New Administration exhibits a multilateral diary , but on crucial issues maintains Trump-era measures
03.06.201 / With domestic affairs as a priority, due to Covid, the new Biden Administration's attention to Latin America has generally been relegated to a very low priority. Abroad, negotiations with Iran or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been the focus of U.S. diplomacy, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken taking center stage. But some regional issues have national repercussions in the US, such as migration or drug trafficking, and Biden has placed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, at the forefront of the management of these problems. With Biden's direct dialogue with his hemispheric counterparts hampered by the pandemic, it is Harris who is leading the meetings with Mexican and Central American authorities, as in the trip she will make in June.
article / Miguel García-Miguel
Once he became president, Joe Biden found a very different landscape from the one he had left behind after serving as Barack Obama's vice president. Donald Trump pursued an isolationist and certainly not paternalistic policy compared to what has often been the character of the U.S. relationship with its neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Trump had a dominant and imposing tone at times core topic, such as during the T-MEC negotiations or in the application of sanctions to Cuba and Venezuela, but the rest of the time he disengaged from the region. This lack of involvement was to the liking of populist leaders of different stripes, such as Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador or Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.
In these next four years, we can expect from the Biden-Harris Administration a return to multilateralism, action against climate change and the promotion of democracy and Human Rights, issues that are at the heart of the current US diary . These issues, as well as those related to migratory pressure and the desirability of countering China and Russia in the region with a "vaccine diplomacy" of their own, will mark the relations with neighboring countries. For the time being, however, Biden has maintained Trump's emblematic measures and is taking his time to detail what his Latin America policy should be.
NORTHERN TRIANGLE: Aid and growing tension with Bukele
During his election campaign, Joe Biden promised that if he became president he would carry out an aid plan for Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that over four years would amount to 4 billion dollars and would aim to promote the development of the region in order to prevent the massive flow of migrants to the United States. Previously as Vice President Biden was directly involved in the Alliance for Prosperity that Obama launched in 2014 as a result of a previous migration crisis, which sought to provide more than 750 million annually to the Northern Triangle; the program, whose budget Trump reduced, did not prevent the new migratory boom seen in recent years.
Undoubtedly, the region, one of the poorest in the world, needs incentives for its development, but it also continues to have serious problems such as the propensity to natural disasters, dependence on foreign companies in the exploitation of its resources and poor governance of its politicians. Thus, Washington has included among its priorities the denunciation of corruption in the Northern Triangle countries, publishing lists of corrupt politicians, already started with Trump and now expanded with Biden. Precisely these denunciations and the anti-democratic drift of the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is turning hostile a relationship that Bukele had cultivated during the Trump era.
MEXICO: Migration and environment
Mexico, as a country with which it shares an extensive border, has always been a point core topic in US foreign policy and one of its priorities. With the arrival of the Biden Administration, more friction with López Obrador is expected than during the Trump presidency. The increased migratory pressure on the US-Mexico border is complicating Biden's presidency and risks damaging the electoral prospects of the Vice President, Kamala Harris, whom Biden has directly charged with managing the migratory crisis, which this year is breaking a new record. Also, the limitations placed by Mexico on the presence of the DEA, the U.S. counter-narcotics agency, have strained relations. Biden has not yet traveled to Mexico, despite the fact that visit is one of the first visits made by U.S. presidents.
Biden's environmentalist policy clashes directly with the interests of the Mexican president, who is focused on building a new large refinery instead of promote renewable energies. Precisely, one of the points of tension will be the electric reform that López Obrador plans to carry out, which will further limit the participation of private companies in the electric sector and would promote the use of non-renewable energies, since these are the ones in the hands of the state. The reform was recently suspended by a federal judge, but the government is expected to appeal the blockage. The obstacles to liberalization fit poorly with the renewed agreement Free Trade Agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada (T-MEC).
COLOMBIA: Protests, peace accords and Venezuelan refugees
With Colombia, the Biden Administration is in a period of trial and error. After President Iván Duque approached Trump, despite the latter's initial rebuffs, the Colombian government was praised by Biden for having decided to grant temporary protection status to the almost two million Venezuelan refugees living in the country. Biden congratulated Duque in February by letter, but so far there has been no interview between the two, not even by telephone.
The violent protests that Colombia is experiencing, welcomed with a police management highly criticized by the civil service examination, have not undermined for the moment the express support expressed by the Biden Administration to Duque, but the status may settle in instability with the prospect of the presidential elections in May 2022. In Washington, some missteps in the implementation of the 2016 peace accords, such as the assassination of former guerrillas who laid down their arms and of social leaders, are causing uneasiness. In any case, Colombia is a convenient ally in the fight against drug trafficking, a task in which the two countries have long collaborated closely since the U.S. push for Plan Colombia.
Finally, Bogota may also prove useful to the US government in the management of the Venezuelan crisis, and not only when it comes to retaining immigrants in the Andean country. The new negotiation channels that Biden wants to open, while keeping pressure on Maduro, require a regional consensus of support.
CUBA: The unknown of a post-Castro openness, at least economically
The Obama Administration, in which Biden was Vice President, carried out a historic rapprochement with Cuba by re-establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries. Although Trump maintained that diplomatic recognition, he eliminated some provisions that expanded the contact with the island and imposed new sanctions. After the harsh policies of his predecessor, Biden will not star for now in a return to Obama's policies. The Cuban government did not reciprocate with signs of openness and favoring an immobile regime may have electoral consequences in the US. The possibility of Trump running in 2024 may project in Florida a new struggle for the Latino vote, particularly the Cuban vote, in a state that Biden lost in 2020.
Even so, the Biden Administration will try to loosen some of the sanctions, as has been seen with the authorization to send remittances to the island. For its part, Cuba will probably play quid pro quo diplomacy and wait for its neighbors to take the first steps to implement opening policies, basically on economic issues.
VENEZUELA: Options for a Credible Dialogue
In Venezuela, the recovery of democracy and free elections remain the main goal and Biden has maintained the sanctions against Nicolás Maduro's regime established by Trump. The new Administration has moderated its language and has taken off the table the possibility of a military intervention which was rather rhetorical; however, it continues to consider Maduro as dictator and to recognize Juan Guaidó as legitimate president.
The priority is a negotiated solution, articulated on the next electoral processes, but the talks have only been opened in a timid manner and without establishing well-defined interlocutors and forums for the moment. The US will try to cooperate with multilateral organizations such as the OAS, the Lima group or the European Union to try to solve the political and economic crisis in the country. Cuba also enters the equation in some way, since a change in Venezuela would considerably harm the island if the Castro's successors decide to continue with the communist model .
Moreover, as in the Cuban issue, the attitude towards Chavismo has electoral consequences in the US, especially in Florida, as was seen in the 2020 presidential election, so it is difficult for Biden to loosen the pressure on Maduro before the mid-term elections to be held in November 2022. Biden has granted Venezuelans present in the US temporary protected status.
BRAZIL: The Amazon as a touchstone
Due to the tone of Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, Brazil is another of the countries in the region with which the new Administration has worsened its relations compared to the Trump period. Biden's emphasis on the environment and combating climate change pits him against a Bolsonaro who is clearly less sensitive to these issues, and who does not seem to react sufficiently to the increasingly deforested Amazon. However, even if Biden finds the relationship uncomfortable, the US will continue to work with the main Latin American Economics whose role remains important in regional development issues.
The year and a half remaining until the Brazilian presidential election in October 2022 presents an impasse as the two countries await a possible political turnaround to bring the two countries more in unison, although a return to power of the Workers' Party would not necessarily mean a special consonance, as there was none with either Lula da Silva or Dilma Rousseff even with the Democrats in the White House.
Human rights and vaccines
In addition to the aforementioned countries, some others are also in the US action plan, especially in relation to Human Rights, as is the case of the democratic involution in Nicaragua or the attention that Bolivia can give to the former president Jeanine Áñez.
On the other hand, it is expected that in the coming weeks, with most of the US population already inoculated, the US will proceed to submit million doses of vaccines to Latin American countries. In addition to the real financial aid that these deliveries will represent, they will be a way of counteracting the influence that China and Russia have secured in the region by sending their respective vaccines. If the US-China struggle will mark Biden's presidency, as it will undoubtedly mark this entire decade, one area of dispute will be the US "backyard".
