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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
Memorandum to the Press 05.10
Word Count: 750
Thursday, 27 January 2005
The monthly Foreign Service Journal, which is published by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), has a circulation of 15,000. It is mainly
distributed among U.S. career foreign service officers and others concerned with all aspects of U.S. diplomacy. A copy
of the February, 2005 article, “A Blemished Latin American Record,” can be obtained by contacting the Foreign Service
Journal’s Circulation Manager Ed Miltenberger at ffjads@afsa.org or by going to:
Powell’s Latin America Legacy assessed in forthcoming issue of the Foreign Service Journal
"A Blemished Latin American Record"
by Larry Birns and Jessica Leight
In the February issue of the Foreign Service Journal, two researchers at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) noted
that the replacement of Secretary of State Colin Powell by Condoleezza Rice would provide an appropriate opportunity to
assess his legacy regarding Latin America after four years in office. Underlining such an appraisal was the inescapable
truism that Powell "never articulated a vision for the region." Rather, his policy was marked by an "apathy, revealing
major flaws in the areas of staffing, an indifference toward democratic institutions and tolerance for intervention in
the internal affairs of regional nations."
Powell brought with him a huge reputation but also a stunning lack of comprehension of Latin American economic and
political realities. To the contrary, COHA director Larry Birns and Research Fellow Jessica Leight maintain that Powell
allowed a small group of hard-right "ideologues like Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and his assistant Dan Fisk," along with
the Department’s arch-rightwing zealot, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, "to define regional ties, primarily through
an anti-Havana prism.” Reich was later named the White House's Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere after it was
determined that he could not win Senate confirmation to be assistant secretary for Inter-American affairs. He took
advantage of the vacuum that existed in the White House and State Department as well as Powell's lack of a “feel” for
the Latin American portfolio, to promote a hyper-narrow, if perfunctory, focus on trade and terrorism but his main
stance was a notoriously obsessive hatred of his former motherland, Castro’s Cuba. Such a stand “guaranteed a record at
least as mediocre as it had been under all of his Republican and Democratic predecessors.” The two COHA authors maintain
that “during Powell’s watch, U.S. regional policy has been marked by even more acts of arrogance, squandered opportunity
and unbridled unilateralism – typified by the heavy-handed interventions in the electoral processes in Nicaragua,
Bolivia, El Salvador and Venezuela.”
Meanwhile, the Secretary of State simply stood by as his Inter-American Bureau, first under Reich and then under
Noriega’s command, blundered into interfering in democratic elections across the hemisphere and condoned or even
facilitated coups against the left-of-center governments headed by Presidents Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in April 2002 and
Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in February 2004. The toppling of Aristide, which led to heightened political
instability, rampant human rights abuses and a deepening economic crisis in the Western Hemisphere's poorest and most
fragile polity, will ultimately stand as one of the most damaging blemishes on Powell's now tarnished regional
reputation. It was in fact the State Department's calculated refusal to authorize the dispatching of an emergency
U.S.-led police force to protect the Aristide government in its final days that guaranteed the demise of Haiti’s
democratically-elected government, and its replacement with the Washington-imposed and appallingly inept Latortue
interim government, including its outrageously injudicious Justice Minister, Bernard Gousse, for which it never has had
a public word of criticism.
According to Birns and Leight, "Though a dramatically new direction is needed to restore Washington's tarnished
reputation in Latin America, any prospect for constructive engagement now appears distant." They go on to predict that
during Bush's second term, "a regional policy even more disjointed and colored by ideological priorities" is likely to
be seen, along with "four more years of gun-slinging, bluff rhetoric and the imposed 'diplomacy' it has experienced at
the hand of the […] hard-liners under Powell."
Looking back over the last four years, observers of U.S. policy toward Latin America during this era will inevitably
have to conclude that not only did Powell fail to provide a rational direction and a moderate guiding hand for U.S.
regional policy, it is far from clear that he ever intended to do so. Instead, he “allowed a small clique of political
appointees,” who he always defended with inflated ceremonial language, to formulate an ill-considered series of policies
that have driven the United States’ standing in the region to a new and historic low. Evidence for this can be seen in
the failure of Powell’s “Latin America policy team which lacked the “basic sophistication to effectively grapple with
one of the most significant regional developments in decades: the rise of an informal coalition of left-of-center
democracies increasingly skeptical of Washington’s neoliberal diktats.”
The co-authors of the forthcoming Foreign Service Journal article (February 2005 issue) are COHA Director Larry Birns
and COHA Research Fellow Jessica Leight.
January 27, 2005
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research
and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected
bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our
Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.