Priorities for the Next U.S. Administration

By Peter Hakim

Peter Hakim is president emeritus and a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue. From 1993 to 2010, he served as president of the organization. Hakim writes and speaks widely on hemispheric issues and has testified more than a dozen times before the U.S. Congress. His articles have appeared in Foreign AffairsForeign Policy,New York TimesWashington PostMiami HeraldLos Angeles Times, and Financial Times, and in newspapers and journals in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Canada, Cuba, El Salvador, Italy, Mexico, Peru, and Spain. From 1991 to 2001, Hakim wrote a monthly column for the Christian Science Monitor, and now serves as a board member of Mexico's Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica and editorial advisor to the Chilean-based América Economia. Prior to joining the Dialogue, Hakim was a vice president of the Inter-American Foundation and worked for the Ford Foundation in New York, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. He taught at MIT and Columbia, and has served on boards and advisory committees for the World Bank, Council on Competitiveness, Inter-American Development Bank, Canadian Foundation for Latin America (FOCAL), Partners for Democratic Change, Human Rights Watch, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been decorated by the governments of Brazil, Chile and Spain.

Since the turn of the century, perhaps earlier, there has been a consistent distancing between the U.S. and Latin America. Today it is difficult, perhaps even fanciful, to talk about U.S. policy toward the region as a whole; region-wide policies are mostly a thing of the past. During the Cold War, the U.S. had a security strategy focused on keeping the Soviet Union out of Latin America, discouraging the emergence of communist or even leftist governments, and sometimes working to overthrow them. The war on drugs was a modest addition to the strategy.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the  return of elected governments across Latin America, President George H.W. Bush proposed a new regional agenda, calling for a common effort to build a more integrated and cooperative hemisphere. The agenda included negotiating a hemisphere-wide free trade agreement, reinforcing the collective defense of democracy and human rights, and bolstering inter-American institutions. Each of these initiatives, however, fell far short of their goals.

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