence the domestic affairs of Latin American nations. And our internal turmoil has tarnished our image as a “shining city upon a hill.” Nevertheless, as opportunities have arisen, the Biden team has nudged history in the right direction. Last June in Peru, the United States joined Pedro Castillo, a socialist union leader, in pushing back against unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud from his opponent, the conservative Keiko Fujimori. In Honduras today, Harris leads a high-powered U.S. delegation to celebrate the inauguration of Castro, despite the past alignment between Castro’s husband and Venezuelan Chavistas.
In Chile, 50 years ago the Nixon administration infamously worked to overturn the democratically elected Salvador Allende. This December, Gabriel Boric, backed by some of the same political forces that featured in Allende’s coalition, won a decisive victory against a conservative opponent. The U.S. properly remained neutral, and its policies figured little in the presidential contest.
Boric’s cabinet includes women in 14 of 24 ministries, some with deep experience in grassroots civil society organizations. Key cabinet appointees have worked in Washington: seasoned finance minister nominee Mario Marcel worked at the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank; foreign minister nominee Antonia Urrejola chaired the OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Other nominees completed graduate studies in the United States and Europe (more in sociology than in economics). It’s an inclusive government that Biden progressives should find simpatico. Chile offers multiple opportunities for collaboration, from gender equity to climate change. Elections later this year in Colombia and Brazil might also create openings for issue-specific multilateral cooperation.
At his Summit for Democracy in December, Biden gave a loud shout-out to the Alliance for Development in Democracy, a new coalition of relatively well-functioning democracies (Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Panama). The alliance garnered high praise from President Biden: “This is the sort of inspiring commitment and partnerships that I hope we’ll see more of … in the next year of action.” Between now and the second Summit for Democracy later this year, the administration can demonstrate that Washington will reward political virtue with economic benefits.
The White House has indicated that it could help spur the relocation of industrial supply chains from China to “allies and partners who share our values.” In 2022, it remains to be seen whether the administration wil take concrete steps such as diplomatic encouragement, tax subsidies, loans, or grants, or encourages multilateral development banks to create more favorable investment climates by financing additional infrastructure, digitalization, and worker training, in friendly nations.
In what has become a bipartisan stance, the Biden team is treating China as a strategic rival. But in Latin America, traveling Biden officials have intelligently lowered the rhetorical temperature. Many Latin Americans see little reason to reject Chinese financing of badly needed infrastructure, provided the projects are well designed, carry reasonable financing terms, and respect local laws; shrill Trump administration admonishments largely fell on deaf ears. The Biden administration recognizes that to compete with Chinese offers, the U.S. administration and business investors will have to offer competitive terms, such as those in the proposed B3W platform.
Like the Obama and Trump administrations before it, the Biden team has not uncovered a magical formula to restore democracy to Nicaragua or Venezuela. It has maintained or even added to inherited economic sanctions, so far to no avail. As is becoming increasingly apparent worldwide (for example, in Belarus, Myanmar, and Kazakhstan), ruthless authoritarians can rally their loyal security apparatus, large public sector, and an allied political party to hold at bay both domestic and international opponents.
The administration promised a review of accumulated sanctions, to reconsider their effectiveness and their collateral damage including the negative consequences for local living standards. But the Biden team has not yet articulated a new approach; on the contrary, in response to Russian pressures on Ukraine it is doubling down on economic coercion (not surprisingly, given the alternatives) as a key tool of diplomacy.
During the presidential campaign, Biden promised to return to Obama’s results-oriented policy of détente toward Cuba. In office, however, the White House seems to have outsourced Cuba policy to hardline Senator Robert Menendez, the formidable chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The White House also hopes to flip a few Congressional seats in South Florida by pandering to anti-Communist sentiment among Cuban American voters. Thus, Cuba policy remains stuck in Trump-era hostility, leaving the United States with little leverage to affect trends, some hopeful, on the island. Perhaps after the November congressional elections, the Biden team will return to a more constructive policy paradigm focused as much on influencing directions in Cuba as on catering to domestic politics.
Administrations deserve credit for not doing stupid things. The White House eschewed calls for military intervention in Haiti following the assassination in July 2021 of President Jovenel Moïse. Despite provocations from Daniel Ortega, the administration has shown little interest in expelling Nicaragua from the regional trade pact, CAFTA-DR, which would disrupt neighboring Central American economies—adding to emigration pressures but not likely dislodging the offensive autocrat.
Looking forward, the administration will host the IX Summit of the Americas in June in Los Angeles. Americas summits gather not only governmental leaders but also corporate executives and civil society representatives. This large gathering will offer the Biden administration a golden opportunity to form working coalitions to advance key policy initiatives, including anti-corruption, democracy promotion, civil society engagement, and sustainable development. By mobilizing Los Angeles’s large, diverse immigrant communities from the Americas, the administration can showcase the deep ties that bind the United States to our hemispheric neighbors.
Richard E. Feinberg is professor emeritus at UC San Diego. Previously he served on the National Security Council, Departments of State and Treasury, the Banking Committee of the House of Representatives, and in Peace Corps Chile. He is the long-standing book reviewer for the Western Hemisphere section of Foreign Affairs magazine.
