Colombia

The extradition process enables governments to bring fugitives abroad to justice, but it can be fraught with political tension, even when a treaty is in place.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering October 25 to November 1, was compiled by Yuxin Lei and Rebecca Turkington.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering September 24 to October 1, was compiled by Yuxin Lei and Rebecca Turkington.

Punishing allies won’t help to rally international support for the restoration of democracy.

The ascent of leaders who favor free trade opens space for real integration.

This weekend a beleaguered Argentina hosted the G-20 finance ministers to work out the agenda for their leaders’ December conclave in Buenos Aires. While officially focused on infrastructure and the future of work, these more technical discussions were overshadowed by U.S. tariff threats and President Donald Trump’s belligerence toward allies and the World Trade Organization. The U.S. attack on the global trading system comes as Latin America is finally embracing free trade. In a resurgence of market-friendly leaders, politicians from the left and right are seeking to expand their nations’ global commercial footprint through a flurry of free-trade and investment agreements. In normal times, they might have turned to the U.S., a top investor and trading partner for most every nation. Yet Trump’s obstinacy throughout the NAFTA negotiations suggests few deals are to be had to the north. As a result, a marked shift is now underway. The European Union (EU) has become a favored partner: Mexico advanced the renegotiation of its 2000 agreement in April, opening up the agricultural, services, and digital goods sectors, simplifying customs and harmonizing regulations to make it easier to sell across borders. Mercosur, the trading bloc founded by Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, is pushing to complete an EU agreement that has been marinating for almost two decades. Latin American free traders are also taking their cause to Asia. Mexico, Peru, and Chile were founding partners of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, now the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership after the U.S. withdrawal, and neighboring Colombia is among the nations clamoring to join. Mercosur is eyeing negotiations with South Korea, following a path laid out by Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, which all signed bilateral deals this year. Panama has begun negotiations with China, while Colombia and Mercosur are flirting with the idea. And the South American trading bloc has started talks with Canada and reached out to New Zealand and Australia to gauge interest in boosting trade ties. The main Latin American economies are also moving to make real the long elusive dream of regional economic integration — in which it lags every region but Africa. This week, leaders of the Pacific Alliance, a comprehensive free-trade agreement begun by Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, will meet their Mercosur counterparts in Puerto Vallarta to discuss collaboration and even a potential merger. An agreement would bring together 80 percent of the region’s gross domestic product, creating a $4.3 trillion dollar market. While not as large a prize as the EU or China, this preferential agreement could be more important for Latin America’s future prosperity. Intra-regional trade and investment lean toward medium to higher technology sectors — including chemicals, cars, and pharmaceuticals — and higher value-added industries that bring in technology, enhance productivity, and create better jobs. If Latin American nations want to prosper from global supply chains, they must develop regional production to the point where they can compete with the integrated enterprises of Asia, Europe, and North America. Of course, Latin America’s current free-trade fervor could wane. After Argentine president Mauricio Macri plays host at the end of the year, the G-20 mantle will move on to Japan. Mexico’s president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s NAFTA-friendly comments sit uneasily with his more protectionist calls for self-sufficiency in food and energy. And in Brazil, the next president, who will take the helm in January, could reaffirm or discard the nation’s newfound trade enthusiasm. In that respect, the concrete results of the agreements now on the verge of completion will be critical. Yet even if there is an ebb and flow in sentiment, Latin America’s trade horizons have broadened. While geography remains in large part destiny, Latin America for now is moving on without the United States. After the NATO summit, Germany’s foreign minister proclaimed that the European Union can “no longer completely rely on the White House.” At least on trade, that lesson is one Latin America has already learned. View article originally published on Bloomberg.

Venezuela’s refugee crisis is metastasizing. According to the United Nations, 5,000 Venezuelans have fled to Curacao, 20,000 to Aruba, 30,000 to Brazil, 40,000 to Trinidad and Tobago, and more than 600,000 to Colombia. In times past, the U.S. has led in responding to exoduses sparked by political or humanitarian crises. In 1980, it welcomed 125,000 Cubans fleeing in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. Nearly two decades later, it provided respite for tens of thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, and more than a quarter-million Salvadorans after a 2001 earthquake. Much as the region has not always welcomed some U.S. interventions — think Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and Central America throughout the 1980s — when crises arise, Latin American nations still look north. Yet although the U.S. has put pressure on Venezuela to restore its democracy, the burden of coping with the implosion of what used to be Latin America’s richest nation has fallen most heavily on its immediate neighbors. They can’t afford to wait for a distracted and less benevolent U.S. to do the right thing. Instead, for their immediate and collective future, they must forge a regional response to what has become the hemisphere’s greatest humanitarian crisis. Despite touting its “year of engagement” with Latin America and dredging up unfortunate echoes of the Monroe Doctrine, the Trump administration seems to have little desire to lead in the Americas — at least on the region’s most pressing issues. It pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving Canada, Chile, Mexico and Peru bereft, and has repeatedly threatened to end the North American Free Trade Agreement. It walked away from the Paris climate accord, which Latin American nations widely supported, and rolled back the opening with Cuba. As for Latin Americans themselves, the U.S. is more likely to kick them out or wall them off than extend its welcome mat. It recently ended Temporary Protected Status for some 200,000 Salvadorans and 60,000 Haitians (the fate of an additional 87,000 Hondurans is unclear), and looks to begin deporting some 700,000 Mexican and Central American “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as kids. Not only has it halved the number of spots open to refugees, it is speeding up asylum applications for recent applicants — a decision that will likely result in the rapid repatriation of many Venezuelan asylum seekers who would otherwise have been able to work while waiting for the processing of their cases. Top U.S. diplomats have called out Venezuela’s humanitarian plight and human rights abuses. But on his five-country trip to the region, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson focused more on building support for new sanctions than on addressing this more immediate catastrophe. And while the Trump administration has offered aid to Venezuela — which the Maduro government has repeatedly rejected — the countries receiving Venezuela’s refugees have been largely left to deal on their own. Colombia, bearing the heaviest burden, has granted its own version of temporary protected status to some 150,000 Venezuelans, even as it has cut back on new visas, beefed up military patrols to stanch illegal crossings, and visited refugee camps in Turkey to look for best practices. Brazil declared a state of emergency in border state Roraima, doubling troops and ramping up basic services for the tens of thousands of newcomers. And while often not the first stop for those fleeing, Peru and Argentina have somewhat loosened visa requirements, enabling more Venezuelan migrants to stay and work. These piecemeal responses won’t be enough, however. The flood of people is already overwhelming border economies, schools, health systems and basic shelter in Colombia, Brazil and even Ecuador. Venezuela’s Caribbean neighbors, many with weak institutions and still recovering from last year’s hurricanes, are ill-equipped to meet such new challenges. And those fleeing are vulnerable to human trafficking and extortion, providing fodder for transnational drug and criminal organizations. The surge threatens to shift politics in this year of the Latin American election, when nearly two out of every three voters heads to the polls to elect a new president. Unfortunately, coordination among Latin American nations won’t be easy. Despite much cooperative rhetoric and nearly two dozen regional economic and diplomatic bodies, the countries and their foreign policy efforts remain quite solitary. There is no NATO, no true customs union, and so far no regional body able and willing to act decisively. Instead, and in part due to the weight and leadership of the giant to the north, most every country has historically adopted a non-intervention mantra toward its neighbors. Still, Latin American nations today differ from their more passive past incarnations. With a combined GDP of more than $5 trillion, and two of the world’s 15 biggest economies, the region’s increasing economic heft means more resources are available to address the costs of such a crisis. Mexico recently joined the growing roster of Latin American nations that contribute to peacekeeping missions. Nearly all the countries are democratic, with most committed to spreading these ideals broadly. And the spillover effects of the Venezuelan crisis on their own voting populations have created a shared urgency. To assuage the humanitarian crisis will require coordinating and funding massive efforts to bring food, water, shelter and medicine to those already displaced and the many more to come. It will mean creating schools (one-half of refugees are usually children), building infrastructure, and finding ways to enable the exiled to make a living. And it will mean getting more nations to take in those forced into exile, relieving the crush on Venezuela’s immediate neighbors. To galvanize a response, the region’s leaders should turn to the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank to fast-track cheap loans for refugee-focused infrastructure. They should pressure China, which covets not only Latin America’s raw materials but its growing consumer markets, both to support that effort and to make clear to Venezuela that its conduct must change. And they should forcefully call out Cuba, which has supported and advised President Nicolas Maduro as he dismantled his country’s democracy and engineered its economic and financial self-destruction. Latin America doesn’t need a new mechanism to pursue this more cohesive and comprehensive response — the recently created 14-country Lima group could suffice, and older diplomatic bodies desperate for a mission abound. Its nations need only to summon the will and leadership to pick up the regional humanitarian mantle. If they do so, it may then be the U.S.’s turn to follow. View article originally published on Bloomberg.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering September 29 to October 6, was compiled with support from Becky Allen, Anne Connell, and Susannah Dibble.  

This afternoon, I had the privilege of speaking alongside Cynthia Arnson, Kellie Meiman Hock, and Michael Shifter on current events in South America. Our talk covered countries from Colombia to Argentina, and subjects from climate change to corruption. You can watch the conversation here.

The new administration has emphasized the need to curb security threats from Latin America: bad hombres, rapist Mexicans, and the wall are among the wrenching rhetorical symbols that President Trump has used to signal his goals. Five data points highlight the challenges the administration will face as it moves to secure the southern border. Crime directly consumes 3.55 percent of GDP in Latin America, on average. This is about twice the average cost in developed nations, and exceeds the annual income of the bottom 30 percent of the regional population. Corruption may consume an additional 3 percent of GDP, on average, with illicit financial outflows in some countries suggesting even higher costs. Impunity reigns. Latin American nations are near the top of a global impunity index, with Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador among the world’s worst performers. The practical implications are significant: 9 out of 10 murders go unresolved in a region that is among the world’s most violent. Astounding levels of violence drive migration. A survey of Central American migrants conducted last year by the Inter-American Dialogue found that violence was the second major reason given for the decision to migrate. No wonder, when Latin American homicide rates are four times higher than the global average. The most common trigger for migration, the search for economic opportunities, may also be influenced by the brake crime puts on local economies. In 2014, the U.S. had 55 million self-identified Hispanics or Latinos (about 17 percent of the population). Of these, just over a third – 19.4 million – were immigrants. Latin American remittances surpassed $70 billion in 2016, continuing an upward trend in which remittances to Latin America have more than doubled over the past fifteen years. According to a study of last year’s remittances, “[t]he growth in remittances to Central America…is mostly associated with continued insecurity in the region that is driving people out.” These five data points suggest that untangling the U.S. from Latin America will be fraught with difficulty. The push factors that drive migratory flows – crime, corruption, violence, and impunity – are tangled up with the pull factors that attract them to the U.S.– family ties and economic opportunity – in ways that are not easily undone. The five data points further suggest a strictly hardline approach at the border will be self-defeating. Crime and corruption together consume roughly 6.5 percent of Latin American GDP, driven in no small part by U.S. demand for narcotics and its various knock-on effects: organized crime, violence, and a weak rule of law. The fact that the costs of crime and corruption exceed remittances in most countries in the region suggests that an effective policy set to tackle threats from the southern border must at the very least include rule of law development assistance, aimed at tackling local “push” factors that drive violence and incentivize migration. If, as a consequence of administration policies, remittances were to decline and hundreds of thousands of migrants were blocked or sent home, the economic conditions in much of Latin America – and particularly in those countries closest to the U.S. southern border – would worsen considerably, deepening the “push” factors that drive migration. Both remittances and migratory flows would be driven underground: literally, through border tunnels, and figuratively, through illicit money laundering and organized migrant smuggling. The implications for border security would be profound.

This morning, I had the privilege of testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations at a hearing titled “Venezuela: Options for U.S. Policy.” Also joining me before the committee were David Smilde, Senior Fellow, Washington Office on Latin America, and Mark Feierstein, Senior Associate, Americas Program Center for Strategic and International Studies. You can read my written testimony, the written testimonies of my fellow witnesses, and watch a recording of the hearing on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations website.  

The Colombian government and FARC rebels have signed a historic peace agreement that charts a path to sustainable peace after decades of civil war.