América del Sur y Central nunca estuvieron entre las prioridades de los EE.UU. Esto no constituye ningun secreto. La novedad es que Norteamérica ha dejado de gozar de precedencia en varios asuntos para la mayoría de los países de la región.
The disconnect with Latin America.
There is a long tradition of bemoaning U.S. lack of attention to Latin America. There is also a tradition of writing books and columns on what the United States should do in Latin America. This grew into a cottage industry during the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations as well-intentioned worthies provided advice to the incoming president.Those of us who believe Western Hemisphere countries are key to our future are obsessed with these questions. I have worked in Republican and Democratic administrations. While policies and priorities differ, there are plenty of serious people working Latin American issues day in and day out. Presidents and secretaries of state visit Latin America regularly. But these efforts get little resonance with the experts or the American public.
Andres Oppenheimer’s Nov. 6 column in The Herald is a recent example of that. He checked out Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir to see how many times Latin America is mentioned. His conclusion is that the Bush administration paid insufficient attention to Latin America.
The sad truth is that Washington and the United States in general have no bandwidth for Latin America and the Caribbean. All the people from the executive branch, Congress, human-rights organizations, lobbying groups, from the left, right, and center who care deeply about Latin America could fit into a mid-sized university lecture hall. That’s why so there are so few mentions of Latin America in memoirs by public officials. Latin America does not sell books.
Mainstream media — with the exception of The Miami Herald and The New York Times — carry very little coverage of Latin American issues beyond natural disasters and trapped miners.
American popular culture distorts the reality of Mexico and Colombia and can’t find Brazil on the map. In the meantime Latin Americans have stopped obsessing about the United States. South America is booming. The most successful countries have diversified their trading partners. As a result, they escaped almost unscathed from the 2008 recession.
China, not the United States, is now the largest trading partner of both Chile and Brazil. Colombians grew tired of waiting for the United States to approve the free-trade agreement that was signed in 2006. In the meantime, they and other booming Latin American nations, negotiated agreements with each other, with Canada, the European Union, China and South Korea. They are looking west and east, not north. Peru, organized the “Arc of Pacific,” a group of motivated trading nations on the Pacific coast. Chile, Peru and Mexico deepened their APEC commitments, and Colombia is knocking loudly on APEC’s door.
At a conference in Washington in 2010 a participant asked Colombian Trade Minister Luis Guillermo Plata when Colombia was going to implement Plan B, that is, diversify trade and investment away from the traditional gringo market. His answer was clear: We already have.
It’s time for us to rephrase the question about the United States paying enough attention to Latin America. The question that we should be asking is how much longer Latin America will pay any attention to us.
Charles Shapiro is president of the Institute of the Americas at the University of California San Diego. A retired foreign service officer, he served as ambassador to Venezuela.
Andres Oppenheimer’s Nov. 6 column in The Herald is a recent example of that. He checked out Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir to see how many times Latin America is mentioned. His conclusion is that the Bush administration paid insufficient attention to Latin America.
The sad truth is that Washington and the United States in general have no bandwidth for Latin America and the Caribbean. All the people from the executive branch, Congress, human-rights organizations, lobbying groups, from the left, right, and center who care deeply about Latin America could fit into a mid-sized university lecture hall. That’s why so there are so few mentions of Latin America in memoirs by public officials. Latin America does not sell books.
Mainstream media — with the exception of The Miami Herald and The New York Times — carry very little coverage of Latin American issues beyond natural disasters and trapped miners.
American popular culture distorts the reality of Mexico and Colombia and can’t find Brazil on the map. In the meantime Latin Americans have stopped obsessing about the United States. South America is booming. The most successful countries have diversified their trading partners. As a result, they escaped almost unscathed from the 2008 recession.
China, not the United States, is now the largest trading partner of both Chile and Brazil. Colombians grew tired of waiting for the United States to approve the free-trade agreement that was signed in 2006. In the meantime, they and other booming Latin American nations, negotiated agreements with each other, with Canada, the European Union, China and South Korea. They are looking west and east, not north. Peru, organized the “Arc of Pacific,” a group of motivated trading nations on the Pacific coast. Chile, Peru and Mexico deepened their APEC commitments, and Colombia is knocking loudly on APEC’s door.
At a conference in Washington in 2010 a participant asked Colombian Trade Minister Luis Guillermo Plata when Colombia was going to implement Plan B, that is, diversify trade and investment away from the traditional gringo market. His answer was clear: We already have.
It’s time for us to rephrase the question about the United States paying enough attention to Latin America. The question that we should be asking is how much longer Latin America will pay any attention to us.
Charles Shapiro is president of the Institute of the Americas at the University of California San Diego. A retired foreign service officer, he served as ambassador to Venezuela.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/13/v-print/2498207/the-disconnect-with-latin-america.html#ixzz1dhqYHHPN
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