MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Latin America Seeks Trade Alternatives

The decline of U.S. “soft power” in South America has encouraged increased trade relations with other partners, including more arms trading, as well as rejection of U.S. calls for a shift away from conventional military to “constabulary” forces.

U.S. Relations Relations between the United States and South America have worsened considerably since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and South American countries are taking advantage of alternative relations being offered, especially with China and the E.U. In South America, the U.S. is seen in an increasingly negative light, having severely degraded its "soft power" since 2002, as shown by regional opinion surveys by Latinobarometro over the past eight years. The U.S. record on human rights, its inconsistency regarding terrorism and the perceived degradation of its own civil liberties have deeply undercut its moral credibility with South America--and this on top of the economic failures of the "Washington Consensus." As a result, when the U.S. Southern Command calls for constabulary forces to confront "new threats" of terrorism, drug trafficking and youth gangs--accepted by all the countries of Central America and the Caribbean--its reasons for doing so are questioned in the South. Rather, Washington is seen as pursuing its own "imperial" interests, especially energy security. In recent years, the American Serviceman's Protection Act (protecting U.S. soldiers from prosecution for crimes they might commit while abroad) has been widely rejected by regional governments. When the United States set up a base in the Chaco area of Paraguay, near the oil- and gas-producing regions of Bolivia, Brazil deployed troops to patrol its own border nearby. More recently, Ecuador has denied renewal of the U.S. lease of its Forward Operating Location at Manta when it expires in 2009, and the United States is hard put to find a new home for the base in Central America. This questioning of U.S. policies has opened the way for incursions by extra-regional countries into South America, including via trade in arms. Regional Divisions Across South America there are greater divisions now than at any time in past 20 years, forcing limited but growing concerns over a neighbor increasing arms spending across the border. Since the crisis of 2001, there has been a growing polarization among governments. Outside analysts often simplistically describe these differences in terms of the old divisions of "left" and "right." Indeed, two countries might be considered right of center-- Colombia and Peru, which have followed the U.S. lead in accepting free trade agreements, while Chile has taken a more pragmatic, "go-it-alone" approach. But significant divisions are also evident among the countries considered left-leaning, though perhaps they are better characterized as supporting a stronger role for the state. The generally socialist governments of Chile, Brazil and Uruguay should be distinguished from the more populist governments of Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador. Trading blocks such as Mercosur suffer from growing weaknesses, with the smaller partners (Paraguay and Uruguay) receiving no response to their complaints over asymmetries in the block. With the pending entry of Venezuela, and the acceptance that each of the members can negotiate separate trade agreements with third parties the customs union has little effective meaning. Energy And Trade Globalized markets, especially in commodities, have promoted the strongest growth rate of Treasury income in the past century. However, coexistent with abundance of resources and energy and increasingly favorable terms of trade, very sensitive energy-trade agreements are being broken between Bolivia and Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil, and Argentina and Chile. Peace-Keeping ForcesOne of the roles promoted by the United States--peace-keeping--is judged by almost all regional governments as an attractive confidence-building measure, but insufficient. South American countries wanted to maintain conventional armed forces even when their budgets were hard pressed to do so. Today, this promotion of multilateral idealism, centered on cooperation with the U.N., and on "human security," is giving way to more realist foreign policies requiring conventional operational capabilities. Resource Security London's recently announced intention to claim sovereign rights over more than 600,000 square miles of Antarctic seabed is seen as violating the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, overlapping all of Argentina's claim there, and part of Chile's. This is interpreted as a rush for the South Pole in search of resource security, much like what is occurring in the Arctic. As a result, these regional and global factors augment interstate problems in South America, and uneven arms acquisitions are further altering regional strategic balances.