The former vice president has spent decades working in the region—and he has a chance to rebuild America’s image there.
The trip
to Guatemala was a crucial one, Joe Biden told the delegation flying with him
on Air Force Two. It was January 2016, and the Central American country was
emerging from months of political chaos after its president and vice president
were ousted and jailed over a multimillion-dollar corruption scheme. Fed up
with the political establishment, Guatemalans elevated a TV star, Jimmy
Morales, to the presidency. Now Biden would attend Morales’s inauguration,
lending legitimacy to the new leader.
Biden
would spend just one day in Guatemala, but nevertheless squeezed in a private
meeting with Morales, led migration talks with the leader and his El Salvadoran
and Honduran counterparts, joined a lunch with them and the American
delegation, and answered questions from the local press. (Representative Norma
Torres, part of the delegation, told me it was obvious to the other presidents
in the room for the working lunch that Biden had just given Morales “the talk,”
in which he set out the United States’ expectations for Guatemala, and she
recounted how the other leaders all seemed to remember having that conversation
with Biden at some point too.) While there, Biden pitched his vision for the
region, in which the three so-called Northern Triangle countries could work to
be more open societies and tackle the “root causes” of mass migration—all with
American financial and political backing.
On the
face of it, the trip was unremarkable: a diplomatic visit in keeping with those
made by senior American leaders in the past, containing some combination of
platitudes and pressure for the host country. Yet in many ways, Biden’s 2016
tour of Guatemala offers significant insights into what his administration’s
foreign policy would look like.
President
Donald Trump has largely ignored Latin America, part of a broader withdrawal
from international affairs that has had the effect of sparing the region of the
chaos that his presidency has created when dealing with China, Iran, North
Korea, or the future of the NATO alliance. So Latin American leaders have
adapted their policies in recent years to account for this absence of U.S.
leadership, as well as Trump’s general unpredictability.
Judging
by his time in office as vice president and as chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, as well as by the accounts of his close friends, his
former aides, and policy experts, Biden would approach the region differently.
The former vice president made more trips just to Guatemala—hardly a behemoth
such as Mexico or Brazil, or a strategic interest such as Colombia—in his two
terms than Trump has made to all of Latin America as president. And his efforts
to court the region’s leaders during Barack Obama’s presidency point to another
key tenet of Biden’s policies were he to be elected: A major part of American
domestic policy depends on stability along its southern border, and so the U.S.
should promote cooperation among countries, and partner with them, to prevent
and control migration.
Biden’s
interest in Latin America, and experience there (he was Obama’s chief emissary
to the region)—combined with Trump’s apparent lack of concern for it—thus offer
the former vice president an opportunity: Regional leaders have come to accept
the ebb and flow of American engagement as a condition of living next to a
superpower, but Biden could use Latin America to signal a restoration of
Washington’s historic leadership, leveraging his existing relationships and
focus on multilateralism to cement American primacy in a region largely eager
for a respite from years of erratic diplomacy.
Latin
American countries have long had good reason to distrust the U.S., which was
itself an imperialist power in the region after European nations faded away.
Covert CIA operations, coups d’état supported by Washington, and direct
American invasions colored Latin American perceptions of the U.S. during the
20th century, and the rise of leftist politicians in the 1990s and 2000s
cemented strong anti-American attitudes.
So when
Obama and Biden entered office in 2009, they were faced with a legacy of
decades of harm and distrust. Biden declared on his first visit to the region
that “the time of the United States dictating unilaterally, the time where we
only talk and don’t listen, is over.” Secretary of State John Kerry reaffirmed
that message in 2013, announcing the era of the Monroe Doctrine—a U.S. policy
ostensibly issued to condemn European intervention in the Americas but really
just used to justify America’s own intervention in Latin American affairs—to be
over, sparking some measure of celebration in the region. (Though the degree of
America’s engagement did change, it did intervene in countries’ internal
affairs, often with their government’s support.)
If the
Obama administration sought to characterize its policy toward Latin America as
having a softer tone and focused on multilateral cooperation on climate change,
trade, migration, and economic development, the Trump administration’s overall
strategy has been significantly more haphazard. In some cases, it has sought to
strong-arm regional leaders to agree to its demands, but beyond a handful of
issues related to migration and Venezuela, the U.S. has noticeably stepped back
as social unrest, economic crisis, and political turmoil have rolled through
the region.
Demonstrations
broke out across South America in 2019: Anger at elites and economic inequality
fired up protests in Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador, while frustration with
corruption drove people to the streets in Peru, and outrage over a tainted
presidential election led to an uprising in Bolivia. With regimes falling,
governments fleeing capitals, and discontent rising, some fashioned it a “Latin
Spring.” At the same time, the coronavirus’s spread (now apparently slowing
overall) has led to what looks to be an economic catastrophe. Lockdowns,
shutdowns, and national social-distancing efforts have plunged economies into
severe recessions, wiping away 20 years’ worth of poverty-reduction efforts and
sending unemployment rates soaring.
“Latin
America is not in good shape. It was not in good shape before the pandemic, and
it’s in worse shape now,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American
Dialogue think tank in Washington, told me.
Unrest
didn’t end with the pandemic, but social movements did take a pause. Populist
leaders in Brazil and Mexico reasserted control over society and assured their
people that the public-health crisis was under control. As Southern Hemisphere
countries enter the summer months, when the coronavirus is expected to abate,
the root causes of discontent are once again fomenting instability, and
violence. Embezzlement, price gouging, and graft have been commonplace across
the continent during the pandemic. And through it all, America has watched from
afar, declining to intervene or lead.
The
U.S.’s absence throughout the tumult is a snapshot of the larger failings of
the Trump administration to take its southern neighbors seriously, Cynthia
Arnson, the director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program, told me.
Aside from renegotiating NAFTA, forcing Central American countries to accept a
“safe third country” deal, and inflaming Venezuela’s domestic political crisis,
“there hasn’t been much else to U.S. policy in the hemisphere,” she said.
Instead, driven by then–National Security Adviser John Bolton, the White House
has revived the Monroe Doctrine, asserting a right to intervene in the region
to prevent the growth of Russian and Chinese influence—which, ironically, is
exactly what has happened as America has stepped away.
Tensions
between the U.S. and Latin America aren’t new, but the region now holds an
overwhelmingly negative perception of Washington—similar to the antagonism of
the Bush era of the 2000s. Now, as the region becomes divided between the
conservative governments in Central America, Colombia, and Brazil and the
leftist leaders around them, the Trump administration’s policies seem to be
fueling polarization, Shifter said. “It’s made things worse. So you could see
some sort of reduction of polarization with greater predictability by a new
administration.”
There is
reason to believe that Latin American leaders might actually trust a President
Biden—he has dealt with their contemporaries, and he has already rebuilt
American relations with the region once before.
“The
Trump administration has been very disruptive, and the aftereffects of that are
not going to vanish overnight,” Dan Erikson, who is advising Biden on Latin
America policy, told me. “But there’s an underlying resilience in the
U.S.–Latin American relationship that Joe Biden would be well positioned to
capitalize on.”
Biden’s
history in the region lends him legitimacy. As a senator in the ’90s, he was
the point person on the Plan Colombia in Congress, working with the Bill
Clinton administration to hash out the details of an anti-drug-trafficking,
anti-violence financial and security package that Colombian leaders repeatedly
praised. While vice president, he met often with Northern Triangle leaders in
their countries and in Washington to draft the guidelines for the Alliance for
Prosperity, which offered foreign aid in exchange for domestic reforms and
economic investment, and worked to ensure that they also pledged money to
anti-poverty and security goals.
Biden
often expresses his diplomatic approach in terms of personality—at Democratic
primary debates and in foreign-policy speeches he has talked about how “all
politics is personal, particularly international relations” and spoke about his
“relations all over the world,” boasting about how he knows many world leaders.
But in Latin America, those relationships were actually personal. He spoke
regularly with regional presidents, ministers, and prosecutors. He once joked
with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos about knowing him when Santos was a
finance minister and Biden was a senator (“Now you’re president and I’m vice
president,” Biden said. “It’s obvious who did well!”).
Alongside
those personal connections, Biden also made multiple official visits. Whereas
Trump has visited a Latin American country only once in his
presidency—Argentina, for the 2018 G20 Summit in Buenos Aires—and Vice
President Mike Pence has traveled to the region five times, Obama made five
trips (three in his first term), and Biden visited 16 times, more than any
other president or vice president.
Part of
the frequency of Biden’s trips is for raw policy reasons: He was assigned the
Latin America brief during the Obama administration. But there might also be a
deeper emotional underpinning to Biden’s interest in the region. Senator Tom
Carper of Delaware, a longtime Biden friend, told me that the former vice
president also feels a moral obligation for the U.S. to be active in Latin
America. Motivated by his Catholic faith, Biden believes Washington has to care
for and support its neighbors, especially the Northern Triangle nations. “He
believes that we—the U.S.—are the root cause of much of the violence and crime
and the lack of economic opportunity in these three countries in Central
America,” Carper said. “If it weren’t for our dependence and our reliance on
illegal drugs, fostering the sale and the transport of these drugs … life in
these countries would be a lot better.”
Carper,
who like Torres was on Air Force Two for Biden’s last official trip to Guatemala,
said he was certain Biden would “make sure that we do a better job, and take
seriously our response” to Central and South American countries because “we
have a moral responsibility, having created havoc in these countries.”
In that
vein, Biden’s pitch to Latin America will sound a lot like what he’s said
before: that he envisions “a hemisphere that was secure, middle class and
democratic, from the northern reaches of Canada to the southern tip of Chile.”
Biden plans to deal with root causes and rely on multilateralism. He hasn’t
been quiet about America’s neglect of its southern neighbors and has
articulated a wide-ranging vision to reengage the region. The “Biden Plan for
Central America,” for example, updates the 2015 Alliance for Prosperity to use
$4 billion in foreign aid over four years to fund and back anti-corruption
efforts in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador; push them to reduce migration
and fight human trafficking; and decrease poverty. Biden has long blamed these
factors for migration to the United States and violence in migrants’ home
countries. Although Bolton spoke of Latin America as “our hemisphere,” in which
Washington would call the shots, Biden instead sees the U.S. as “the driving
force” to “enable all of our countries to prosper and grow.” The difference
between the two views is subtle, but important.
“The
best way to pursue a reset in Latin America, in many ways, is just to start by
listening, which the U.S. rarely does and Trump never does,” Ben Rhodes,
Obama’s former deputy national security adviser and a co-host of the Pod Save
the World podcast, told me. “The capacity to make leaders and people in Latin
America feel like they’re being heard again by the United States is going to be
essential after the Trump administration basically played into every negative
stereotype and generalization about how America has acted in that region for
the last hundred years.”
Shifter,
Arnson, and others I spoke with agree with this assessment: A Biden presidency
would be welcomed in the region because he would emphasize multilateral
dialogue in confronting climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, and economic
recovery, after Latin American leaders became “accustomed to being bullied or
ignored or arm-twisted into capitulating to U.S. demands” during the Trump
years, Arnson said.
A new
Biden approach to the region would likely also account for the link between
foreign and domestic policy on issues such as immigration reform and border
security, for example. A return to the traditional asylum process and an
overhaul of U.S. immigration law would create space for tougher negotiations
with Mexico and Northern Triangle countries on fighting organized crime and
cartels.
The fact
is that although American foreign policy tends to devote much of its attention
to events in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, Latin America policy has
perhaps the greatest impact on Americans themselves—Latino and Hispanic
families are often directly affected by any change in policy in the region. The
Trump administration’s decision to end temporary protected status, a program
that normalizes the legal status of Salvadorans and Hondurans living in the
U.S., and policies that force asylum seekers at the southern border to remain
in Mexico while their cases are processed, are just two examples of how foreign
and domestic policy mix.
“Americans
who have family in Latin America understand that,” Rhodes said, “but more
broadly, there’s just a lack of an awareness of how closely impacted we are—in
terms of the flow of people, in terms of trade, in terms of political
dynamics—by what we’re doing in Latin America.”
That
direct link between foreign policy and American politics demonstrates why
sustained engagement and longer-term investments in the region are necessary.
These nuances in foreign policy also have political ramifications in an
election year: As Biden endeavors to juice up his support among Latinos, a more
tailored campaign strategy that emphasizes his accomplishments in specific
Latin American countries would resonate with smaller communities of
Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Cubans, and Colombians living in swing
states such as Florida, Torres told me.
If he
wins, Biden might get a second chance at achieving his vision for a free and
secure Western Hemisphere. At the very least, these states would have an
American ally who actually cares about them—and doesn’t inject himself into
domestic affairs to revive a flailing campaign.
Biden’s
interest in Guatemala captures this dynamic well. When he first championed the
Alliance for Prosperity and anti-corruption reforms in the country, Biden dealt
with President Otto Pérez Molina, a former army officer accused of links with
human-rights abuses and civilian murders. He pushed Molina to accept the
U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (known by
its Spanish acronym, CICIG), which worked with Guatemala Attorney General
Thelma Aldana to investigate official corruption, including allegations of
bribery against Molina and his vice president. Both were investigated, ousted,
and jailed.
Then
Biden had the task of assuring Morales, Molina’s successor, that he, too,
should support the CICIG and Aldana’s work. But in Trump’s first year in
office, Aldana moved to investigate Morales for campaign-finance-law
violations. Morales responded by trying to curb the CICIG’s power, and block
Aldana’s probe into him and his family. Guatemalan presidents have legal
immunity that can be stripped away by a two-thirds vote in the country’s
Congress, but because Aldana and the CICIG were also investigating senior
lawmakers at the time, her effort died there. The next two years, “the CICIG
died a death by a thousand cuts,” Arnson told me.
Throughout
this whole episode, Morales actively courted Trump’s support to delegitimize
the CIGIG and push Aldana out. To an extent, he won a minor victory: The White
House remained mum on Morales’s actions. Without a strong American presence,
Morales turned out not to be the great crusader for justice Biden had once
hoped he would be.
To
contrast Trump and Biden’s approaches, Senator Carper told me about
conversations he had with Biden and Aldana before Guatemala’s 2019 presidential
election, when the prosecutor was running to succeed Morales. Carper was about
to meet with Biden in Washington when the senator found out Aldana was in town.
He told Biden, who stopped what he was doing, tracked her down, and spoke with
her on the phone. Biden had met with Aldana on his 2016 trip, and during their
conversation three years later, Carper said, the former vice president
encouraged her in her campaign, saying, “hopefully, she would win. And when
that happened, we would be there to help her and help her government to be
successful.”
Aldana
was ultimately disqualified from running after prosecutors unsealed corruption
charges against her that she argued were trumped up. She fled for the U.S.,
where she was granted political asylum. She now lives outside Washington.
The
episode illustrates many of the complexities and pitfalls that have troubled
U.S. policy in Latin America for decades. Throughout, however, Biden has
remained unbowed, his interest in the region clear over the years, and likely
to be a centerpiece of his foreign policy should he be elected. “The challenges
ahead are formidable,” he wrote in a 2015 op-ed that laid out the
administration’s gambit. “But if the political will exists, there is no reason
Central America cannot become the next great success story of the Western Hemisphere.”
*Christian
Paz is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/joe-biden-foreign-policy-latin-america/616841/