Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America | Analysis

US-LATAM: Summit Will Test Obama Magic

Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Apr 15 2009 (IPS) - As Barack Obama packs his bags for his first trip as president to Latin America and the Caribbean, the big question is whether he will be bringing much with him – beyond his listening skills and charisma – that will excite the region and its leaders at the fifth "Summit of the Americas" in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend.

There is little doubt that Obama will make a positive impression on virtually all of the other 33 heads of state – possibly including even Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez – who are expected in Port of Spain. However, observers here do not expect that he will offer any new major policy initiative or vision – other than enhanced co-operation on energy and support for a pending capital increase for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) – that he has not already announced in his nearly 90 days in office.

The hemisphere's leaders have welcomed a number of those steps – notably, his pledge to close the Guantanamo detention facility within one year; his efforts within the Group of 20 (G20) to make more money available to developing countries to cope with the global financial crisis; and this week's executive order to lift all restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island. Yet the consensus here is that Obama still has a long way to go to undo the damage to Washington's image in the region inflicted by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush.

Moreover, Obama will be dealing with leaders of a region that is generally more confident and self-reliant – and far less inclined to defer to the U.S., especially on economic issues – than Bush faced when he attended his first summit in Quebec City in 2001, let alone when former President Bill Clinton hosted the first one in Miami in 1994 to launch the negotiation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), an idea that is now seen as a dead letter.

"Latin America is moving ahead on its own terms," according to Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). "The era of U.S. domination of the hemisphere is over, and the question now is, what relevance does the United States have to the region as a whole? That's what the leaders and the region will be asking themselves as Obama addresses them."

Obama leaves Thursday for Mexico City for talks with President Felipe Calderon, with whom he has already met twice – once just before his inauguration and again at the G20 Summit in London earlier this month. Dominating the meeting will be Calderon's campaign to defeat violent drug cartels whose profile has risen sharply in the U.S. over the last several months.

Obama's presence, which comes on the heels of visits by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, is designed to demonstrate strong U.S. support for Calderon's efforts, and he is expected to promise to expedite delivery of helicopters and other equipment under the three-year, 1.4-billion-dollar Merida Initiative, according to White House officials.

Obama is also likely to publicly acknowledge Washington's own responsibility for reducing domestic demand for drugs that keep the cartels in business – as Clinton did to great acclaim last month – and pledge greater efforts to crack down on the smuggling of weapons from the U.S. to the cartels.

On the eve of his departure, Obama issued an executive order naming leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas, and La Familia Michoacana as subject to far-reaching economic and financial sanctions under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act of 1999 and announced the appointment of a former U.S. attorney, Alan Bersin, as "border czar" to co-ordinate Mexican-U.S. actions on a range of issues, including trafficking and gun-running.

Also on the agenda will be how to deal with Congress' cancellation of a programme that allowed some Mexican truckers to operate in the U.S. under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Mexico's imposition of tariffs on several billion dollars of U.S. imports in retaliation. Obama has promised to launch a new programme after consulting with Congress.

Given Congress' failure to date to ratify long-pending free-trade accords with Panama and Colombia, trade will also come up in Trinidad, as well, although it will not claim the central role it enjoyed in previous summits, according to experts here. Obama has indicated he favours the Panamanian deal and will favour Colombia's as well, provided "benchmarks" ensuring Bogota's protection of labour rights can be worked out.

As with the NAFTA trucking programme, Washington's ratification of the Colombia accord is considered an important test of U.S. credibility in dealing with the region, according to Sidney Weintraub, a Mexico specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

"Every Latin American leader says, 'If this is the way you treat your friends, what are we to think?" he said, speaking of Democratic opposition to the Colombia deal. "It has a lot of resonance in the region, and I think (the administration) realises that."

But the financial crisis and Obama's intentions vis-à-vis Cuba, rather than trade, are much more likely to take centre-stage in Trinidad.

As to the former, Obama is considered unlikely to go much further than he did at the G20 Summit. At a briefing here earlier this week, ret. Amb. Jeffrey Davidow, who acted as the administration's coordinator for the summit, said Obama intended to stress the importance of protecting "the poorest of the poor" through such measures as expanding micro-finance in dealing with the crisis. He may also announce conditional backing for a proposal to increase the IDB's capital to as much as 280 billion dollars, a step that would require approval by Congress where there are significant concerns about the Bank's management.

Davidow also made clear that he hoped this week's lifting of Bush-era travel and remittance restrictions on Cuban-Americans would effectively pre-empt discussion on U.S. relations with Cuba. But most experts here said that hope was unrealistic given the degree to which all Latin American countries have rallied behind calls from regional leaders, including Chavez and Lula, for Washington to lift its 47-year-old trade embargo and normalise ties with Havana.

"I don't think there's any other single issue that the Latins will consider more important as an indication of change," said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, an hemispheric think tank.

Barring some unexpected development, however, Obama is likely to disappoint his fellow-summiteers on that score. Even some of his loyal supporters here expressed frustration that he take more steps this week in moving toward normalisation – for example, by removing Cuba from the State Department Terrorism list or announcing the opening of bilateral negotiations on immigration and anti-drug cooperation.

"He's clearly going to be a media hit and make a positive impression, in part by being acknowledging the shortcomings of the past and at least some parts of Washington's own responsibility for some of the problems that confront the region," said WOLA's Thale.

"But if he doesn't have something major to put on the table in terms of poverty and development, or a major new approach to Cuba, or a significant change in dealing with drug-related violence and insecurity, people in the hemisphere are going to be wondering about the relevance of U.S. policy to the region."

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.