In this short retrospective, David Scott Palmer provides a deft survey of President Bill Clinton's Latin American policy, taking him to task for failing to capitalise on the fortuitous inter-American relations he inherited from President George H. W. Bush. In 1992 most Latin governments were freely elected and shared Washington's faith in the neoliberal economic prescription of free trade and open markets. Hemispheric concordance was at its zenith. Whereas Bush responded ‘appropriately and effectively’ to this opportunity, Palmer argues, Clinton ‘failed to seize the moment to build and sustain an effective Latin American policy’ (p. xi), thereby ‘squandering the opening provided by a felicitous convergence of forces’. This failure ‘contributed to the renewed disquiet in the region over U.S. policy’ evident today (p. 95).
A partisan deconstruction might summarise this argument as: (1) George H. W. Bush did a good job in Latin America; (2) Bill Clinton screwed it up; and (3) the dismal state of contemporary relations is Bill Clinton's fault (implicitly, not George W. Bush's). Palmer is not nearly so partisan in assessing the particulars of Clinton's policy, which he reports fairly and accurately. He is correct that Clinton's policy suffered from the low priority that the president and senior officials accorded the region, and their inclination to let domestic politics colour their decisions. He gives Clinton credit for successes on important issues like NAFTA ratification, the Mexican peso crisis, Mexico's transition to democracy, the Guatemalan peace accord, and the Summit of the Americas. Nevertheless, Palmer's overall judgment on Clinton is thumbs down – more so than I think the evidence warrants.
Palmer rests his argument on capsule sketches of seventeen Clinton policy decisions and a data-based assessment of Latin America's political and economic progress during the Clinton years. The decisions cover a grab-bag of issues from the Mexican peso crisis to the return of Elián Gonzalez to Cuba. Their shortcoming is their brevity. Apart from seven case studies that receive detailed treatment, the descriptions run to no more than a few paragraphs – too short to capture the complexity and nuance of these decisions. Readers familiar with them will undoubtedly think crucial elements have been omitted, sometimes distorting the result. For example, Palmer attributes the surge of drug production and political violence in Colombia to Clinton's 1996 decertification of Ernesto Samper's government, which ‘delegitimised’ it. In fact, cocaine production surged because of intensified eradication efforts in Bolivia and Peru, which pushed production into Colombia. Political violence rose as drug money fuelled the three-way war among leftist guerrillas, rightist paramilitaries, and the Colombian army. To these dynamics, certification was marginal.
In a section entitled, ‘Making Difficult Decisions’, Palmer lauds Clinton's handling of the 1994 Cuban migration crisis as an example of ‘doing the right thing’ rather than surrendering to political expediency. In fact, the decision to intern the rafters at Guantanamo could be seen as the height of expediency. Clinton would not let the refugees into the United States because of political pressure from Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, then up for re-election, and he could not send them back to Cuba because of political pressure from the Cuban-American community. Internment was a political compromise that left thousands of refugees stuck in detention for months, until the administration negotiated a new migration agreement with Cuba.
Interestingly, of the seventeen policy decisions that Palmer profiles, he portrays only six as real failures, and three of these involved a hostile Republican Congress: the inability to win fast-track authority for new trade agreements; the failed ambassadorial nomination of Robert Pastor; and the Helms-Burton legislation tightening the Cuba embargo. After the 1994 congressional elections, the Republican majority on Capitol Hill was determined to eviscerate Clinton's presidency. I doubt he could have done anything to win their approval, so it seems unfair to blame their recalcitrance on his lack of leadership. The three other failures Palmer describes are the decertification of Colombia, Washington's tolerance for Alberto Fujimori's assault on Peruvian democracy because he cooperated in the drugs war, and the decision to recall the peacekeeping force aboard the USS Harlan County rather than land it in Haiti in the teeth of an angry mob.
In Clinton's defence, one could argue that decertification significantly improved Colombia's cooperation in the drugs war, as intended (and sent a warning to Mexico, with the similar results); the subordination of Peruvian democracy to the drugs war was not a failure but a conscious trade-off (whether or not you agree with it); and the USS Harlan County incident was a momentary tactical defeat in an overall policy that succeeded in restoring the elected president in Haiti (Jean-Bertrand Aristide's subsequent blunders notwithstanding).
Why conclude that Clinton's Latin American policy was unsuccessful when, on close reading, the specific policy successes outnumber the alleged failures? In the last chapter of the book, Palmer reminds us that Clinton's articulated objectives for Latin America were to preserve democracy, promote prosperity, eradicate poverty and discrimination, and preserve the environment. An examination of political and economic data from the region demonstrates that there was little progress on these dimensions during the Clinton years. That lack of progress leads Palmer to conclude that Clinton failed.
The unarticulated premise is that political decay and economic stagnation in Latin America – and the consequent tension in inter-American relations – resulted from US policy decisions during the Clinton years. Instead, what the data documents is the failure of the neoliberal economic model. Ironically, the very policies that Palmer lauds as George H. W. Bush's biggest success are precisely the ones that produced the current crisis. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, policy-makers in Washington and Latin America shared the vision of a hemisphere united by electoral democracy, free trade and open markets. They expected that this vision would light the way to an harmonious future. Had the model worked, it might have, but it did not work as advertised. Electoral democracy was marred by corrupt and unresponsive political elites. Neoliberal economics failed to deliver on its promise of rapid growth and better living conditions for the poor. These failures, in turn, led to a resurgent and revitalised left, from radical populism in Venezuela to sedate social democracy in Chile. Despite their differences, all the new leftist governments elected in the first decade of the 21st century shared a scepticism about the virtues of unfettered capitalism and a willingness to use state power to attack the social problems of poverty and exclusion. None of these developments had anything to do with the particulars of Bill Clinton's Latin American policy, other than his embrace of the neoliberal faith bequeathed to him by George H. W. Bush. The current discord in inter-American relations did not arise because Bill Clinton was not focused enough, or skilful enough, or courageous enough. It arose because Latin America no longer shares Washington's neoliberal vision of the hemisphere's future. The real failure has been George W. Bush's inability to respond creatively to Latin America's repudiation of that vision.
