U.S.-Latin American Policymaking: A Reference Handbook 0313279519

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Phillips Memorial Library Providence Colleae

U.S.-Latin American P olicymaking

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data U.S.-Latin American policymaking : a reference handbook / edited by David W. Dent, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-27951-9 (alk. paper) 1. Latin America—Foreign relations—United States—Bibliography. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Latin America—Bibliography. 3. United States—Foreign relations administration—Bibliography. 4. Policy sciences—Bibliography. I. Dent, David W. II. Title: US Latin American policymaking. Z1609.R4U59 1995 [F1418] 016.3277308—dc20

94-27947

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1995 by David W. Dent All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-27947 ISBN: 0-313-27951-9 First published in 1995 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 987654321

Contents

Tables and Figures Preface 1.

vii ix

Introduction: U.S.-Latin American Policymaking

xiii

David W. Dent

PART I.

THE INTER-AMERICAN ENVIRONMENT

2. The External Environment

3

G. Pope Atkins

3.

The United States and the OAS

24

Larman C. Wilson and David W. Dent

4.

International Economic Organizations

45

Rene Salgado

PART II. 5.

THE U.S. DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENT

Elite Values

67

Mark P. Lagon

6.

Think Tanks

96

Howard J. Wiarda

7.

Interest Groups

129

David W. Dent

8.

The U.S. Media John Spicer Nichols with the collaboration of Michael J. Dillon and Krishna Kishore

163

Contents

vi 9. Public Opinion Frederick C. Turner PART HI.

190

WHO MAKES LATIN AMERICAN POLICY?

10.

Making Policy for Latin America: Process and Explanation Harold Molineu

221

11.

The Presidency Stephen G. Rabe

248

12.

The Presidential Advisory System Gabriel Marcella

275

13.

The Role of the U.S. Ambassador Edward S. Mihalkanin and Warren Keith Neisler

307

14.

The U.S. Military Charles T. Call

334

15.

The U.S. Congress Philip Brenner and Geoffrey Plague

363

PART IV.

SPECIALIZED POLICY ISSUES IN U.S.LATIN AMERICAN RELATIONS

16.

Intervention and Interventionism Michael J. Kryzanek

397

17.

Human Rights Elizabeth Cohn

424

18.

Promoting Democracy Elizabeth Cohn and Michael J. Nojeim

457

19.

The United States and the Central American Peace Process Dario Moreno and Dario Perez

481

PART V.

APPENDICES

A.

Presidential Letter to Chiefs of Mission

501

B.

Political Cartoons: Explanations of the Incidents Portrayed

504

Index

525

About the Editor and Contributors

551

Tables and Figures

TABLES 3.1

6.1

Issues in Inter-American Relations: Cold War versus PostCold War Use (and Nonuse) of the Organization of American States (OAS), 1948-1994

25

Congressional Hearings on U.S.-Latin American Policy, by Think Tank and Year, 1981-1992

117

Think Tank Political Orientation, by Type and Political Ideology

120

Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Latin America, by Region, 1939-1992

197

Number of Questions Asked in the United States Regarding Latin America in the Roper Archive, by Country and Issue, 1939-1992

198

Top Executive Branch Personnel with Jurisdiction over Latin American Affairs

277

12.2

Composition of the National Security Council

280

13.1

A Sample List of U.S. Ambassadors, by Host Country and Type, 1910-1989

311

U.S. Ambassadors in Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, by Status and Gender, 1913-1992

327

U.S. Ambassadors, by Career Status and Role Type

328

6.2

9.1

9.2

12.1

13.2

13.3

viii

15.1

15.2

15.3

16.1

Tables and Figures

Congressional Jurisdiction over Latin America: Committees, Subcommittees, Caucuses, and Groups

365

Congressional Hearings on U.S.-Latin American Policy, by Issue and Year, 1981-1992

368

Congressional Hearings on U.S.-Latin American Policy, by Country/Region and Year, 1981-1992

378

U.S. Military and Covert Intervention in Latin America: A Brief Chronology

398

FIGURES

4.1 Major Actors in U.S. Policy toward Multilateral Development Banks 5.1

48

Perceptual Filters of U.S. Elites Influencing Policy toward Latin America

69

Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Latin America, by Region, 1939-1992

193

Number of Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Argentina, by Year, 1939-1992

194

Number of Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Cuba, by Year, 1939-1992

195

Number of Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Mexico, by Year, 1939-1992

196

12.1

The Structure of the Department of State

283

12.2

Proposed Reorganization: Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, 1994

286

The Structure of the Department of Defense

338

9.1

9.2

9.3

9.4

14.1

Preface

This is a reference book designed to examine the process of formulating and implementing U.S. policy toward Latin America. It contains nineteen original chapters created to guide scholars, journalists, foreign policy practitioners, and those who labor in the growing number of Washington-based think tanks and interest groups concerned with Latin American issues through the diversity of materials currently available on U.S.-Latin American policymaking. This hand¬ book is more than a series of bibliographic essays on who makes U.S.-Latin American policy. It endeavors to provide ample interpretation of the available literature so that it can function as both a handbook or guide to the literature and a source for understanding what has been written on this subject over the past thirty years. There are five reasons for writing an edited volume on U.S.-Latin American policymaking. First, the process of making U.S.-Latin American policy is not a subject that is well understood, either in the United States or in Latin America. Much of what is currently written on U.S.-Latin American relations dodges the process questions and instead focuses on the problems, trends, and themes in¬ herent in inter-American relations. Second, the “democratization” of U.S.-Latin American policymaking in the post-Cold War era has opened the process of policymaking to a growing number of domestic and international nongovern¬ mental actors that play an important role in the formulation and implementation of policy toward the region. Third, at the present time there is no single work that provides a systematic overview of the process of formulating and imple¬ menting U.S. policy toward Latin America. Fourth, those who have functioned as key policymakers at one time or another during the Cold War era of U.S.Latin American relations have done a relatively poor job of explaining what they actually did while making policy. While some of these accounts and mem¬ oirs are interesting in their own right, most are disappointing (often quite de¬ fensive and partisan in tone) for those who want a better grasp of United States

X

Preface

foreign policy toward Latin America. Very few who have served as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, or as U.S. ambassadors in the re¬ gion, have written solid accounts of their role in making and implementing U.S. policy. And fifth, as external pressures on U.S. policymakers from such inter¬ national organizations as the Organization of American States and the United Nations have expanded with the post-Cold War era, the United States has not been able to exercise the regional hegemony over Latin America and the Car¬ ibbean that it once did. To understand U.S.-Latin American policymaking in the 1990s requires a better understanding of the relationship between these mul¬ tilateral agencies and U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, our goal in this volume is to answer two important questions concerning U.S.-Latin American policymaking: (1) who makes U.S.-Latin American pol¬ icy? and (2) how do these individuals and institutions (governmental and non¬ governmental) interact to formulate and implement U.S. policy toward the region? I was encouraged to attempt this project by Mildred Vasan, political science editor at Greenwood Press. Her enthusiasm and guidance were invaluable from beginning to end. I am also indebted to a number of colleagues and a variety of Washingtonians for their assistance at various stages of this project. Edward Marasciulo had the most impact, providing me with a number of research ideas and contacts within the Washington Latin American policymaking community for which I am most grateful. At the Hispanic Division of the Library of Con¬ gress, I was assisted by Cole Blasier, Dolores Martin, David Dressing, and Everett Larson. Others in the Washington community who helped with the over¬ all project and my own examination of nongovernmental interest groups include Chuck Call, Isaac Cohen, Joe Eldridge, Richard E. Feinberg, Jo Marie Griesgraber, Richard Nuccio, Howard Wiarda, Alex Wilde, and Larman Wilson. Mar¬ tha Kumar and Jim Roberts—members of the Political Science Department at Towson State University—offered their time to comment on several chapters or to assist in the often difficult task of tracking down prospective contributors. Through a Summer Research Stipend from the Faculty Development Committee at Towson State University, I was able to hire Jeff Morrison, who applied his skills at creating tables and charts along with valuable editorial comments on the project. Carolyn Westbrook was cheerful and professional in helping to prepare Tom Flannery’s political cartoons for inclusion in this book. Pope At¬ kins and Larman Wilson offered valuable assistance in launching the project and keeping it alive when the prospects for completion looked bleak. At the U.S. Naval Academy, the political scientist Stephen Frantzich shared some of his vast knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, and how to access information on this subject, that helped to make this a better reference book. My efforts as general editor were fourfold: to make sure that each chapter covered the most current and relevant literature on the subject, to organize the literature in the most readable and interesting fashion possible, to reduce inter-

Preface

xi

chapter overlaps and redundancies, and to clarify contrasting interpretations of the same body of literature when necessary to add overall understanding of how the United States formulates and implements policy toward Latin America. In addition to these duties, I wrote Chapter 7, “Interest Groups”; crafted the “In¬ troduction”; collaborated on Chapter 3, “The United States and the OAS”; and wrote the interpretations for the sixteen political cartoons that appear in the v Appendices to this volume. In a project of this magnitude it goes without saying that the interpretation of all materials rests with the authors of the chapters contained in this edited volume. This book would not have been possible without the creative work of my fellow contributors, who made my job as general editor less onerous than it could have been without their enthusiasm, patience and willingness to endure my continual harassment and interruptions. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude. They made the editing process a challenging exercise in organizing a vast amount of disparate information on a subject of increasing importance to inter-Americanists. We sincerely hope our efforts in preparing this book will contribute to a better understanding of the process of U.S.-Latin American pol¬ icymaking and spawn additional empirical studies of exactly how U.S. policy toward Latin America is made and carried out. Certainly, those who care about the Western Hemisphere deserve a better understanding of the major actors and institutions in the policymaking process than has prevailed over the past three decades of U.S.-Latin American relations.

'

-

1 Introduction: U.S.-Latin American Policymaking David W. Dent

We tend to take Latin America for granted and give it attention only when a crisis forces us to focus attention on it. —Nestor Sanchez, director of Latin American affairs, National Security Council staff, 1983 There is no real security threat to the United States in this part of the world, ... and that’s why we can get back to the real roots of U.S. values [support for human rights, free elections, civilian control over the military and police, and the rule of law] in foreign policy. —John F. Maisto, U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, February 1994

Ronald Reagan assumed the office of the presidency in January 1981 determined to stem the tide of Soviet-Cuban expansionism in Central America and the Caribbean. This foreign policy—the Reagan Doctrine—spawned U.S. support for the contras, huge amounts of economic and military aid for friendly gov¬ ernments, intense interbranch rivalries in Washington, a major constitutional crisis (Iran-contra), the “marginalization” of the Organization of American States (OAS), and the dramatic growth of nongovernmental organizations with an interest in U.S.-Latin American policy. In the ensuing years since Reagan’s election, significant changes had occurred in Washington, Latin America, and the broader international environment by the time President Bill Clinton arrived in Washington in 1993. Schoultz, “End of an Era: The Reagan Administration and Latin America” (1989), argues that there have been fundamental changes in the domestic and international environment that have made the Cold War emphasis on “strategic denial” untenable in the post-Cold War era. According to Schoultz (1989: 148), there are at least five significant changes that have transformed inter-American relations over the past fifteen years: (1) Latin Amer¬ ica’s more assertive role in world politics; (2) a dispersion of economic and

xiv

Introduction

military power to other nations around the world; (3) the relative decline in the value of U.S. resources (particularly foreign aid) to determine political and ec¬ onomic outcomes in Latin America; (4) the democratization of the U.S. foreign policymaking process; and (5) “startlingly different beliefs about what is actu¬ ally happening in Latin America” among the new participants in the policy¬ making process. With the exception of minor references to Mexico, Haiti, and Castro’s Cuba, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean were given short shrift in the U.S. presidential campaign as presidential candidate Bill Clinton tried to focus on domestic and economic issues and the “change” theme in order to defeat the incumbent, George Bush, and the gadfly, Ross Perot.

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION AND U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICYMAKING In his efforts to forge a Latin American policy, President Clinton inherited a number of legacies after twelve years of Republican rule that would influence strategies of dealing with the region. President Reagan’s emphasis on unilater¬ alism and a tendency to rely on hard-line ideologues and amateurs to run his Latin American policy served to undermine U.S.-Latin American cooperation, but the election of George Bush tended to reverse some of these negative trends. Despite the use of U.S. military force in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989)— condemned as a violation of the nonintervention principle of the OAS Charter by a large majority of Latin American and Caribbean governments—the bitter memories associated with the Reagan-Bush era seemed to have diminished somewhat by the time Clinton arrived in Washington. South of the border, Latin American leaders began to shift their attention to privatization at home, the expansion of free trade agreements throughout the region, and a sudden reali¬ zation that they would have to rely on considerably fewer resources from the United States. The dependency of some governments on huge amounts of for¬ eign aid from the United States during the 1980s resulted in the creation of numerous Latin American aid ‘ ‘junkies’ ’ so that when the dramatic cutbacks in foreign assistance began with President Bush, many leaders expressed anger on hearing of this policy reversal. With the Cold War over, foreign aid is slowly becoming less politicized, but more carefully targeted to only a few countries, with emphasis on “sustainable” development, democracy building, humanitar¬ ian assistance, and promoting peace. Although the Bush administration played a role in supporting the elections in Nicaragua that brought an end to the Cold War conflicts over the fate of the Sandinistas and helped the United Nations broker a peace agreement between the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) and the conservative government in El Salvador, many Central Americans felt the region was. being neglected by the United States or, worse, left in the hands of Jesse Helms, conservative senator from North Carolina. Helms held up numerous ambassador appointments, and economic assistance, to El Salvador and Nicaragua during

Introduction

xv

the Bush and Clinton administrations because of the ideological orientation of some appointees and disagreement with Clinton over the direction of U.S.—Latin American policy. How will the legacies of the Reagan-Bush era affect Clinton’s Latin American policy? How will Congress adjust to new policies and priorities in the region? Will the end of the Cold War cause a shift from the congressional committees that have jurisdiction over foreign affairs to those concerned with K trade, finance, and international economic organizations? In order to further its policy of promoting democracy and economic growth in Latin America, the Clinton administration put more emphasis on working through international economic organizations such as the Inter-American De¬ velopment Bank (IDB), the principal source of external public financing for most Latin American countries. During the Reagan administration, Treasury Depart¬ ment officials pressured the IDB to restrict loans to Latin American governments on both economic and ideological grounds. Now, think tanks such as the Brook¬ ings Institution, Global Engagement: Cooperation and Security in the 21st Cen¬ tury (1994), argue that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) should do more to make sure that Third World borrowers demonstrate that the money will not be used for military or military-related purposes, a severe detriment to Latin American development efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. What role do multilateral development banks play in the Latin American policy of the United States? Like most U.S. presidents, Bill Clinton arrived in Washington with little ex¬ perience in foreign policy matters and even less in dealing with Latin America. He spent most of the presidential campaign deflecting barbs from the Bush White House that he was a closet “dove” masquerading as a foreign policy “hawk,” and continual Republican rhetoric that the sum of his experience in world affairs was limited to breakfast at the International House of Pancakes. Although candidate Clinton tried to distance himself from Bush’s policies on Haiti and the use of force to solve hemispheric disputes, he quickly found that pressing domestic issues and the quest for electoral votes necessitated compro¬ mises in campaign strategy. In the euphoria of the first Democratic victory since 1976, those who had endorsed Clinton wondered whether U.S.-Latin American policy would enter a new era with a focus and programs dramatically different from those of past Republican administrations. Would the new president an¬ nounce a 1990s version of FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, calling for restraint in the use of U.S. military power in the region? Would President Clinton reverse the hard-line policy toward Castro’s Cuba and alter Bush’s policy toward Haitian immigrants and refugees? Where would promotion of democracy and human rights fit into the new Democratic administration that was setting up shop in Washington? Will Bill Clinton prove to be a quick learner and eventually forge a coherent and effective policy toward Latin America, or will the region again disappear from the nation’s foreign policy “radar screen” and revert to what some call “benign neglect?” By the time President-elect Clinton was ready to assemble his foreign poli-

xvi

Introduction

cymaking team in early 1993, U.S. policy toward Latin America had shifted from Cold War battles over proxy military forces and economic and military aid to a few small countries in Central America and the Caribbean, fighting the “drug war” in the Andes Mountains, and solving the debt crisis to problems of a more “intermestic” nature such as passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tying Mexico with Canada to form the world’s largest trading bloc, immigration flows from the south, and finding ways to sustain and promote democracy in the Western Hemisphere. Clearly, President Clinton faces a well-defined set of issues with which to put his own stamp on U.S.-Latin American policy, particularly in expanding free trade arrangements and improving hemispheric cooperation. According to Hakim, “NAFTA ... and After” (1994: 102), “it is hard to recall a time when the United States has had a more favorable opportunity to shape, with its own policy choices, the future of hemispheric relations.” In an effort to seek greater unity and coordination among the nations of the Americas, President Clinton announced a “Summit of the Americas” for De¬ cember 1994 where all the Latin American and Caribbean heads of state (except those of Cuba and Haiti, of course) would meet to discuss ways of dealing with hemispheric issues such as trade, defense, strengthening of democracies, protec¬ tion of the environment, and alleviation of poverty. However, soon after Pres¬ ident Clinton unveiled his summit meeting to be held in Miami, the foreign ministers of the Rio Group (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ec¬ uador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, plus Costa Rica and Jamaica) concluded a two-day meeting in Brasilia, where reservations about the planned meeting, particularly the fact that the United States established the venue, the date, and the agenda without adequate consultation with the Latin American governments, were expressed. From the Latin American perspective, a summit meeting is a good idea but they have other topics to discuss, the date could conflict with Brazil’s presidential election, and many heads of state don’t want to be harassed by Miami’s large Cuban community if the Cuba question is raised at the summit, as many feel that it should be. Unlike the Reagan and Bush administrations, that relied for foreign policy ideas on conservative and center-right policy planning groups such as the Her¬ itage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, and the Hoover Institution, President Clinton has chosen the Inter-American Dialogue as a fountain of ideas to help shape his administration’s Latin Amer¬ ican policy. Clinton appointed several of its members to his foreign policy team, including Richard E. Feinberg, an international economist and former president of the Dialogue, to the staff of the National Security Council. Warren Christo¬ pher, Clinton’s secretary of state, withdrew from the Dialogue after his appoint¬ ment to the Clinton transition team. In preparation for the opportunity to influence Latin American policy issues in a new administration, the InterAmerican Dialogue issued a report titled Convergence and Community: The Americas in 1993 (1993) that mirrors the Clinton administration’s priorities in

Introduction

xvii

Latin America: economic integration, collective defense of democracy, and the problems of poverty and inequality. Yet the match between the Inter-American Dialogue’s ideas and recommendations and the “declarative” policy of the Clin¬ ton administration is far from perfect, and this has brought domestic criticism of his Latin American policy. Oppenheimer, “Think Tank Can Shape Clinton’s Latin Policy” (1993), examines the impact of the Inter-American Dialogue on Clinton’s Latin American policy. In hopes of a new U.S. policy and dialogue with Cuba, the Inter-American Dialogue issued a report called Cuba in the Americas: Reciprocal Challenges (1992) in an effort to promote peaceful democratic change in Cuba. The Dial¬ ogue’s report on Cuba called for a gradual lifting of the U.S. trade embargo, opposition to the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act sponsored by Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), and an official declaration from the White House that the United States has no intention of invading Cuba or condoning the repeated violent actions by some exile groups. However, to assuage the Cuba lobby and win key electoral votes in Florida, Clinton endorsed the Cuban Democracy Act that Bush opposed, denounced Castro before the Cuban American National Foundation in a fund¬ raiser in Miami, and chose to ignore the negative consequences of Radio and TV Marti, controversial forms of political broadcasting that cost the American taxpayers millions of dollars each year. Why does the Cuba lobby appear to have such a large voice in U.S. policy toward Latin America, now that the Cold War is over? Clinton’s team of foreign policy advisers resembles what Friedman, “Clin¬ ton’s Foreign-Policy Agenda Reaches Across Broad Spectrum” (1992), calls “an ideological peacock” made up of a diversity of groups associated with the Democratic party: old hands from the Carter years (Warren Christopher, An¬ thony Lake, and Samuel Berger) who are most adverse to the use of force, conservative Democrats (Sam Nunn and Les Aspin), neoconservative Reagan Democrats (Richard Shifter and Penn Kemble), and a new generation of foreign policy thinkers such as Will Marshall from the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Michael Mandelbaum, professor of foreign affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Clinton’s reasoning in selecting his senior foreign policy advisers was to elevate economics in U.S. foreign policy and achieve a sort of ideological reconciliation between the Carterites and the neoconservatives. According to Frisby, “At the White House, Titles Offer Few Clues About Real Influence” (1993: Al, A5), Clinton’s policymaking process is based on “committees, task forces and loosely defined clusters of friends and advisers [who] represent a deliberate effort to get around the established channels of government.” But in relying on an “ad-hocracy” to make decisions in the White House, President Clinton runs the risk of trying to make foreign policy without the institutional memory and information that one finds in the formal channels of the presidential advisory system. How will Clinton organize the Executive Office of the Presi¬ dency (EOP) and the presidential advisory system to deal with the myriad prob¬ lems facing the United States in Latin America? Will Clinton be able to balance

xviii

Introduction

the ideological differences within his administration and construct an effective foreign policy, or will he vacillate between different ideological perspectives among his advisers, opposing demands from think tanks and lobby groups, and conflicting approaches to the region? As did previous presidents, Bill Clinton stirred up a feud between domestic groups over his nomination to head the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs at the Department of State. During the Reagan-Bush years, the task of finding someone ideologically appropriate to run Latin American policy at State often resulted in the appointment of many noncareer political appointees such as Langhorne Mot¬ ley, Elliott Abrams, or Bernard Aronson. President Clinton’s first choice was Mario Baeza, a Cuban-American lawyer from New York, who he hoped would please two constituencies: Cuban-Americans and blacks. However, Baeza’s nomination was quickly squelched by the Cuba lobby in Miami because he was perceived as being “soft” on Castro. Under pressure from a group of Cuban American Democrats from Miami and the conservative Cuban American Na¬ tional Foundation, Clinton nominated a white woman, Sally Shelton-Colby, for¬ mer ambassador to the Eastern Caribbean under the Carter administration, but she ran into opposition in Congress. President Clinton finally settled on Alex¬ ander Watson, a former U.S. ambassador to Peru with extensive experience in the region, but with considerably less support from the Cuban community or the black community. The difficulty of appointing the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs is only one of many aspects of formulating and implementing U.S. Latin American policy. What difference will it make now that the Inter-American Bureau at State is in the hands of a Foreign Service officer instead of a more ideologically oriented political appointee? Clinton succeeded in getting NAFTA passed during his first year in office, despite widespread opposition in public opinion polls and among interest groups concerned about jobs, human rights, and adequate environmental protection. However, optimism in the NAFTA juggernaut came to an abrupt halt with the January 1, 1994, Indian uprisings in Chiapas, Mexico, and the assassination of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) presidential candidate Luis D. Colosio in the streets of Tijuana, Mexico, two months later. The Caribbean countries that became the beneficiaries of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) during the Reagan years began to express fears that, as a result of NAFTA, they will lose their duty-free entry into the U.S. market for most of their exports or see their exports reduced by Mexican and Canadian products. To address these concerns, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Alexander Watson announced in March 1994 that the long-term goal of U.S. policy in Latin Amer¬ ica is that NAFTA will eventually provide a stimulus for the creation of an Americas-wide free-trade region. The problems in Mexico pale in comparison to what the Clinton administra¬ tion faces in Haiti. Clinton’s Haiti policy has been fraught with confusion, vac¬ illation, and blistering criticism from domestic groups like TransAfrica, a foreign policy think tank that feels the policy is “racist,” illegal, and discriminatory.

Introduction

xix

The forty-member Congressional Black Caucus called for a policy shift and the removal of Lawrence Pezzullo (Clinton’s special envoy, and former ambassador to Nicaragua) throughout the spring of 1994. After campaign statements that he would overturn Bush’s policy of returning Haitians captured on the high seas, Clinton reversed himself in response to domestic opposition to allowing more people from the Caribbean into the United States, pressure from U.S. businesses * in Haiti, and the absence of a strong Haiti lobby in the United States. Randall Robinson, director of TransAfrica, announced that he would begin a hunger strike on April 12, 1994, and continue it until President Clinton altered current policy toward Haiti. About the same time, two human rights groups—Human Rights Watch-Americas and the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees—is¬ sued a report (and letter to Clinton) accusing him of causing a “human rights disaster” in Haiti. After one year of struggling to carry out a failed policy of compromise with Haiti’s military rulers, Ambassador Pezzullo was forced to resign under heavy criticism from Haitian democracy activists and members of Congress. Throughout the late spring and summer 1994, the Clinton administration shifted from one strategy to another in hopes of solving the Haitian crisis. From May through July Clinton bowed to domestic pressure in the United States, trying to convince the Haitian power elite that it was time to step down. Under heavy pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus and domestic interest groups, Clinton replaced Ambassador Pezzullo with William H. Gray III (a former member of Congress and the Congressional Black Caucus) in May 1994, and adopted a more liberal policy of treating Haitian refugees fleeing the military regime. When this shift in policy led to a flood of Haitian boat people, Clinton reversed policy again and announced a “safe haven” approach that would re¬ locate Haitians in other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America while at the same time dispatching U.S. Marine and Navy units to waters off Haiti. With U.S. military forces in place, the Clinton administration went to the UN Security Council in late July where a resolution was passed securing the United Nations’ blessing for the first time for an armed intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Working feverishly at the United Nations, U.S. diplomats were able to overcome most of the opposition of the Latin American states, and the reluctant Aristide, to obtain authorization for a multinational invasion to oust the military leaders and restore constitutional government. As the likelihood of a U.S.-led invasion of Haiti increased through summer 1994, the Clinton administration faced one of the major difficulties in forging a coherent and effective Latin American policy in the aftermath of the Cold War: How can collective measures to pro¬ mote democracy be accomplished without resorting to the use of force, either to remove recalcitrant generals who refuse to cede power or to provide stability and democracy? Critics such as Schulz and Marcella in Reconciling the Irrec¬ oncilable (1994: 18) argue that “From the beginning of the crisis, U.S. policy was marked by a seeming incomprehension of both Haitian and international realities, a flight from leadership, and a reluctance to take measures that might

XX

Introduction

have convinced the Haitian power elite of our seriousness of purpose.” What role will think tanks and interest groups play in the formulation and implementation of U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean? Will the Clinton administration continue to bend to domestic pressures in the effort to restore the democratically elected Aristide to power in Port-au-Prince? How much influence do U.S. ambassadors and special envoys have in formulating and implementing U.S.-Latin American policy? With the end of the Cold War, and the declining saliency of strategic issues to U.S. policymaking elites, it is now much easier for Congress and the presi¬ dency to ignore Latin America and the Caribbean. In a recent NBC News-77ie Wall Street Journal poll, “Opinion Outlook,” (1994: 42), asking Americans how important Latin America will be to the United States over the next five years, only 8 percent answered “most important” compared to China, the Mid¬ dle East, Russia, and Japan. How important will public opinion and the media be in setting the agenda for Clinton’s Latin American policy? Will the United States pay more attention to the multilateral approach to hemispheric problems established in the OAS or will the organization continue to be an instrument of U.S. hegemony in the region as it was during the Cold War? Clearly, there are now a multitude of governmental and nongovernmental institutions that play a key role in the process of U.S.-Latin American policymaking. We now turn to a brief examination of the academic literature on U.S.-Latin American policy¬ making.

U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICYMAKING: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE U.S.-Latin American policymaking is a complex process that involves dif¬ ferent stages, patterns, and interests among a wide array of governmental and nongovernmental actors in Washington and Latin America. General studies of governmental policymaking point to three general stages—agenda setting, policy formulation, and policy implementation—for understanding the process of mak¬ ing foreign policy. Rosati, The Politics of United States Foreign Policy (1993: 249), provides an examination of “the dynamic process by which foreign pol¬ icymakers and agencies interact to produce U.S. foreign policy.” McCormick, American Foreign Policy and Process (1992: 263-515), examines how various institutions and groups—the Executive, the Congress, the foreign policy bu¬ reaucracies, political parties, interest groups, the media, and public opinion— and their values and beliefs make U.S. foreign policy. In his examination of United States policy toward Central America during the Reagan years, Wiarda, American Foreign Policy Toward Latin America in the 80s and 90s: Issues and Controversies from Reagan to Rush (1992: 32), points out how difficult it is to ascribe a monolithic “administration” policy to the formulation and implemen¬ tation of U.S. policy toward Latin America. For scholars and practitioners interested in U.S.-Latin American policymak-

Introduction

xxi

mg, the complexity of the policymaking process creates an arduous task of sorting out the major players or “voices” when it comes to dealing with Latin America. The process of making policy toward Latin America is much more fluid, malleable, and derivative than with other parts of the world. Much of what passed for U.S. policy toward Latin America from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s was derivative of both a “strategic denial” framework (rooted in the , Monroe Doctrine and a Cold War mind-set), and a complex network of domestic forces. The Cold War forced policy into a narrow anticommunist framework for dealing with Latin America and the Caribbean and domestic forces in the United States produced a much greater effect on Washington policymaking than the reality of what was happening in Havana, Managua, San Salvador, or Panama City. U.S.-Latin American policy tends to fall into different categories—security, crisis, and intermestic—depending on the issues and the institutional actors in¬ volved. Policymaking toward Latin America involves (1) the president and the presidential advisory system, (2) the foreign policy bureaucracy, (3) Congress, and (4) influential nongovernmental actors. According to Scott, “Branch Ri¬ vals” (1994), crisis decisions are dominated by the Executive branch, strategic or security policy involves both Executive and congressional branches, and in¬ termestic policies tend to involve presidential and congressional actors along with nongovernmental actors who may also have influence. Pastor, Whirlpool (1992a: 104—117), argues that an interbranch model is most appropriate for understanding U.S.-Latin American policymaking because it focuses on the “vehicle [or set of actors] that carries a particular policy.” For example, the use of force, covert action, and diplomacy tends to be controlled by the Exec¬ utive branch. If the policy involves a treaty (North American Free Trade Agree¬ ment, the Alliance for Progress, or the Panama Canal), foreign assistance, or international financial institutions such as the IDB, then Congress will play an active role. As U.S.-Latin American policies involve more intermestic issues, domestic actors such as Washington-based think tanks, interest groups, and the media step in to influence the policymaking process. According to Pastor (1992a: 275), “The role of Congress in shaping foreign policy increases when the Administration’s policy shifts from diplomacy to the use of resources—for example, foreign aid.” In many areas of U.S.-Latin American policymaking Congress functions to balance and constrain the Executive. The process of making policy toward Latin America has not received the attention it deserves, despite numerous studies dealing with the general area of U.S.-Latin American relations and efforts to prescribe new foreign policies for Latin America and the Caribbean. One of the early efforts to understand how U.S. policy is made is Bloomfield, Who Makes American Foreign Policy? Some Latin American Case Studies (1972), who uses four case studies to elucidate the major actors and institutions involved in U.S.-Latin American policymaking. Bloomfield (1972: 111-112) contends that “our [routine] Latin American re¬ lations present a deadly combination of a very large number of [U.S. domestic]

xxii

Introduction

transnational actors, busily working away at trying to make their objectives U.S. policy, and a very low level of national strategic interests.” Bloomfield’s efforts to develop a theoretical framework and his limited number of case studies can be faulted, but his analysis does highlight the importance of domestic political factors on the formulation and implementation of U.S.-Latin American policy. Lowenthal et al., The Making of U.S. Policies Toward Latin America: The Con¬ duct of Routine Relations (1975), offers a series of brief chapters devoted to the actors and institutions involved in the “routine” decisions of the U.S. govern¬ ment involving Latin America during the 1970s. The distinction between “routine” and “crisis” decision making is important for understanding the process of making policy toward Latin America because it helps to illustrate how policy is made and which institutions and actors are likely to determine policy outcomes. The academic literature on the process of making policy toward Latin America is clearly skewed in favor of crisis deci¬ sions that concern the perceived threat from Latin American revolutions, the fall of friendly tyrants, and the intrusion of extrahemispheric power in the hemi¬ sphere. The routine decisions that involve trade and investment, immigration, and foreign aid have received considerably less attention, with the exception of the flurry of interest in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and U.S. policy toward Mexico. Lowenthal and Treverton, “U.S. Policy-Making Toward Latin America” (1975: 286), argue that the process of U.S.-Latin American policymaking is affected by numerous contextual characteristics of the U.S. domestic and inter-American environment. They note, for example, that power asymmetries have an important role in U.S.-Latin American relations, that Latin American policy issues carry a relatively low level of saliency among Washington policymakers, and that policymaking exhibits permeability to a wide variety of public and private pressures, particularly those of U.S. businesses with interests in Latin America. Jones, “The Council of the Americas and the Formation of American Foreign Policy” (1975), argues that corporate America has a significant impact on U.S.-Latin American policy. Lowenthal, Treverton, and Bloomfield were some of the first scholars to emphasize the important role of U.S. domestic factors on the Latin American policy of the United States. Now that the Cold War has ended, these factors Jrave become more salient in U.S.-Latin American policymaking and have generated more studies of domes¬ tic groups and their impact on foreign policy.

CHARACTERISTICS OF U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICYMAKING What are the principal characteristics of U.S.-Latin American policymaking? The academic literature on this subject is actually rather slim; most of those interested in U.S.-Latin American relations have chosen to emphasize diplo¬ matic history, policy patterns and continuities that occur between administra¬ tions, case studies of interest groups and a few think tanks, and numerous policy

Introduction

xxiii

recommendations for improving inter-American relations. The following repre¬ sents an overview of the process of formulating and implementing U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. 1. Many U.S. government policies—domestic and foreign—affecting Latin America are formulated without considering their repercussions in the hemi¬ sphere and often involve minimal input from government officials working on inter-American affairs. Domestic political considerations—reelection strategies, Congressional-Executive relations, foreign policy fiascos and scandals, shifts in public opinion, the president’s vigor in pursuing Latin American policy issues, and the role of the media—can impede effective policymaking. What this means is that a great deal of U.S.-Latin American policymaking is susceptible to the influence of domestic interest groups. Those who emphasize the importance of the U.S. domestic environment in the making of U.S. policy toward Latin Amer¬ ica include Lowenthal and Treverton, “U.S. Policy-Making Toward Latin America” (1975); Wyman, “Summary: U.S.-Latin American Relations and the Cases of the Countervailing Duty” (1975: 239); Hartlyn, Schoultz, and Varas, eds., The United States and Latin America in the 1990s (1992); and Wiarda, “United States Policy Toward Latin America: A New Era of Benign Neglect” (1991: 11). Lowenthal and Treverton (1975) point out that many governmental decisions which importantly affect Latin America are not ‘ ‘Latin American pol¬ icy” decisions at all but U.S. domestic or general foreign policy decisions. Wyman (1975: 239) argues that the reason the United States has such difficulty conducting a coherent economic policy toward Latin America is that ‘ ‘many of the U.S. government actions that affect Latin America are the result of either domestic or global considerations.” Wiarda (1991: 11) asserts that close to 90 percent of U.S.-Latin American policy is derived “from domestic political con¬ siderations rather than having much to do with Latin America per se.” 2. The president, and his advisory system, are the most important govern¬ mental players in the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. The president’s role in the early stages of the policymaking proc¬ ess—agenda setting and policy formulation—is paramount; Congress plays an important role in legitimation, implementation, and evaluation of U.S.-Latin American policy. The president’s powers expand when decisions involve diplo¬ macy, intervention, and covert action. The following studies of U.S.-Latin American policymaking examine the importance of the president and the pres¬ idential advisory system for types of policy and at different stages of the policy process: Lake, Somoza Falling (1989); “U.S. Policy: Who Is Calling the Shots Now?” (1986); and Wiarda, Foreign Policy Without Illusion (1990). 3. The presidential advisory system—Departments of State and Defense, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency—often works at cross-purposes in producing Latin American policy. Gonzalez, “United States Policy and Policy-Making in the 200-Mile Fisheries Dispute with Ecuador and Peru” (1975), examines the players, issues, and policy conflicts of those re¬ sponsible for solving the fishing dispute with Ecuador in the 1970s: State, De-

xxiv

Introduction

fense. Congress, and the American Tunaboat Association. The decision-making process frequently takes on the appearance of an adversary system that works at cross-purposes in producing Latin American policy. Mitchell, “Dominance and Fragmentation in U.S. Latin American Policy” (1974), argues that there are two sources of poor policy coordination: (1) bureaucratic pluralism combined with intense competition among governmental actors and (2) the lack of presi¬ dential attention to Latin American affairs. The following studies of Reagan administration policymaking in the 1980s also support this generalization: Rubin, Secrets of State (1985); Rubin, “Reagan Administration Policymaking and Central America” (1984); Gutman, Banana Diplomacy (1988); Kryzanek, U.S.-Latin American Relations (1990); Lake (1989); Menges, Inside the Na¬ tional Security Council (1988); and Walsh, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters (1993). 4. Since the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and the end of the Vi¬ etnam War, Congress has been less willing to accept presidential dominance over U.S.-Latin American policy. The process and substance of U.S.-Latin American policy are more likely to be codetermined by both the president and Congress. Over fifty committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill now have some jurisdiction over U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet, only a few legislators are interested in Latin American policy, and the overwhelming majority of those in Congress will support the president during times of crisis. In a study of the role of Congress in U.S.-Latin American policymaking shortly after the Vietnam War, Pastor, “Congress’ Impact on Latin America” (1975: 269), found that Latin America is not very important to Congress but at the same time he argued, “Legislators feel an emotional at¬ tachment to Latin America that is not manifested for other regions.” However, in a more recent study, Pastor, “Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy” (1992b), argues that Congress is an asset in the interbranch formulation of U.S. foreign policy. According to Pastor (1992b: 333), “With regard to overall U.S. policy toward Central America during the last 15 years, the role of Congress has been that of a balancer.” Amson, Crossroads (1989), examines the assertive role that Congress played in challenging the Reagan administration over Central Amer¬ ican policy. Legislators who represent districts in the South and Southwest must pay close attention to Latin American policy issues because issues such as im¬ migration, trade, and jobs can clearly affect their prospects for reelection. Con¬ gressional representatives from Florida, Texas, and California are often key participants in U.S.-Latin American policymaking. 5. U.S.-Latin American policy is increasingly shaped by a multitude of private nongovernmental groups that can impede the Executive and Congress in for¬ mulating and implementing decisions. According to Lowenthal and Treverton (1975), much of the substance of U.S. policy toward Latin America involves a multiplicity of nongovernmental entities and processes which affect Latin Amer¬ ica at least as much as actual governmental decisions. Kryzanek, U.S.-Latin American Relations (1990), examines a wide range of nongovernmental partic-

Introduction

xxv

ipants in U.S.—Latin American policymaking: the business lobby, banks, the human rights lobby, agents of Latin American governments, the contra lobby, the labor lobby, the media, and the public. According to Hartlyn, Schoultz, and Varas, eds. (1992: 7), U.S.-Latin American policymaking is now more “de¬ mocratized” with greater likelihood that a widespread number of nongovern¬ mental interest groups, public opinion polls, grass-roots organizations, and organized lobbies will have a say in policy formation and implementation. Lowenthal, “Changing U.S. Interests and Policies in a New World” (1992: 77), argues that the policy debates surrounding immigration, drug trafficking, trade, and human rights have strong “intermestic” overtones for the policymaking process. In an earlier study, Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1981), found that business and human rights interest groups do have an impact on policymaking, particularly when Congress is in¬ volved and the policy issue does not involve “anticommunism” or “national security.” 6. Public opinion plays a limited role in U.S.-Latin American policymaking because most citizens are poorly informed about and uninterested in Latin Amer¬ ica and the Caribbean. However, as the public receives more information about Latin American policy issues, opinions can change, and often do. Schoultz, Human Rights and U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (1981: 42), claims that “two obstacles—the low level of public interest in U.S.-Latin American rela¬ tions and the lack of a means for collecting and disseminating the few opinions that do exist—hamper the ability of public opinion to influence the Latin Amer¬ ican policy of the United States.” However, in the debate over contra aid in the 1980s, Sobel, ed., Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy (1993: 276), argues that “the public’s opposition to contra aid constrained [emphasis added] the administration from pursuing more aggressive policies.” Jentelson, “The Pretty Prudent Public” (1994), argues that the American public’s support for military force during the 1980s varied depending on whether force was being used to restrain an adversary (greater support) or whether it was being used to engineer internal political change (lesser support). 7. The end of the Cold War and the demise of military dictatorships have helped to reinvigorate the OAS and the UN, emphasizing the promotion of de¬ mocracy and making it more difficult for the United States to act unilaterally in Latin America. The academic literature on the United States and the Organ¬ ization of American States (OAS) tends to be critical of the United States be¬ cause of its past interventionist policies in Latin America. Those who have written about the United States and the OAS from the perspective of an insider, that is, those who have worked in the OAS, tend to be more sanguine about the possibility of solving the hemisphere’s problems through multilateral diplomacy. Much of the abuse that the OAS suffered was due to the fact that during the Cold War the United States used it as an instrument in the East-West struggle. According to Munoz, “A New OAS for the New Times” (1993: 91), “Although the OAS still carries for many Latin Americans the negative historical conno-

xxvi

Introduction

tation of alignment with Washington, it has been able to confront new challenges and crises largely because it is free of the ideological straitjacket of the cold war period.” 8. The U.S. media are both manipulators and objects of manipulation in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of U.S.-Latin American policy. The reason for this has a lot to do with the fact that TV networks devote so little attention to Latin America, and much of what is reported is not balanced, his¬ torical, or relevant to the average citizen of the United States. Moreover, the president—with his advisory system—controls a great deal of the relevant information about Latin American policy. The following works examine the role of the news media in foreign policy: Serfaty, ed., The Media and Foreign Policy (1991); Dickson, “Press and U.S. Policy Toward Nicaragua, 1983-1987” (1992); Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, The Media and Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World (1993); O’Heffeman, Mass Media and American Foreign Policy (1991); and Wiarda, “The Media and Latin America” (1985). 9. Despite the fact that U.S. ambassadors are expected to be representatives of the president in Latin America, and are often overshadowed by top policy¬ makers in Washington, they often play important roles in the policymaking process. The history of U.S.-Latin American diplomacy reveals that U.S. am¬ bassadors have played many policymaking roles—proconsul, interventionist, or good neighbor—during their tenure in Latin America or the Caribbean. For example, Ronning and Vannucci, Ambassadors in Foreign Policy (1987: 137), argue that “ambassadors can be important determinants of U.S. foreign policy.” Blasier, The Hovering Giant (1985), examines the important role that U.S. am¬ bassadors have played in the U.S. response to revolutionary change in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. As early as the 1930s American ambassadors were learning the power of evoking the ex¬ istence of a “communist threat” to sway policymakers in Washington to support “anticommunist” or “antiradical” politicians in Latin America. U.S. ambas¬ sadors often played important roles when presidents had to make “crisis” decisions in Latin America or the Caribbean: the overthrow of Arbenz in Gua¬ temala, the response to Castro’s revolutionary government in Cuba, and Lyndon Johnson’s decision to intervene in the Dominican Republic in 1965. American ambassadors were dealt out of the crises in Grenada (1983), the Malvinas/Falklands fracas (1982), and Panama (1989), particularly when they voiced skepti¬ cism about the use of the U.S. military to solve the crisis. 10. Latin American diplomats have little impact on U.S.-Latin American pol¬ icy because they rely too heavily on the State Department, at the expense of other key points of entry in the U.S. policymaking process. The training of Latin American diplomats is generally poor, Latin American embassies in Washington focus on matters of information about doing business in the host country, and ambassadors are often reluctant to work the halls of Congress to affect policy. Sack and Wyman, “Latin American Diplomats and the United States Foreign Policymaking Process” (1975), stress these factors and suggest that an able

Introduction

xxvii

ambassador—one who knows the power game in Washington—is the best asset for influencing the Latin American policy of the United States. Although some Latin American embassies are improving their strategies for influencing policy, most operate at a severe disadvantage in the policy process.

OVERVIEW The eighteen chapters that follow examine the academic literature devoted to how various institutions and groups—and their values and beliefs—make policy toward Latin America. Each chapter was written exclusively for this reference book and draws mainly on the published materials—books, monographs, gov¬ ernment documents, academic journals, “inside-the-beltway” magazines, and major newspaper articles—that offer valuable information and insights into the process of making policy toward Latin America. Part I looks at three aspects of the international environment important for understanding U.S.-Latin American policymaking. In Chapter 2, G. Pope Atkins examines the Latin American in¬ ternational subsystem within which U.S. policies toward Latin America are for¬ mulated. Larman C. Wilson and David W. Dent focus on the Cold War and post-Cold War history of the United States and the OAS in Chapter 3, emphasizing different roles—anticommunist alliance, antidictator alliance, and peacemaking and peacekeeping—that the United States has envisioned for the OAS in its Latin American policy. In Chapter 4, Rene Salgado surveys the literature on the role of international economic organizations—the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund— in the formulation and implementation of U.S.-Latin American policy. Part II deals with the relationship between the domestic environment and the making of U.S. policy toward Latin America: elite values, think tanks, interest groups, the media, and public opinion. In Chapter 5, Mark Lagon examines how elites, and their attitudes and beliefs, helped to shape U.S.-Latin American pol¬ icy during the pre-Cold War, Cold War, and post-Cold War eras. Howard Wiarda covers a number of multifunctional and Latin American-focused think tanks that have come to Washington and their decisive impact on U.S.-Latin American policy in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7, David W. Dent looks at the growing number of interest groups that now have some say in U.S.-Latin American policymaking: the human rights, business, labor, environmental, Latino, and Cuba lobbies, among others. John Spicer Nichols assesses the impact of the media on U.S.-Latin American policy with Michael J. Dillon and Krishna Kishore in Chapter 8, and Frederick Turner looks at the literature on the role that public opinion—both U.S. and Latin American—has on U.S. policy toward Latin America in Chapter 9. Part III examines six aspects of the policymaking process, emphasizing the role of governmental actors in U.S.-Latin American policymaking. Harold Molineu examines the process and explanation of how U.S. policy toward Latin America is made in Chapter 10, focusing on six major approaches for under-

xxviii

Introduction

standing the policy process. In Chapter 11, Stephen Rabe looks at the literature linking U.S. presidents and Latin American policy, from Harry Truman through George Bush. Gabriel Marcella examines the role of the presidential advisory system (Department of State, National Security Council and staff, and -Central Intelligence Agency) in the formulation and implementation of U.S.-Latin American policy in Chapter 12. The role of the U.S. ambassador in Latin Amer¬ ica, a role that has varied considerably throughout the past century of diplomatic relations between the United States and Latin America, is discussed in Chapter 13 by Edward Mihalkanin and Keith Neisler. In Chapter 14 Charles Call takes a close look at the role of the Pentagon in U.S.-Latin American policymaking, indicating how the end of the Cold War has contributed to major alterations in the missions of this important governmental institution. In Chapter 15, Philip Brenner and Geoffrey Plague examine the literature on the U.S. Congress and its more assertive role in U.S.-Latin American policymaking. Finally, Part IV looks at the literature on four specialized policy issues that have played a prominent role in U.S.-Latin American relations throughout the twentieth century: intervention and interventionism, human rights, democrati¬ zation, and peacekeeping efforts in Central America. Michael J. Kryzanek’s treatment of the intervention theme in Chapter 16 raises important questions about the legacies of U.S. intervention and the future of U.S. intervention— both covert and overt—in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Chapter 17, Elizabeth Cohn provides a thorough account of U.S. human rights policy in Latin America. The literature on democracy promotion, a major theme in U.S.Latin American relations, is examined with considerable skill in Elizabeth Cohn and Michael Nojeim’s Chapter 18. In the final chapter, Dario Moreno and Dario Perez cover the literature devoted to the Central American crisis in the 1980s and the various efforts that developed to bring a peaceful solution to the region. The reader will also find that some chapters have been embellished with original research that serves to extend our knowledge and understanding of U.S.-Latin American policymaking. The sixteen political cartoons penned by the former Baltimore Sun editorial caricaturist Tom Flannery during the Reagan presidency are included to illustrate the importance of this craft to understanding U.S.-Latin American relations. The symbols, labels, and metaphors employed in Flannery’s cartoons serve to illuminate the values and assumptions of U.S. policymakers in making Latin American policy. Each cartoon is accompanied by an explanation in Appendix B which describes the incident portrayed in the cartoon and its importance to U.S.-Latin American policymaking.

REFERENCES Amson, Cynthia J. 1989. Crossroads: Congress, the Reagan Administration, and Central America. New York: Pantheon Books. Blasier, Cole. 1985. The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America. Second Edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Introduction

xxix

Bloomfield, Richard J. 1972. Who Makes American Foreign Policy? Some Latin Amer¬ ican Case Studies. Mimeo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Center for International Affairs. Brookings Institution. 1994. Global Engagement: Cooperation and Security in the 21st Century. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Dickson, Sandra H. 1992. “Press and U.S. Policy toward Nicaragua, 1983-1987: A Study of the New York Times and the Washington Post.” Journalism Quarterly 69 (Fall): 562-571. Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. 1993. The Media and Foreign Policy in the PostCold War World. New York: Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. Friedman, Thomas L. 1992. “Clinton’s Foreign-Policy Agenda Reaches across Broad Spectrum.” New York Times (October 4): Al, A28. Frisby, Michael K. 1993. “At the White House, Titles Offer Few Clues about Real Influence.” Wall Street Journal (March 26): Al, A5. Gonzalez, Edward. 1975. “United States Policy and Policy-Making in the 200-Mile Fisheries Dispute with Ecuador and Peru.” In Abraham F. Lowenthal, et al., eds. The Making of U.S. Policies toward Latin America: The Conduct of “Routine” Relations, Vol. 3, Appendix 1, of the Report of the Commission on the Organi¬ zation of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Gutman, Roy. 1988. Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua 1981-1987. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hakim, Peter. 1994. “NAFTA ... and After: A New Era for the US and Latin America? Current History 93, no. 581 (March): 97-102. Hartlyn, Jonathan, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds. 1992. The United States and Latin America in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Inter-American Dialogue. 1993. Convergence and Community: The Americas in 1993. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Dialogue. -. 1992. Cuba in the Americas: Reciprocal Challenges. Washington, D.C.: InterAmerican Dialogue. Jentleson, Bruce W. 1994. “The Pretty Prudent Public: Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force.” In Eugene R. Wittkopf, ed. The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy: Insights and Evidence. Second Edition. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Jones, Marie Thomson. 1975. “The Council of the Americas and the Formation of American Foreign Policy.” In Abraham F. Lowenthal, et al., eds. The Making of U.S. Policies toward Latin America: The Conduct of “Routine” Relations, Vol. 3, Appendix 1, of the Report of the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern¬ ment Printing Office. Kryzanek, Michael J. 1990. U.S.-Latin American Relations. Second Edition. New York: Praeger. Lake, Anthony. 1989. Somoza Falling. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Lowenthal, Abraham F. 1992. “Changing U.S. Interests and Policies in a New World.” In Jonathan Hartlyn, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds. The United States and Latin America in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

XXX

Introduction

Lowenthal, Abraham F., and Gregory F. Treverton. 1975. “U.S. Policy-Making Toward Latin America: Improving the Process.” In Abraham F. Lowenthal et al., eds. The Making of U.S. Policies toward Latin America: The Conduct of Routine Relations, Vol. 3, Appendix 1, of the Report of the Commission on the Organi¬ zation of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Lowenthal, Abraham F., et al. 1975. The Making of U.S. Policies toward Latin America: The Conduct of Routine Relations, Vol. 3, Appendix 1, of the Report of the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Maisto, John F. 1994. [statement cited in ‘‘U.S. Envoy in Nicaragua Asserts Washington Will Stop Meddling.” New York Times (February 10).] McCormick, James M. 1992. American Foreign Policy and Process. Second Edition. Itasca, Ill.: F.E. Peacock. Menges, Constantine C. 1988. Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan’s Foreign Policy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Mitchell, Christopher. 1974. ‘‘Dominance and Fragmentation in U.S. Latin American Policy.” In Julio Cotier and Richard R. Fagen, eds. Latin America and the United States: The Changing Political Realities. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Munoz, Heraldo. 1993. ‘‘A New OAS for the New Times.” In Viron P. Vaky and Heraldo Munoz. The Future of the Organization of American States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. O’Heffeman, Patrick. 1991. Mass Media and American Foreign Policy: Insider Per¬ spectives on Global Journalism and the Foreign Policy Process. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. ‘‘Opinion Outlook.” 1994. National Journal 26, no. 1 (January 1): 42. Oppenheimer, Andres. 1993. ‘‘Think Tank Can Shape Clinton’s Latin Policy.” Miami Herald (February 1). Pastor, Robert A. 1992a. Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. -. 1992b. “Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy: Comparative Disadvantage or Dis¬ advantage.” In Brad Roberts, ed. U.S. Foreign Policy after the Cold War. Cam¬ bridge, Mass.: MIT Press. -. 1987. Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. -. 1975. “Congress’ Impact on Latin America: Is There a Madness in the Method?” In Abraham F. Lowenthal, et al., eds. The Making of U.S. Policies toward Latin America: The Conduct of “Routine” Relations, Vol. 3, Appendix 1, of the Report of the Commission on the Organization of Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Ronning, C. Neale, and Albert P. Vannucci, eds. 1987. Ambassadors in Foreign Policy: The Influence of Individuals on U.S.-Latin American Policy. New York: Praeger. Rosati, Jerel. 1993. The Politics of United States Foreign Policy. Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Rubin, Barry. 1985. Secrets of State: The State Department and the Struggle over U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Introduction

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-. 1984-. “Reagan Administration Policymaking and Central America.” In Robert S. Leiken, ed. Central America: Anatomy of Conflict. New York: Pergamon Press. Sack, Roger E„ and Donald L. Wyman. 1975. “Latin American Diplomats and the United States Foreign Policymaking Process.” In Abraham F. Lowenthal, et al., eds., The Making of U.S. Policies toward Latin America: The Conduct of "Rou¬ tine” Relations, Vol. 3, Appendix 1, of the Report of the Commission on the Organization of Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Sdnchez, Nestor. 1983. Statement cited in U.S. Department of State, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1983. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Schoultz, Lars. 1989. “End of an Era: The Reagan Administration and Latin America.” In James M. Malloy and Eduardo A. Gamarra, eds. Latin America and the Car¬ ibbean Contemporary Record 7, 1987-1988. New York: Holmes and Meier: A140-150. -. 1981. Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Schulz, Donald E., and Gabriel Marcella. 1994. Reconciling the Irreconcilable: The Trou¬ bled Outlook for U.S. Policy toward Haiti. Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. Army War College. Scott, James M. 1994. “Branch Rivals: The Reagan Doctrine, Nicaragua, and American Foreign Policy-Making.” Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Interna¬ tional Studies Association, Washington, D.C., March 30. Serfaty, Simon, ed. 1991. The Media and Foreign Policy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sobel, Richard, ed. 1993. Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Controversy over Contra Aid. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Walsh, Lawrence E. 1993. Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters. Washington, D.C.: United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. “U.S. Policy: Who is Calling the Shots Now?” 1986. Latin American Weekly Report 6 (February 7): 4-5. Wiarda, Howard J. 1992. American Foreign Policy toward Latin America in the 80s and 90s: Issues and Controversies from Reagan to Bush. New York: New York Uni¬ versity Press. -. 1991. “United States Policy toward Latin America: A New Era of Benign Neglect?” LASA Forum 22, no. 3 (Fall): 10-13. -. 1990. Foreign Policy without Illusion: How Foreign-Policy Works and Fails to Work in the United States. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman. -. 1985. “The Media and Latin America: Why Coverage Goes Astray.” The Jour¬ nalist (Fall): 18-19. Wyman, Donald L. 1975. “Summary: U.S. Latin American Relations and the Cases of the Countervailing Duty.” In Abraham F. Lowenthal, et al., eds., The Making of United States Policies toward Latin America: The Conduct of "Routine” Rela¬ tions, Vol. 3, Appendix 1, of the Report of the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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THE INTER-AMERICAN ENVIRONMENT

■

The External Environment G. Pope Atkins

This chapter explores the literature related to the extrasocietal environment within which U.S. policies toward Latin America are formulated and in which they operate. It offers a broad assessment of the research and writing about the Latin American international subsystem that constitutes the “setting” of U.S. decision making toward Latin America. The studies cited represent a sampling of some of the more general works that have appeared in the voluminous lit¬ erature on this broad subject. While reference is made to international organi¬ zations, Larman C. Wilson and David W. Dent, and Rene Salgado make detailed appraisals of these important components of the external environment in the following chapters. The present undertaking begins with a discussion of the way in which it fits into the book’s conceptual scheme.

SOME CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS Analysts of Latin American international relations today tend to follow the general study of international relations, while adopting certain specific adjust¬ ments as regional observers.1 Most of them have overtly or implicitly employed a systems perspective as an analytic framework to guide their inquiry. In the case of foreign policy analysis, which deals with the way state policymakers formulate and execute courses of action, they focus on how and why decision makers behave as they do. Thus the elements of decision making, around which the present book is organized, are central to foreign policy analysis. In this conceptualization, international systems and subsystems constitute the extraso¬ cietal environment that gives rise to decisions and in which subsequent policy action takes place. An international system or subsystem is a complex political, military, economic, and social structure of both power and interdependence.2 It comprises state and nonstate actors interacting in cooperation and conflict, in¬ formal power relationships, and formal international institutions. Analysts meas-

4

The Inter-American Environment

ure systemic change or transformation essentially in terms of significant shifts in the forms and nature of state power, the capabilities of certain other actors, and the levels of state interdependence that indicate movement from one his¬ torical era to another. The external environment comprises, in sum, the inter¬ national political-military-economic-social system of states and other actors and their policies and interactions, the distribution of power and patterns of inter¬ dependence, and systemic change. Within the systems perspective, particular competing decision models place different emphases on the functions of the external environment in policymak¬ ing. While no satisfactory overarching theory of foreign policy has emerged to explain the behavior of decision makers, and in important ways the contending designs are mutually exclusive, the theoretical effort has nevertheless produced generic sets of models that, when taken together, alert us to the various factors that may influence decisional processes. They may be categorized as rational actor, perceptual, and bureaucratic-organizational process models. The rational actor model assumes that decision makers follow (or should follow) an architectonic plan of state purposes and goals and logical strategic and tactical procedures as they make and prosecute foreign policy decisions. It is closely identified with the Realist school of international relations, for whom state actions are calculated solutions to strategic problems, making the external environment a primary consideration. What goes on inside the state in the way of individuals or organizations is of little analytic importance since the essential factor explaining policy orientations lies in the strategic position, calculated in terms of interstate balances of power and geopolitics. The rational model is not restricted to the Realist school, however, as others with different values under¬ lying their preferences for state purposes and policies use the same language of strategic setting, interest, and capability. For example, certain Idealists and lib¬ erals who wanted a different yet unified policy approach strongly criticized the Reagan administration’s Realist-neoconservative Central American policies as a misreading of subregional and global situations, leading to ill-advised goals and actions that squandered U.S. resources. A significant sector of international po¬ litical economists also adopt rationalist concepts in their concern with macroeconomic goals that stress the interrelationship of economic policies and the international political and economic systems. Other foreign policy analysts, seeing the rational model as fundamentally flawed because it assumes decisions that result from consistent state processes, have constructed alternative theories emphasizing the centrality of fallible human beings. They argue that the human element in decision making not only intrudes on but departs from rational processes. One group focuses on the perceptions and images that decision makers hold of the world, their own societies, and themselves, and the way they form foreign policy motivations, aspirations, and expectations in response to stimuli from both intrasocietal and extrasocietal en¬ vironments. Other specialists—advocates of bureaucratic-organizational process models—also focus on psychological characteristics of decision makers but con-

The External Environment

5

tend that foreign policies most often are the result of group dynamics and in¬ stitutional biases within competing bureaucracies and other organizations central to the policy process. Thus, they place little emphasis on the extrasocietal en¬ vironment. Critics of this approach say it aspires to explain too much from an overly narrow conceptual base, but that it does offer insights about the limita¬ tions of groups that make it a useful corollary to more comprehensive models.3 A political process model that takes into account the overall decision-making system, including consideration of rational, perceptual, and bureaucraticorganizational processes, provides a useful analytic framework for organizing foreign policy data and the accompanying theoretical debate. It assumes politics to encompass a wide range of factors, including extrasocietal environmental ingredients. It is, essentially, an operationalization of the systems perspective indicated at the beginning of this chapter and in effect the organizing device adopted for this volume. An accurate picture of the structure of the Latin American international en¬ vironment involves several levels of analysis. It requires that we define the overall region itself, acknowledge the international subsystems within Latin America (especially Mexico, the circum-Caribbean, and the South America Southern Cone), link the region to the western hemispheric Inter-American Sys¬ tem (a subject addressed in the following chapter), and place all of the above in a global context. A close connection exists between these various international levels and U.S. policies inasmuch as the different conditions in each of them present distinct if related challenges to policymaking. My interpretation of how U.S. decision makers have responded to the Latin American environment until the end of the Cold War is laid out in Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System (1989), especially chapter 4. The argument is that, from as early as 1811 until the late 1980s, U.S. officials fo¬ cused on the threats that great powers outside Latin America might pose to U.S. security through their actions in the region. This preoccupation, most dramati¬ cally reflected in the Monroe Doctrine and its “corollaries,” was aimed at po¬ tential interventions by Great Britain, France, and Spain in the first quarter of the nineteenth century; shifted back to Great Britain prior to the U.S. Civil War; to Germany at the turn of the century and again in the 1930s, and to the Soviet Union after 1947 until the definitive end of the Cold War in 1989.4 A related ideological element led to U.S. fears that hostile threats might emerge from monarchism in the nineteenth century, fascism in the 1930s, and communism after World War II. The historical evidence is that the United States was most active in Latin America when nonhemispheric states seemed most menacing and, conversely, when those dangers seemed to recede so did the policies mo¬ tivated by external threat perceptions. This orientation sometimes led to positive actions (for example, multilateral collaboration in World War II and the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s) but more often to paternalism and conflict (such as Caribbean imperialism during the first third of the twentieth century and Central American policies in the 1980s).

6

The Inter-American Environment

Other treatments with similar perceptions about the environment-based U.S. policy formulation have been articulated. Schoultz, National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America (1987), concludes that “the core” of U.S. policy toward Latin America was a concern with security, although policymak¬ ers were deeply divided over what constituted security threats. Schoultz calls this U.S. way of thinking about the region “strategic denial.” Blasier, The Hovering Giant (1985), says that perceived threats from outsiders explained policies toward Latin American revolutionary movements and regimes. He la¬ ments that U.S. decision makers learned so little from their experiences. Martz, ed.. United States Policy in Latin America (1988), and colleagues address pol¬ icymaking largely from the perspective of crisis management, with the crises precipitated by U.S. fears of communism and communist expansion. Martz makes a particularly scathing indictment of U.S. miscalculations. Hayes, Latin America and the U.S. National Interest (1984), asserts that the most salient influences on U.S. policy were Latin America’s role in the world economy, U.S. regional security interests, and the particular challenges of the intraregional sub¬ systems.5 The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s rendered irrelevant traditional U.S. security thinking about Latin America. The book-length literature on the nature of the post-Cold War system and its impact on U.S. policy is only now emerg¬ ing. Atkins, ed.. The United States and Latin America (1992), brings together a group of expert analysts to assess the new high priority issues in the new era. The editor notes that with the retirement of the Soviet Union and then its dis¬ solution, U.S. officials discarded the “strategic denial” orientation but were slow to fashion a new strategic paradigm. Nevertheless, a common set of issues ascended to the top of the inter-American policy agenda—external debt, inter¬ national trade and investment, human rights, democracy, immigration, refugees, drug trafficking, to a lesser degree degradation of the environment, all of which had been evident as crucial problems but none of which had much to do with excluding extrahemispheric rivals. Desch, When the Third World Matters (1993), deals with the problem of a future U.S. “grand strategy” toward Latin America in the new environment. Lowenthal and Treverton, eds., Latin America in a New World (1994), is an examination by a distinguished group of authors of a broad range of subjects concerning the evolving international role of Latin America in terms of recent stunning developments, particularly those associated with the end of the Cold War and with the domestic and international politicaleconomic changes within the region. Dependency theory posited a very different view of the structure of Latin American international relations. It was conceptualized in two fundamental ways: structuralist theory and neo-Marxist theory. Structural dependency theory was pioneered after World War II by the Ar¬ gentine economist Raul Prebisch, who strongly influenced Latin American and Third World thinking from his United Nations positions, first as executive sec¬ retary of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and later as

The External Environment

7

founder of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He vi¬ sualized the world economy in terms of a “center-periphery” structure, with industrialized states forming the center and underdeveloped ones the periphery, a status perpetuated by unfair terms of trade imposed by the center. Among Prebisch’s voluminous list of works are Nueva politico comercial para el desarrollo (1964) and Change and Development (1970). Di Marco, International ' Economics and Development (1972), provides a complete bibliography of Pre¬ bisch’s work up to 1970. The Mexican economist Victor L. Urquidi, who suc¬ ceeded Prebisch as executive secretary of ECLA, was also an influential structuralist; he had a strong perception of Latin America as a unique, regional economic whole. His views are found in, among many other works. Free Trade and Economic Integration in Latin America (1962) and The Challenge of De¬ velopment in Latin America (1964); see also Urquidi and Thorp, eds., Latin America in the International Economy (1973). Structuralist theories served as the basis for Latin American policies of import substitution industrialization, economic integration as a defense against the outside world, and state commod¬ ities agreements. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Latin Americans aban¬ doned structuralism and the attendant policies as redemocratization was widely accompanied by economic neoliberalism. Economic integration was revived but reformed to seek parallel free trade arrangements with the United States. A second school of dependency theory, applying a Marxist frame of reference emphasizing sociopolitical as well as economic factors, enjoyed broad currency in the 1960s and 1970s but sharply declined thereafter. As a general matter, this school saw U.S. policies as designed to defend private overseas economic in¬ terests. It postulated that Latin American economic development was determined by external capitalist states, especially the United States, and multinational cor¬ porations, particularly those with U.S. headquarters, within the world capitalist market. The outcome for Latin Americans was not only economic dependence over which they had no control but a detrimental effect on their political and social systems. This theory rejected the structuralists’ reform policies and called for radical revolutionary solutions. Neo-Marxist dependency theory as it applies to Latin America was pioneered by Frank, Latin America (1969), who then, in the mid-1970s, declared the movement dead. Other works were by Cardoso and Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en America Latina (1969); Santos, Dependencia economica y cambio revolucionario en America Latina (1970); Bodenheimer, The Ideology of Developmentalism (1971); Cockroft, Frank, and Johnson, Dependence and Under¬ development (1972); the dependency-oriented contributors to Cotier and Fagen, eds., Latin America and the United States (1974); and Szymanski, The Logic of Imperialism (1981). Ocampo et al., Dependency Theory (1976), analyze and criticize dependency theory. More recently, Packenham, The Dependency Movement (1992), says, and worries, that the movement is still alive in the sense of its long-term politicizing of the social sciences; however, Packenham acknowledges the accuracy of some dependency propositions.

8

The Inter-American Environment

THE LATIN AMERICAN REGION Latin America as a unit in the international system is geographically defined as that portion of the Western Hemisphere south of the United States occupied mostly by thirty-three independent states (including the new states in the circum-Caribbean). Many specialists are skeptical of regionwide conceptualiza¬ tions because of the great differences and heterogeneity among the states within the region and their tremendous diversity in culture, size, and other aspects. They prefer to focus on the individual countries and subregions within Latin America.6 Logically, if one cannot treat a region that is so internally different as a whole, then the United States cannot have a workable foreign policy for the overall region. While this view contains a valid warning that the regional level of analysis has important limitations, it is, in my opinion, exaggerated and misleading. From the earliest days of statehood to the present, despite the diversity, a Latin American regional subsystem has existed to some degree. Latin Americans have tended to band together when outsiders intervened or exerted other pres¬ sures. They have also formally organized among themselves, in rudimentary forms in the nineteenth century and intensely so since World War II. In the post-Cold War world intra-Latin American organization has actually increased regional coherence, at the same time that Latin American governments and their regional intergovernmental organizations have expressed strong concern with their common involvement in the global international system. On this structural level, U.S. officials have historically had some sort of overall Latin American policy. After World War II they tended to integrate the region as a unit in their global conceptualizations of East-West conflict and Third World development. Latin American states responded, to a considerable degree in concert, to Cold War and Third World developments: A number of them joined the Nonaligned Movement, and all of them participated in (and some were primary leaders of) the New International Economic Order (NEEO). The end of the Cold War chal¬ lenged the identity of both the Non-Aligned Movement and the NIEO. Never¬ theless, Latin Americans generally seek to maintain and expand their relations with the outside world beyond the Americas and to be active participants in whatever new global system finally emerges. A large number of studies in history, political science, and economics have delineated general Latin American international relations. The efforts began with comprehensive diplomatic histories that detailed a broad range of Latin Amer¬ ica’s international political, economic, and cultural interactions. Among the more notable early works were Quesada, Historia diplomatica hispanoamericana (1918-1920); Rodriguez Larretta, Orientation de la politico international en America Latina (1938); and Rippy, Latin America in World Politics (1938), an especially thorough early history. The tradition was carried forward by Davis, Finan, and Peck, Latin American Diplomatic History (1977); and Boersner, Relaciones internacionales de America Latina (1990). In the meantime, political

The External Environment

9

scientists began to provide systemic analyses. One of the earliest is Bailey, Latin America in World Politics (1967), a to-the-point treatment focusing on inter¬ national politics and organization. Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System (1989), attempts to construct a comprehensive framework for the analysis of Latin American international relations on all levels—regional and global as well intraregional subsystems and individual state and other actors. Scholars who have evaluated a broad range of phenomena in terms of the in¬ ternational system and Latin America’s place in it include Lagos Matus, ed., Las relaciones entre America Latina, Estados Unidos y Europa Occidental (1979); Tomassini, ed., Relaciones Intemacionales de la America Latina (1981); and Jaguaribe, El nuevo escenario Internacional (1985). Parkinson, Latin America, the Cold War, and the World Powers, 1945-1973 (1974), broadly analyzes the Latin American region during a critical period. Latin American international political economy is dealt with in general terms by Fishlow and Diaz-Alejandro, Rich and Poor Nations in a World Economy (1984); Grunwald, ed., Latin America and World Economy (1978); and Hartlyn and Morley, Latin American Political Economy (1986). Weintraub, ed., Free Trade in the Western Hemisphere (1993), orchestrates a group of Latin American specialists to ana¬ lyze myriad aspects of the subject matter in the current new international era. They give appropriate historical and current policy and institutional background, take due notice of extant Latin American integration organizations, and focus on the North American Free Trade Agreement and the possibilities of some sort of hemispherewide arrangement(s).

LATIN AMERICAN SUBSYSTEMS Analysts who highlight the further international subsystems within Latin America emphasize Mexico, the Circum-Caribbean, and South America beyond the Caribbean, with special attention to Brazil. Disparate conditions are found in each instance that impinge on U.S. policy calculations, making them signif¬ icant factors in decision processes.

Mexico Mexico stands apart in Latin America because it is a large and important state that has intense special bilateral relations with the bordering United States. In the nineteenth century Mexico suffered severe territorial losses to the United States as a result of Texas independence and then statehood, and the war of 1846-1848; it was also battered by European interventions, most notably its incorporation into the French empire (1862-1866). The dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911) allowed the United States and certain European states to dominate its economy. After the Revolution of 1910, Mexico adopted highly protectionist economic policies and an essentially isolationist political orienta¬ tion toward the outside world; it was clearly the weaker partner in its relations

The Inter-American Environment

10

with the United States. The evolution since World War II, however, resulted in the basic reality of the special and complicated bilateral association, in sharp contrast to the historical reality, of a strong mutual dependency. In fact, a rapid mutual reorientation of policies has taken place, beginning in the mid-1980s, when Mexico abandoned its protectionist trade and investment policies. In re¬ sponse to Mexican urging, the United States agreed to free trade negotiations, Canada joined the process, and the historic North American Free Trade Agree¬ ment (NAFTA) went into effect on January 1, 1994. Story, “Mexico’s International Relations” (1990), is an insightful discussion emphasizing U.S. relations and Mexican policy perspectives. The literature on Mexico’s international relations is immense; a listing of some of the more com¬ prehensive accounts includes Barkin, Las relaciones Mexico-Estados Unidos (1980); Bueno, ed., Mexico-Estados Unidos (1987); Cline, The United States and Mexico (1963); Gomez-Robledo Verduzco, ed., Relaciones Mexico-Estados Unidos (1981); Ojeda, Alcances y limites de la politica de Mexico (1976); Ojeda, Mexico (1986); Pastor and Castaneda, Limits to Friendship (1989); Pellicer de Brody et al., La politico exterior de Mexico (1983); Purcell, Mexico-U.S. Re¬ lations (1981); Purcell, ed., Mexico in Transition (1988); Reynolds and Tello, U.S.-Mexico Relations (1983); Roett, ed., Mexico and the United States (1988); Schmitt, Mexico and the United States, 1821-1973 (1974); Seara Vazquez, Politico exterior de Mexico (1985); Vazquez and Meyer, The United States and Mexico (1985); and Weintraub, A Marriage of Convenience (1990).

The Circum-Caribbean The Circum-Caribbean is a complex geographic and political region that in¬ cludes the islands of the Caribbean Sea and those nearby in the Atlantic Ocean, the Central American isthmus, and the north coast of South America extending to the Atlantic Ocean outside the Caribbean Sea, so that Venezuela, Colombia, and Suriname are included. It has its own further subregions, most notably Central America and the Commonwealth Caribbean Countries.7 The Caribbean region has always been the object of great power rivalry and intervention. The Panama Canal, of U.S. interest in the nineteenth century and taken over and completed by the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, has loomed large in its strategic calculations. After World War II the United States had a primary concern in the Circum-Caribbean—more intensely than in other parts of Latin America—with deterring what it perceived as Soviet expansionism and the spread of communism. The region has been made up for the most part of small weak states, with most of the area part of a U.S. bilateral trading system, where the United States throughout the twentieth century exercised an interna¬ tional police power. A principal challenge to U.S. domination arose from Soviet policies and the relationship to Cuba after 1959 and Nicaragua after 1979. In the 1980s, despite a strong U.S. strategic concern with and actions in the Car¬ ibbean region, the Soviet Union was persistent, serious U.S. domestic political opposition was manifested, important opposition came from NATO allies, and,

The External Environment

11

most striking, local Latin American states challenged the United States with proposals for settlement of Central American conflict. Changes attendant to the post-Cold War era were especially dramatic in the Circum-Caribbean, where East-West conflict had been most dramatically played out. The Soviet Union in effect retired from the region and actually became a part of the Central American peace process; with the decline of Soviet power and then the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, commitments to Cuba were virtually canceled. Yet the U.S. military intervention in Panama indicated that the United States was still willing to use such compulsion even in the post-Cold War era, although the Bush administration said it was a unique case. The United States signed framework agreements for the negotiation of free trade with all the states except Cuba and Haiti; Mexico initiated negotiations with the five Central American states for the same purpose. Most Caribbean states still have little recourse in their rela¬ tions with the United States and the nonhemispheric states have limited oppor¬ tunities for political influence; Europeans are chary of involvement in an area where their interests are not primary. Fernandez, “Central America and the Caribbean” (1990), is a thorough dis¬ cussion of the literature emphasizing theoretical development and thematic treat¬ ments. Of the abundant writings addressing the international relations of the Circum-Caribbean, the following are representative: Adelman and Reiding, eds., Confrontation in the Caribbean Basin (1984); Anderson, Geopolitics of the Car¬ ibbean (1984); Braveboy-Wagner, The Caribbean in World Affairs (1989); Child, The Central American Peace Process, 1983-1991 (1992); Cirincione, ed., Central America and the Western Alliance (1985); Erisman and Martz, eds., Colossus Challenged (1982); Findling, Close Neighbors, Distant Friends (1987); Heine and Manigat, eds.. The Caribbean and World Politics (1988); Ince, ed., Contemporary International Relations of the Caribbean (1979); LaFeber, In¬ evitable Revolutions (1993); Langley, Struggle for the American Mediterranean (1976); Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century (1982); Leiken, ed., Central America (1984); Millett and Will, eds., The Restless Caribbean (1979); Ropp and Morris, Central America (1986); Perkins, The United States and the Caribbean (1966). Among the more interesting and val¬ uable works are Adams, A Foreign Policy in Transition (1993), an examination of Moscow’s retreat from Central America and the Caribbean in terms of Gor¬ bachev’s reconstitution of Soviet foreign policy, in the context of past Soviet orientations and the developments that brought the Cold War to an end; Griffith, The Quest for Security in the Caribbean (1993); and Watson, ed.. The Caribbean in the Global Political Economy (1993), stress the “new” states in the subre¬ gion.

Southern Cone and Brazil Most of South America beyond the Caribbean composes what is often called the Southern Cone.8 The key states are Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and the others are Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru, with Ecuador sometimes drawn

12

The Inter-American Environment

in. The Southern Cone itself has a number of special characteristics that make it strikingly different from the rest of Latin America. The remoteness of its ge¬ ographic location from Europe and the United States, combined with the relative strength of the key local states, has left the region free, for the most part, from inclusion in global power rivalries (although some of the South American states suffered European interventions from time to time in the nineteenth century). Neither the United State nor other outside great powers have exercised the func¬ tion of international policeman enforcing the peace. The Southern Cone states also have a broad array of external relationships that add to their ability to bal¬ ance outside influences. It is a multilateralized trading area, with long-standing cultural, military, and economic ties with Europe, and Japan an important eco¬ nomic actor, in addition to those with the United States and with immediate neighbors. Brazil, like Mexico, could be singled out as forming its own sub¬ system. It stands apart from the rest of Latin America because of its Portuguese cultural heritage, large size, and diversified economy and highly multilateral in¬ ternational trade (including in the Middle East and Africa). The United States, by and large, has been one of several competitors in South America, never ap¬ proaching a position of dominance as in the Circum-Caribbean or of primary importance as in Mexico. In fact, some local states developed their own balance of power systems and geopolitical thinking, extended to the Antarctic region. Subsystemic international relations have been characterized more often than not by conflict. Since the early 1980s, however, those relations have been increas¬ ingly distinguishd by substantive international cooperation, including in subre¬ gional economic integration organizations, and domestic redemocratization (moving away from military regimes to constitutional democracies), with neither of which the United States has had much to do. In February 1990 Argentina and the United Kingdom reestablished relations, broken during their 1982 war over the Falkland/Malvinas islands; they now pursue their differences through diplo¬ macy. The United States has signed framework agreements with the Southern Cone states for the negotiation of free trade agreements, although South Amer¬ icans have indicated their determination to continue multilateralized international economic and other relationships. Francis and Power, “South America” (1990), is a provocative discussion of themes, theories, and the research agenda regarding this complex subregion. Some books dealing with the area are Atkins, ed., South America into the 1990s (1990); Baily, The United States and the Development of South America, 19451975 (1976); Barclay, Struggle for a Continent (1971); Child, Geopolitics and Conflict in South America (1985); Child, Antarctica and South American Geo¬ politics (1988); and Kelly and Child, eds., Geopolitics of the Southern Cone and Antarctica (1988).

KEY ACTORS IN THE SYSTEM The large number of individual actors other than the United States involved in the structures described here may be categorized on three levels: the Latin

The External Environment

13

American regional states themselves, states outside the Americas, and nonnation-state actors, both within the region and without. The following survey concentrates on the broadly based literature; treatments of individual countries or other actors, and specific themes or subjects, are not included.

The Latin American States Traditional studies of Latin American international relations were histories concerned almost exclusively with interactions rather than formulation. The first comprehensive attempt at comparative Latin American foreign policy analysis was by Davis et al., Latin American Foreign Policies (1975), which contains chapters on various topics and on the foreign policy processes of almost all of the regional states. Other broadly conceived works that had explicit theoretical as well as descriptive purposes followed. Among them are edited collections by Drekonja and Tokatlian, Teona y practica de la politico exterior latinoamericana (1983); Ferris and Lincoln, Latin America Foreign Policies (1981); Lincoln and Ferris, The Dynamics of Latin American Foreign Policies (1984); Munoz and Tulchin, Latin American Nations in World Politics (1984); and Puig, Amer¬ ica Latina (1984). In the early 1980s, several institutions around Latin America joined in the formation of the Programa de Estudios Conjuntos Sobre las Relaciones Internacionales America Latina (RIAL); since 1985 RIAL, under the leadership of the Chilean professor Luciano Tomassini, has published an annual monographic series titled El sistema intemacional y America Latina in which Latin American experts from various countries analyze an array of subjects. In January 1984, the Chilean scholar Heraldo Munoz organized El Programa de Seguimiento de las Politicos Exteriores de Latinoamericana (PROSPEL), which in 1985 began publishing an annual monographic series, Anuario de Politicos Exteriores Latinoamericanas, analyzing the foreign policies of each country of Latin America and regional and functional issues.

Extrahemispheric States and Canada A broad array of external actors has influenced Latin Americans and conse¬ quently U.S. policy toward the region. The first notable general study of the Latin American policies of the nonhemispheric states in general was the pio¬ neering effort by Goldhamer, The Foreign Powers in Latin America (1972), which focused on interaction processes rather than country-by-country policies. More recently. Perry and Wehner, eds., The Latin American Policies of U.S. Al¬ lies (1985), produced a useful collection of essays, with chapters devoted to West German, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Canadian, Japanese, and Israeli involvement in Latin America. With reference to European interests, Grabendorff and Roett, eds., Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States (1985), organized an important book of fourteen U.S., Latin American, and European specialists. Duran, European Interests in Latin America (1985), is an excellent general treatment by a Mexican analyst. Mower, The European Com-

14

The Inter-American Environment

munity and Latin America (1982), studies European Community (EC) economic policies from an international political economy perspective. On evolving postCold war European policy, Grabendorff, “European Integration” (1992) and Freres, Klaveren, and Ruiz-Gimenez, “Europa y America Latina” (1992), pro¬ vide ample insight. The policies of the Soviet Union generated a substantial lit¬ erature. Among the best books are Blasier, The Giant’s Rival (1988); Duncan The Soviet Union and Cuba (1985); Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959-1987 (1989); collections edited by Mujal-Leon, European Socialism and the Conflict in Central America (1989); and Varas, Soviet-Latin American Re¬ lations in the 1980s (1987). On post-Cold War developments, see two informa¬ tive articles by Blasier, “Moscow’s Retreat From Cuba” (1991), and “Latin America Without the USSR” (1993); an edited book by Wayne S. Smith, The Russians Aren’t Coming (1991); and, with specific reference to the Soviet retire¬ ment from the Circum-Caribbean, Adams (1993). Canada has long had some sort of presence in the region, especially a financial one in the Circum-Caribbean but has otherwise been largely peripheral. From the late 1980s, however, Canada be¬ gan to undertake a significant role in inter-American relations, especially through commitments made in the Inter-American System and the United Nations. On the evolution of Canada’s relations with Latin America, see Ogelsby, Gringos from the Far North (1976); Canadian policy reorientations since 1989 are treated by Rochlin, Canada as a Hemisphere Actor (1992); Haar and Dosman, eds., A Dynamic Partnership (1994); and Dosman, “Canada and Latin America” (1992).

Other Actors in the System Increasing attention to non-nation-state actors over the past three decades in the study of international relations has had special significance for Latin Amer¬ ica. The Roman Catholic Church—today the Holy See as a sovereign state with Vatican City as its territorial base—has a tradition of Latin American relations dating from the early colonial era. It has been particularly active since the late 1960s. An early historical treatment is by Manhattan, Latin America and the Vatican (1946). Studies of the Latin American church that include aspects of the Holy See’s roles and relations include Cleary and Stewart-Gambino, eds., Conflict and Competition (1992); Considine, The Church in Latin America (1964); Levine, Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America (1986); Mutchler, The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America (1971); and Schmitt, ed., The Roman Catholic Church in Modem Latin America (1972). Analytic treatments of multinational corporations (MNCs) reached their height in the mid- to late 1970s; they have since declined along with external invest¬ ment itself in the region. Important theoretical and informational treatments, with substantial reference to Latin America, were provided by Barnet and Muller, Global Reach (1975); Eells Global Corporations (1976); Vernon, Sovereignty at Bay (1971); and two companion volumes by Wilkins, The Emergence of

The External Environment

15

Multinational Enterprise (1970) and The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise (1974). Studies of MNCs in Latin America include Behrman, The Role of In¬ ternational Companies in Latin America (1972), and Irish, ed., Multinational Corporations in Latin America (1978). Broadly conceived recent treatments of the subject have been notably lacking. An exception is Grosse, Multinationals in Latin America (1989), who sees the 1990s as a period of significant direct , foreign investment in the wake of past Latin American governments’ hostile or restrictive policies and the debt crises of the 1980s. General analyses of transnational political parties are few. On the Comintern and Communist parties in Latin America, see Alexander, Communism in Latin America (1963); Caballero, Latin America and the Comintern 1919-1943 (1986); Herman, ed., The Communist Tide in Latin America (1973); and Poppino, International Communism in Latin America (1964). A comprehensive treatment of the Socialist International is provided by Braunthal, History of the International (1967-1980), and a later critique with specific reference to Latin America by Williams, La Internacional Socialista y America Latina (1984). The literature on guerrilla groups and insurgency is considerable and only a sampling of general works is listed here. They include Bambirra et al., Diez ahos de insurreccion en America Latina (1971); Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (1970); Mercier Vega, Guerrillas in Latin America (1969); Moss, Urban Guerrillas (1972); Radu and Tismanlanu, Revolutionary Organizations in Latin America (1986); and Schump, Las guerrillas en America Latina (1971). The revived interest in this subject in the 1980s tended to be country-specific.

CONCLUSION U.S.-Latin American policy is formulated and implemented within an extrasocietal environment composed of states and nonstate actors that affect foreign policies, inter-American relations, and periodic shifts in global and regional pat¬ terns of power and interdependence. Scholars who have evaluated the region point to the importance of recognizing the different levels of analysis for pur¬ poses of understanding U.S. policy toward Latin America: the regional states themselves; states outside the Americas and, increasingly, Canada; and nonstate actors within the region and from other parts of the world. These systemic structures influence how U.S. policymakers respond to Latin America and issues of concern to the United States. The individual chapters in this volume focus on the role of governmental and nongovernmental actors in the formulation and execution of U.S. policy toward Latin America. From the earliest days of inter-American relations until the end of the Cold War, the United States made its decisions about the region in terms of what Lars Schoultz called “strategic denial,” particularly toward the circumCaribbean subregion subject to U.S. military control and economic domination. The literature dealing with the history of inter-American relations points to a distinct pattern in which U.S. involvement has ebbed and flowed on the basis

16

The Inter-American Environment

of its security, defined as the degree of threat posed by nonhemispheric states in the Western Hemisphere. Moscow’s retreat from the region and the virtual elimination of any security threat from Cuba altered the environment, refocusing U.S. attention on a broad array of new issues. The end of the Cold War has changed the dynamic of U.S. policy toward Latin America, forcing a shift in policy priorities emphasizing security to a broad set of “intermestic” issues that will determine future U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. Attention to the role of nonstate actors will no doubt increase with the decline of traditional security interests. As more voices are added to the policymaking process, systemic structures and processes will change in re¬ sponse to the altered Latin American international subsystem.

NOTES 1. This point is discussed at some length in G. Pope Atkins, “Patterns of International Relations Research,” in David W. Dent (ed.), Handbook of Political Science Research on Latin America: Trends from the 1960s to the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990). 2. Gordon C. Schloming, Power and Principle in International Affairs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), makes a solid synoptic presentation of these concepts. 3. Roger Hilsman, The Politics of Policy Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs: Conceptual Models and Bureaucratic Politics, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1990), emphasizes this shortcoming and the value of bureaucratic-organizational models. 4. The goal of minimizing foreign intrusions in the Western Hemisphere began with the U.S. Congress’s No-Transfer Resolution of 1811 in response to apparent British ambitions, and President James Monroe’s statement in 1823 (later known as the Monroe Doctrine) directed at France and Spain. The last episodes of this mode of thinking were in the 1980s when U.S. officials opposed what they saw as Soviet expansionism in concert with Cuban and Nicaraguan “surrogates.” 5. These analyses do not dismiss domestic political factors. To the contrary, they analyze the profound impact on decisions of the conflictual and fragmented nature of U.S. polipymaking engendered by the constitutional division of powers and various do¬ mestic interests competing for influence. 6. This problem is further articulated in Atkins, “Patterns of International Relations Research,” in David W. Dent (ed.), Handbook of U.S. Latin American Policymaking: Trends from the 1960s to the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 304; and Atkins, “Latin America’s International Relations in the Post-Cold War Era,” in Helen Purkitt (ed.), World Politics, 92/93 (Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin Publishing Group, 1992), pp. 41-44. 7. The Circum-Caribbean is delineated in detail in Atkins, “The United States and the Caribbean Basin,” in David J. Myers (ed.), Regional Hegemons: Threat Perception and Strategic Response (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991). 8. The South American subsystem is portrayed in Atkins, “South America in the International Political System,” in G. Pope Atkins (ed.). South America into the 1990s:

The External Environment

17

Evolving International Relationships in a New Era (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press 1990).

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18

The Inter-American Environment

Boersner, Demetrio. 1990. Relaciones intemacionales de America Latina: breve historia. Fourth Edition. Caracas: Nueva Socieddd. Braunthal, Julius. 1967-1980. History of the International, vol. 1, 1864-1914, New York: Praeger; vol. 2, 1914-1943, New York: Praeger; vol. 3, 1943-1968, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline A. 1989. The Caribbean in World Affairs: The Foreign Policies of the English-Speaking States. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Bueno, Gerardo M., ed. 1987. Mexico-Estados Unidos. Mexico, D.F.: El Colegio de Mexico. Caballero, Manuel. 1986. Latin America and the Comintern 1919-1943. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto. 1969. Dependencia y Desarrollo en America Latina. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. English trans. 1979. Depend¬ ency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Child, Jack. 1992. The Central American Peace Process, 1983-1991: Sheathing Swords, Building Confidence. Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner. -. 1988. Antarctica and South American Geopolitics: Frozen Lebensraum. New York: Praeger. -. 1985. Geopolitics and Conflict in South America: Quarrels Among Neighbors. New York: Praeger. Child, Jack, ed. 1986. Conflict in Central America: Approaches to Peace and Security. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Cirincione, Joseph, ed. 1985. Central America and the Western Alliance. New York: Holmes and Meier for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Cleary, Edward L., and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, eds. 1992. Conflict and Competition: The Latin American Church in a Changing Environment. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Cline, Howard F. 1963. The United States and Mexico. New York: Atheneum. Cockroft, James D., Andre Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson. 1972. Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy. Garden City, N.Y.: An¬ chor Press. Considine, John J. 1964. The Church in Latin America. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Cotier, Julio, and Richard R. Fagen, eds. 1974. Latin America and the United States: The Changing Political Realities. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Davis, Harold Eugene, John J. Finan, and F. Taylor Peck. 1977. Latin American Dip¬ lomatic History: An Introduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Davis, Harold E., et al. 1975. Latin American Foreign Policies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Desch, Michael C. 1993. When the Third World Matters: Latin America and the United States Grand Strategy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Di Marco, Luis Eugenio, ed. 1972. International Economics and Development: Essays in Honor of Raul Prebisch. New York: Academic Press. Dosman, Edgar J. 1992. “Canada and Latin America: The New Look.” International Journal 47, no. 3 (Summer): 529-554.

The External Environment

19

Drekonja K-., Gerhard, and Juan G. Tokdtlian, eds. 1983. Teoria y Practica de la Politico Exterior Latinoamericana. BogotS: Universidad de los Andes. Duncan, W. Raymond. 1985. The Soviet Union and Cuba: Interests and Influence. New York: Praeger. Duran, Esperanza. 1985. European Interests in Latin America. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul for the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Eells, Richard. 1976. Global Corporations: The Emerging System of World Economic Power. Revised Edition. New York: Free Press. Erisman, H. Michael, and John D. Martz, eds. 1982. Colossus Challenged: The Struggle for Caribbean Influence. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Fernandez, Damian J. 1990. “Central America and the Caribbean.” In David W. Dent, ed. Handbook of Political Science Research on Latin America: Trends from the 1960s to the 1990s. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Ferris, Elizabeth G., and Jennie K. Lincoln, eds. 1981. Latin American Foreign Policies: Global and Regional Dimensions. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Findling, John E. 1987. Close Neighbors, Distant Friends: United States-Central Amer¬ ican Relations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Fishlow, Albert, and Carlos Dfaz-Alejandro. 1984. Rich and Poor Nations in a World Economy. New York: McGraw-Hill. Francis, Michael J., and Timothy J. Power. 1990. “South America.” In David W. Dent, ed. Handbook of Political Science Research on Latin America: Trends from the 1960s to the 1990s. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1969. Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy. New York: Monthly Review Press. Freres, Christian L., Alberto van Klaveren, and Guadalupe Rufz-Gimenez. 1992. “Europa y America Latina: la busqueda de nuevas formas de cooperacidn.” Smtesis 18 (septiembre/diciembre): 91-178. Goldhamer, Herbert. 1972. The Foreign Powers in Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gomez-Robledo Verduzco, Alonso, ed. 1981. Relaciones Mexico-Estados Unidos: una vision interdisciplinaria. Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autonoma. Gott, Richard. 1970. Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. London: Nelson. Grabendorff, Wolf. 1992. “European Integration: Implications for Latin America.” In Colin I. Bradford, Jr., ed. Strategic Options for Latin America in the 1990s. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank. Grabendorff, Wolf and Riordan Roett, eds. 1985. Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States. New York: Praeger. Griffith, Ivelaw Lloyd. 1993. The Quest for Security in the Caribbean: Problems and Promises in Subordinate States. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. Grosse, Robert. 1989. Multinationals in Latin America. London: Routledge. Grunwald, Joseph, ed. 1978. Latin America and World Economy: A Changing Interna¬ tional Order. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage. Haar, Jerry and Edgar Dosman, eds. 1994. A Dynamic Partnership: Canada’s Changing Role in the Americas. New Brunswick: Transaction Press. Hartlyn, Jonathan, and Samuel A. Morley. 1986. Latin American Political Economy: Financial Crisis and Political Change. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

20

The Inter-American Environment

Hayes, Margaret Daly. 1984. Latin America and the U.S. National Interest: A Basis for U.S. Foreign Policy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Heine, Jorge, and Leslie Manigat, eds. 1988. The Caribbean and World Politics: Cross Currents and Cleavages. New York: Holmes and Meier. Herman, Donald J., ed. 1973. The Communist Tide in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ince, Basil, ed. 1979. Contemporary International Relations of the Caribbean. St. Au¬ gustine, Trinidad: Institute of International Relations. Irish, Donald P., ed. 1978. Multinational Corporations in Latin America. Athens: Ohio University Press. Jaguaribe, Helio. 1985. El nuevo escenario intemacional. Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Econdmica. Kelly, Philip, and Jack Child, eds. 1988. Geopolitics of the Southern Cone and Antarc¬ tica. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. LaFeber, Walter. 1993. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Lagos Matus, Gustavo, ed. 1979. Las relaciones entre America Latina, Estados Unidos y Europa Occidental. Santiago: Universidad de Chile. Langley, Lester D. 1982. The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press. -. 1976. Struggle for the American Mediterranean: United States-European Ri¬ valry in the Gulf-Caribbean, 1776-1904. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Leiken, Robert S., ed. 1984. Central America: Anatomy of Conflict. New York: Pergamon Press. Levine, Daniel H. 1986. Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lincoln, Jennie K., and Elizabeth G. Ferris, eds. 1984. The Dynamics of Latin American Foreign Policies. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Lowenthal, Abraham F., and Gregory F. Treverton, eds. 1994. Latin America in a New World. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Manhattan, Avro. 1946. Latin America and the Vatican. London: Watts. Martz, John D., ed. 1988. United States Policy in Latin America: A Quarter Century of Crisis and Challenge, 1961-1986. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mercier Vega, Luis. 1969. Guerrillas in Latin America. New York: Praeger. Middlebrook, Kevin J., and Carlos Rico, eds. 1986. The United States and Latin America: Contending Perspectives on a Decade of Crisis. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts¬ burgh Press. Miller, Nicola. 1989. Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959-1987. New York: Cam¬ bridge University Press. Millett, Richard, and W. Marvin Will, eds. 1979. The Restless Caribbean: Changing Patterns of International Relations. New York: Praeger. Moss, Robert. 1972. Urban Guerrillas. London: Temple Smith. Mower, Glenn, Jr. 1982. The European Community and Latin America: A Case Study in Global Role Expansion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Mujal-Le6n, Eusebio M. 1989. European Socialism and the Conflict in Central America. New York: Praeger. Munoz, Heraldo, and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds. 1984. Latin American Nations in World Politics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

The External Environment

21

Mutchler, David E. 1971. The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America. New York: Praeger. Ocampo, Josd, et al. 1976. Dependency Theory. Riverside, Calif.: Latin American Per¬ spectives. Ogelsby, J.C.M. 1976. Gringos from the Far North: Essays in the History of CanadianLatin American Relations, 1866-1968. Toronto: Macmillan. Ojeda, Mario. 1986. Mexico: El surgimiento de una politico exterior activa. Mexico, D.F.: Secretaria de Educacidn Publica. -. 1976. Alcances y limites de la politico de Mexico. Mexico, D.F.: El Colegio de Mexico. Packenham, Robert A. 1992. The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Parkinson, F. 1974. Latin America, the Cold War, and the World Powers, 1945-1973. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage. Pastor, Robert A., and Jorge G. Castaneda. 1989. Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico. New York: Vintage Books. Pellicer de Brody, Olga, et al. 1983. La politico exterior de Mexico: Desafios en la Ochenta. Mexico, D.F.: Centro de Investigacidn y Docencia Econdmica (CIDE). Perkins, Dexter. 1986. The United States and the Caribbean. Revised Edition. Cam¬ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Perry, William, and Peter Wehner, eds. 1985. The Latin American Policies ofU.S. Allies: Balancing Global Interests and Regional Concerns. New York: Praeger. Poppino, Rollie E. 1964. International Communism in Latin America. New York: Free Press. Prebisch, Raul. 1970. Change and Development: Latin America’s Great Task. Washing¬ ton, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank. -. 1964. Nueva politico comercial para el desarrollo. Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Econdmica. Puig, Juan Carlos, ed. 1984. America Latina: politicos exteriores comparadas. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano. Purcell, Susan Kaufman. 1981. Mexico-U.S. Relations. New York: Academy of Political Science. Purcell, Susan Kaufman, ed. 1988. Mexico in Transition: Implications for U.S. Policy. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Purcell, Susan Kaufman, and Robert M. Immerman, eds. 1992. Japan and Latin America in the New Global Order. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Quesada, Vicente G. 1918-1920. Historia diplomatica hispanoamericana. 3 Vols. Buenos Aires: La Cultura Argentina. Radu, Michael, and Vladimir Tismanlanu. 1986. Revolutionary Organizations in Latin America. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Reynolds, Clark W., and Carlos Tello. 1983. U.S.-Mexico Relations: Economic and Social Aspects. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Rippy, J. Fred. 1938. Latin America in World Politics. Third Edition. New York: F. S. Crofts. Rochlin, James. 1992. Canada as a Hemisphere Actor. Toronto: McGraw Hill-Ryerson. Rodriguez Larretta, A. 1938. Orientacion de la politico intemacional en America Latina. 2 Vols. Montevideo: Pena.

22

The Inter-American Environment

Roett, Riordan, ed. 1988. Mexico and the United States: Managing the Relationship. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Ropp, Steve C., and James A. Morris. 1986. Central America: Crisis and Adaptation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Santos, Theotonio dos. 1970. Dependencia economica y cambio revolucionario en Amer¬ ica Latina. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Izquierda. Schmitt, Karl. 1974. Mexico and the United States, 1821-1973: Conflict and Coexistence. New York: John Wiley. Schmitt, Karl M., ed. 1972. The Roman Catholic Church in Modem Latin America. New York: Alfred Knopf. Schoultz, Lars. 1987. National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Schump, Walter. 1971. Las guerrillas en America Latina. Buenos Aires: Punto Cntico. Seara Vazquez, Modesto. 1985. Politico exterior de Mexico, Third Edition. Mexico, D.F.: Harla—Harper & Row Latinoamericana. Smith, Wayne S., ed. 1991. The Russians Aren’t Coming: New Soviet Policy in Latin America. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Story, Dale. 1990. “Mexico’s International Relations.” In David W. Dent, ed. Handbook of Political Science Research on Latin America: Trends from the 1960s to the 1990s. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Syzmanski, A. 1981. The Logic of Imperialism. New York: Praeger. Tomassini, Luciano, ed. 1981. Relaciones Intemacionales de la America Latina. Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica. Urquidi, Victor L. 1964. The Challenge of Development in Latin America. New York: Praeger. -. 1962. Free Trade and Economic Integration in Latin America. Berkeley: Uni¬ versity of California Press. Urquidi, Vfctor L., and Rosemary Thorp, eds. 1973. Latin America in the International Economy. New York: Wiley. Varas, Augusto, ed. 1987. Soviet-Latin American Relations in the 1980s. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Vdzquez, Josefina Zoraida, and Lorenzo Meyer. 1985. The United States and Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vernon, Raymond. 1971. Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enter¬ prises. New York: Basic Books. Watson, Hilboume A., ed. 1993. The Caribbean in the Global Political Economy. Boul¬ der, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Wiarda, Howard J., ed. 1986. Iberian-Latin American Connection: Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Weintraub, Sidney. 1990. A Marriage of Convenience: Relations between Mexico and the United States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. Weintraub, Sidney, special ed. 1993. Free Trade in the Western Hemisphere. Entire issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 526 (March). Wilkins, Mira. 1974. The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise. Cambridge, Mass.: Har¬ vard University Press. -. 1970. The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

The External Environment

23

Williams, Felicity. 1984. La intemacional socialista y America Latina: una vision critica. Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Autdnoma Metropolitana.

3

_

The United States and the OAS Larman C. Wilson and David W. Dent

The United States has often used the Organization of American States (OAS) to pursue its principal objectives in Latin America: preventing foreign influence in the Western Hemisphere and maintaining political stability, particularly in the Circum-Caribbean area. Since the OAS was established by the Ninth Inter¬ national Conference of American States held in Bogota, Colombia, in 1948, the United States has been interested mainly in the OAS’s playing the following roles, depending on its foreign policy objectives: (1) peacekeeper and peace¬ maker, (2) antidictator alliance and/or promoter of democracy and human rights, and (3) mechanism to secure multilateral support for policies designed to prevent the incursion of or remove communism from Guatemala, Cuba, and the Do¬ minican Republic. The United States saw no reason to use the OAS in its efforts to “destabilize” the Allende government in Chile; in the case of Grenada in 1983, the United States argued that the OAS was irrelevant since the invasion was a joint effort under the auspices of the Organization of East Caribbean States (OECS), a subgroup of the OAS. The use and nonuse of the OAS by the United States, beginning in 1948, are presented in Table 3.1, an examination of the major roles the organization has played in inter-American relations. Clearly, Table 3.1 reveals a close relationship between the Latin American policy of the United States and the role of the OAS in hemispheric affairs since its inception in the late 1940s. The history of the relationship between the United States and the OAS is one of vacillation between unilateralism and multilateralism in its Latin American policy. When the OAS could not be relied upon to deal multilaterally with an issue of perceived importance to the United States—communist threats or noncompliant dictators—it often ignored or bypassed the organization in favor of unilateral U.S. military intervention or covert action. U.S. efforts to assemble joint military operations involving other members of the OAS have fallen on deaf ears, regardless of the magnitude of the crisis in the region. (The meta-

Table 3.1 Issues in Inter-American Relations: Cold War versus Post-Cold War Use (and Nonuse) of the Organization of American States (OAS), 1948-1994

COLD WAR USE OF THE OAS Peaceful Settlement: Cuba and the Dominican Republic (1948-51; 1956-59) Costa Rica and Nicaragua (1948-49; 1955-56; 1978-80) Dominican Republic and Haiti (1949-50; 1963-64) Dominican Republic and Venezuela (1959-60) Cuba and Venezuela (1963-64) El Salvador and Honduras (1969) Argentina and the U.K. (1982)—only at outset Anticommunist Alliance: Guatemala (1954) Cuba (1962, 1964, 1967) Dominican Republic (1956-66) Promotion of Democracy, Protection of Human Rights, and Economic Development: Dominican Republic (1960-62; 1965-66) Protocol of Buenos Aires (1967) American Convention of Human Rights (1969) Nicaragua (1978-79) American Court of Human Rights (1969) Election Observers in Bolivia and El Salvador (1981 and 1984) Protocol of Cartagena (1985)

POST-COLD WAR USE OF THE OAS Peaceful Settlement: Group of Observers in Nicaragua (1989-1990) Jointly with United Nations Observer Group for Central America (ONUCA, 1989) Peace Accord (between rebels and government) in Suriname (1992) Promotion of Democracy and the Protection of Human Rights: OAS and UN election observers in Bolivia and Paraguay (1989), Nicaragua and Haiti (1990), Suriname (1991), and Peru (1992) OAS and Panama (Noriega crisis, 1989) OAS (General Assembly) approves Santiago Resolution and commitment to Renewal of the OAS (June 1991) OAS approves sanctions vs. Haiti and mediation missions (October 1991); becomes joint with UN (1992)

The Inter-American Environment

26 Table 3.1 (continued)

COLD WAR NONUSE OF THE OAS Peaceful Settlement: Contadora Peace Process Reagan Administration Opposition to Contadora United Nations Support for Peace Process U.S. nonpayment of full quota to OAS

Anticommunist Alliance: Commonwealth Caribbean states begin joining OAS, not bound by OAS sanctions OECS and U.S. invade Grenada (1983) Massive amounts of U.S. aid to El Salvador and Honduras (1980's) U.S. support of contras U.N. opposition to U.S. policy in region

POST-COLD WAR NONUSE OF THE OAS Peaceful Settlement: Canada joins OAS (1990), emphasizing multi-lateral solutions to regional issues United Nations role: Peace Accord (between FMLN and Government) in El Salvador (ONUSAL, 1992); Peace Accord between URNG and Government in Guatemala (1994) Promotion of Democracy and the Protection of Human Rights: U.S. military intervention of Panama (1989)

morphosis of U.S. military intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean is treated by Kryzanek in Chapter 16 of this volume.) The pattern of U.S. intervention—particularly armed intervention and covert actions—has provoked great criticism among the Latin Americans, as well as among U.S. academic scholars, because the use of force is contrary to the legal principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states. The non¬ intervention principle, enshrined in the Charter of the OAS, constitutes the cornerstone (la piedra angular) of the Inter-American System (IAS), the insti¬ tutionalized structure of multilateral cooperation among the American states. These institutions, principally the Rio Treaty, the OAS Charter, and the Pact of Bogota, are examined in some detail in Atkins, Latin American in the Interna¬ tional Political System (1989: 202-236). One of the earliest books on the OAS and the Inter-American System (IAS)—Dreier, The Organization of American States (1962: 11)—refers to the IAS as the “broad complex of juridical prin¬ ciples, political policies, and administrative arrangements that has grown up among the American republics over the years,” with the OAS as the principal multilateral organization within the system.1 The Inter-American Treaty of Re¬ ciprocal Assistance, or Rio Treaty, because of the city in Brazil where it was

The United States and the OAS

27

signed in 1947, provided the backbone of collective security efforts for the Western Hemisphere. The principle of nonintervention is the most important international law duty in the charter, and it transcends all the other duties, including that of promoting representative democracy and the protection of human rights, both of growing significance to the OAS. The absolute prohibition of all forms of intervention, direct and indirect—with the exception of collective action approved by twothirds majority vote—was contained in Article 15 in the original charter and Article 18 in the amended charter some years later. It should be pointed out, however, that international law does recognize intervention as a legal action in cases where (1) a legitimate government requests another state to intervene, (2) treaties sanction the right to intervene, (3) it involves a reprisal against an illegal act, (4) it involves the protection of citizens of the intervening state—especially when the government declares its inability to protect them, and (5) the OAS, or United Nations, intervenes for purposes of stopping aggression or settling dis¬ putes, if provided for by charter. The OAS as an international organization does not have a life of its own, for its role is the function of the will of all of its members. There is no Security Council in the OAS structure, each member state has one vote, and no provisions exist for either veto power over resolutions in the General Assembly or mech¬ anisms for the expulsion of member states.2 The first secretary general of the OAS, the former Colombian president, Alberto Lleras Camargo, made this clear (quoted in Welch and Gutierrez, The Organization of American States [1990: viii]) by stating, “The Organization in itself is neither good nor bad,... it is what the member governments want it to be and nothing else.”

THE CHANGING COMPOSITION AND MEMBERSHIP OF THE OAS

The relationships among the United States, the OAS, and the Latin American and Caribbean states have been affected by the changing composition of the OAS since the Charter went into effect in 1951. According to Vaky, “The Organization of American States and Multilateralism in the Americas” (1993: 33), the OAS is now divided into five centers or subgroupings—the United States, Canada, the thirteen members of the English-speaking Caribbean, the Rio Group, and the small Latin member states in Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama) and the Caribbean (Haiti and the Dominican Republic).3 The government of Cuba was suspended from OAS participation through collective action in 1962 but it remains part of the Organization as a member state. The symbols of the Cuban state—red-whiteand-blue flag, hand-carved chair with “Cuba” engraved at the top, and the marble bust of Jose Marti—can still be observed at OAS headquarters at the comer of 17th and Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. Canada’s entry into the OAS as a full member in 1990 has had a dramatic effect on the ori-

28

The Inter-American Environment

entation of the organization by diffusing the traditional hostility between the United States and the other member states, serving as counterweight to the United States in the hemisphere, and helping to bridge the gap between the Caribbean bloc (Afro-Caribbean) and the Ibero-American nations. The Rio Group is hampered by coherence and leadership problems but aspires to be a major policy bloc within the OAS which can challenge the “hegemonic” pol¬ icies of the United States in Latin America. Dent, “Canada in Latin America” (1990), examines the consequences of Canada’s entry into the OAS and U.S.Latin American policy. Guy, “Canada Joins the OAS: A New Dynamic in the IAS” (1989), examines the reasons for Canada’s decision to join the OAS, including the perceived advantages and disadvantages of OAS membership. Ac¬ cording to Guy (1989: 509), “Canada’s full participation in the Inter-American System will carry as much implication for Canada-U.S. relations as it does for Canada-Latin American relations.” Despite the heterogeneous membership, power asymmetries, organizational proliferation, and severe financial restraints on the Organization of American States in the 1990s, there is still a linkage between the state of U.S.-Latin American relations and the role of the OAS in dealing with a broad range of hemispheric issues. The pattern of OAS-U.S. relations is largely the result of asymmetries in power between the United States and Latin America. Thus, when interests and policies converge between the United States and Latin America, the OAS tends to be active and more successful in its efforts in the hemisphere; when relations are turbulent and there is a divergence in U.S.-Latin American interests and policies, they are reflected in a moribund and inactive OAS. After the Panama Canal treaties were signed and ratified in 1978, and Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the United States eschewed multilateral channels for dealing with crises in Latin America and adopted an essentially unilateralist foreign policy for advancing its interests. For example, during the Reagan-Bush years, the United States decreased its interest in (and financial contributions to) the OAS and ignored the peacekeeping machinery of the OAS in dealing with conflicts in Central America, Grenada, and the war over the Falklands/Malvinas islands. President Bush tried the OAS for a while in order to dislodge General Noriega from Panama but eventually relied on the use of military force rather than collective efforts through the OAS. During this period, U.S.-Latin Amer¬ ican relations deteriorated, the OAS declined in importance, and the Latin Amer¬ ican countries moved toward their own brand of unilateralism; toward greater coordination through such mechanisms as the Contadora and Esquipulas peace process, the Rio Group, and the Latin American Economic System (SELA); or toward the United Nations.

THE OAS AS AN ANTICOMMUNIST ALLIANCE

According to Rossi and Plano, Latin America: A Political Dictionary (1992: 186), “The major controversies to come before the OAS since 1948 have mainly

The United States and the OAS

29

been those associated with efforts—led by the United States—to keep com¬ munism out of the hemisphere, whether the threat emanates from outside the region or from within.” The OAS was created at the beginning of the Cold War and gradually became a major tool of the United States in its efforts to counter the Soviet menace in Latin America. Looking at the period from 1948 to 1970, Williams, The Political Themes of Inter-American Relations (1971: 35), points out, “The Cold War and communism theme has pervaded every aspect of hem¬ ispheric intercourse, dictating political and military policy, influencing the ap¬ portionment of economic aid, shaping the agenda of inter-American conferences, and motivating the establishment of the Alliance for Progress.” The geopolitics of the Cold War—and the rise of military dictatorships in the region—both weakened and complicated the commitment of OAS members to the principles of democratic rule. The turning point in the conversion of the OAS into an anticommunist alliance coincided with U.S.-Cuba policy in the 1960s and the use of force by President Johnson in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Fidel Castro’s announced devotion to Marxism-Leninism, his close ties with the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev’s decision to install intermediate range ballistic missiles on the island provoked great controversy among the OAS member states about intervention and non¬ intervention, U.S. relations with the hemisphere, and whether the OAS or the United Nations would have priority in resolving regional disputes. Wyden’s account of the planning that preceded the Bay of Pigs invasion—Bay of Pigs (1979)—reveals how some of Kennedy’s top advisers reflected on the nonin¬ tervention principle of the OAS Charter prior to sending the Cuban exile brigade to Cuba in 1961. Wyden (1979: 180) claims that the United States was prepared to seek a cloak of legitimacy for its intervention by asking the OAS to inter¬ vene to help rid the island of Fidel Castro. During the Cuban missile crisis and the intervention in the Dominican Re¬ public in 1965, enormous pressure was exerted on the Latin American countries by the United States. However, although the Latin American countries provided unanimous support only in the former case, such support did legitimize the U.S. position toward Castro and Khrushchev. As Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days (1969: 121), argues: It was the vote of the OAS that gave a legal basis for the quarantine. Their willingness to follow the leadership of the United States was a heavy blow to Khrushchev. It had a major psychological and practical effect on the Russians and changed our position from that of an outlaw acting in violation of international law into a country acting in accor¬ dance with twenty [Latin American and Caribbean] allies legally protecting their position.

Yet, the use of the OAS by the United States as an anticommunist alliance proved to be a costly and counterproductive strategy for conducting foreign policy. Franck and Weisband, Word Politics (1972), point out that the Johnson Doctrine—Washington’s self-proclaimed right to invade any Latin American

30

The Inter-American Environment

country in the name of anticommunism—furnished the international legitimacy the Soviets needed to suppress the Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968. According to Franck and Weisband (1972: 94), “This doctrine of limited sovereignty was the broadest net we [United States] could possibly have thrown over our actions; it was the most costly of all possible rationalizations for U.S. conduct.”

THE UNITED STATES AND THE OAS: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

The academic literature on the IAS and the OAS over the past thirty years is largely the result of work by U.S. scholars and published mostly in English. The first works were written by international civil servants and/or scholars work¬ ing at the OAS; some were former university professors and others later became professors of international law and organization.4 Manger’s Pan America in Crisis (1961) focused on the functions and structure of the OAS, U.S.-Latin American relations, and the development of the IAS. Unlike Dreier’s (1962) more favorable history of the United States and the OAS, Manger was quite critical of U.S. policy—particularly its many interventions and their negative impact on Latin America—claiming that the United States had the “primary responsibility” for the future success of the OAS, which at the time included adhering to the nonintervention principle in its dealings with Latin America and strongly supporting the Alliance for Progress.5 Mecham, The United States and Inter-American Security, 1889-1960 (1961), is a historical account of the United States and the OAS up through the first decade of the OAS in action, providing a useful synthesis of the important studies on the subject up to that time. Gil, Latin American-United States Relations (1971), provides a valuable historical account of the struggle between “regionalists” and “globalists” from the first post-World War II meeting in Mexico City to the early 1960s. The early works by Manger (1961), Mecham (1960), and Dreier (1962) were followed in the 1960s by studies that focused on the development, organization, and functions of the OAS and its peacekeeping activities in the region. Fenwick, The Organization of American States (1963), is a general overview of the history of the inter-American system.6 Thomas and Thomas, two international lawyers and professors at Southern Methodist University, published The Organization of American States (1963), a detailed treatment of the structure and functions of the OAS. Stoetzer’s first book on the OAS, The Organization of American States (1965), provides a critical perspective after working in the organization for several years. Slater, The OAS and United States Foreign Policy (1967), is an excellent treatment of how the United States has used the OAS at different times to carry out its Latin American policy. Slater is critical of the United States for its interventionist policies that render the OAS impotent as an alliance of hemispheric states. Ball, The OAS in Transition (1969), is a heavily docu-

The United States and the OAS

31

mented effort to examine the evolution, structure, and operation of the OAS with special emphasis on specialized organizations. According to Atkins (1989: 62), “An Inter-American Peace Force settled the Dominican civil war of 1965—1966 (under de facto U.S. leadership), and a sim¬ ilar organization was instrumental in bringing warfare between El Salvador and Honduras to an end in 1967.” In a classic analysis of the “try the OAS first” strategy, Claude, “The OAS, the U.N., and the United States” (1964), argues that a regionalist approach is preferable to a globalist approach to hemispheric problems. Connell-Smith, The Inter-American System (1966), offers a British perspective on the history of U.S.-OAS relations emphasizing regional security and peacekeeping. He notes how the inter-American system has benefited both Latin American and the United States; however, the OAS has been more ben¬ eficial to the United States and this has served to weaken the OAS as a legitimate international peacekeeping organization. The best of the early works on the role of the OAS in U.S.-Latin American policy were written by Jerome Slater, a political scientist with an interest in events surrounding the Dominican intervention in 1965. In The OAS and United States Foreign Policy (1967), Slater presents a balanced analysis of the sym¬ biotic and asymmetrical relationship between Latin America and the United States. Slater (1967) focuses on the OAS as both an “Anti-Communist Alli¬ ance” and “Anti-Dictatorial Alliance,” judging that the OAS was more suc¬ cessful with the latter than the former during the 1950s and 1960s. Several years later, Slater, Intervention and Negotiation (1970), criticized United States inter¬ vention in the Dominican Republic on the grounds that President Johnson’s “no more Cubas” policy was seriously flawed. Johnson appealed to the OAS to help achieve a cease-fire and the restoration of a legitimate government only after receiving heavy criticism for intervening unilaterally and repressing a popular revolt.7 The bulk of the Inter-American Peace Keeping Force (LAPF) was made up of troops from Brazil, then under a right-wing military regime, and only token forces from other Latin American countries, almost all also under military rule. The United States applied heavy pressure to secure the fourteen OAS votes necessary to establish the IAPF, but a backlash soon developed and many Latin American countries decided to use the United Nations because of the perception that the United States controlled the OAS. The Dominican case ended the “try the OAS first” strategy and thus assured the Latin American states that they would never again approve such a “peacekeeping” force, even when it could serve a potentially useful purpose, as in Nicaragua in 1979. Jose, An InterAmerican Peace Force Within the OAS (1970), concludes that the Dominican case sealed the fate of future peacekeeping efforts because of the heavy-handed involvement of the United States in establishing and overseeing the IAPF. Reactions to the Dominican intervention in 1965 led to the first major change to the Charter of the OAS (Protocol of Buenos Aires) and a guarded optimism that the organization was in transition to more control from the Latin American side. Ball, The OAS in Transition (1969), argues that the charter amendments

32

The Inter-American Environment

would eventually contribute to an organization with a greater degree of Latin American control. The OAS continued to evolve into the 1970s but the rise of Latin American militarism, the U.S. role in the overthrow of Allende in Chile, and problems of U.S. control over the Panama Canal left the OAS out of much of U.S.-Latin American policymaking. Further complications arose when some Latin American countries wanted to begin trading with Cuba, ignoring the bind¬ ing OAS sanctions established some years earlier. The newly independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean joined the OAS, but since they were not sig¬ natories to the Rio Treaty they established diplomatic relations with Castro’s Cuba. As Wilson, “Multilateral Policy and the Organization of American States” (1975), points out, by the 1970s the United States and the Latin Amer¬ ican members of the OAS began to diverge in their interpretations of how the organization should function as a multifunctional regional organization within the hemisphere. The Latin American and Caribbean perspective began to em¬ phasize the importance of dealing with economic and social problems endemic to their national and international status, and at the same time expressing less enthusiasm for the U.S. position of using the OAS as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and Cuba. The complexity of trade and economic development issues thus became intermeshed with U.S. concern over security and ideology in the 1970s.

The Decline of the OAS The U.S. role in the overthrow of Allende in Chile, tuna “wars” with Ecuador over fishing rights, the nationalization of foreign economic interests in Chile and Peru, and the U.S. punishment of Venezuela and Ecuador (both full mem¬ bers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC]) over the oil embargo angered the Latin American and Caribbean members and generated demands to distance themselves from the OAS and the United States and its Cold War policies in the region. In 1975, at the OAS Meeting of Foreign Min¬ isters in Costa Rica, a Freedom of Action Resolution was passed, freeing OAS members from the trade sanctions imposed on Cuba ten years earlier. These events started a period of decline for the OAS, both as an instrument of U.S.-Latin American policy and as an instrument of unity for the Latin American states. The academic literature that emerged from this period (19751988) was meager, and highly critical, as inter-American relations deteriorated and the United States found little use for the OAS in the formulation and im¬ plementation of its Latin American policy. Some scholars even went so far as to suggest that the United Nations would be a far better instrument for dealing with hemispheric issues than the OAS. For example, Tom Farer, a professor of international law and member of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, was very critical of the IAS in two major works on the subject. In the first, Farer, The United States and the Inter-American System (1978: 74-75), con¬ cludes that the “present institutional structure,” which “was established pri-

The United States and the OAS

33

manly to exclude Soviet influence, to restrain the... United States, and to induce a flow of concessional economic assistance from the United States ..., does not matter” a great deal either to the United States or the principal Latin nations.” The IAS “is simply marginal” to its members’ “practical concerns.” His edited book, The Future of the Inter-American System (1979: 202), dissected a number of problems in the ‘ ‘new context’ ’ of hemispheric relations that were contributing to the decline of the IAS. These included issues of human rights (he favored and supported Carter’s policy), trade and investment matters, the failure of regional integration, and the rise of Brazil and Venezuela as regional powers that often challenged the United States over its Latin American policy. Farer argues in favor of ‘ ‘slowly restoring responsibility to the United Nations’ ’ in peacekeeping activities.

THE UNITED STATES AND THE OAS: FROM CARTER TO BUSH The Carter Administration and the OAS

The Carter administration’s stress on human rights as part of its Latin Amer¬ ican policy resulted in the resurrection of the OAS as an anti-Somoza/dictator alliance; however, as in the Dominican situation some fifteen years earlier, the Carter administration did not try the OAS first. He preferred working outside the OAS in his initial efforts to pressure Somoza to resign from office. The mechanism for removing the dictator Somoza was a three-nation group, chaired by the United States, that would try to bargain with Somoza in hopes that he would see the magnitude of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Nicaragua in 1978-1979. However, Somoza reneged on the agreement that involved his step¬ ping aside in preparation for new elections, and this prompted the Carter administration to seek some sort of legitimation from the OAS. This shift in U.S. policy coincided with the growing success of the Sandinista-led popular insurrection and a highly critical report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) after its visit to Nicaragua in late 1978. To help resolve the crisis in Nicaragua, the Permanent Council met in June 1979 and passed an unprecedented resolution calling for the ‘ ‘replacement of the Somoza regime” (since his regime was the major obstacle to any change), the creation of a democratic government, and the guarantee of human rights protections until free elections could be held in Nicaragua. At the same meeting of the Permanent Council of the OAS in Washington, the United States (led by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance) proposed the creation of an Inter-American Peace Force to be sent to Nicaragua to help negotiate a settlement between Somoza and the op¬ position. Although such a force could have played a useful role in the crisis, Vance’s proposal received no support and was quickly dismissed by the Latin Americans, who still remembered a similar proposal that they supported during the Dominican crisis in 1965.

34

The Inter-American Environment

In response to the efforts of the Permanent Council in Washington, the Sandinista provisional government (headquartered in San Jose, Costa Rica) sent a letter to the secretary general of the OAS promising that their government would hold elections, supported a mixed economy, and would pursue a nonaligned foreign policy once they assumed power. In the end, the OAS played a minor role in the removal of Somoza—his National Guard was defeated in July 1979 and he fled the country, leaving the Sandinistas with little to begin the difficult task of political and economic reconstruction. Wilson, “The Nicaraguan Insur¬ rection and the Delegitimization of Somoza” (1984a), provides an interesting account of the role of the OAS and the United States in the Nicaraguan Revo¬ lution, including the various interpretations of the Sandinista promises to the OAS in 1979.

The Reagan-Bush Administrations and the OAS

The OAS continued to decline in the 1980s as the Reagan administration sidestepped the OAS and turned to the United Nations for dealing with the Falklands/Malvinas war between England and Argentina, and bypassed multi¬ lateral diplomacy in favor of unilateralism in dealing with the conflict in Central America (El Salvador and Nicaragua) and the political crisis in Grenada in 1983 that led to U.S. intervention. The legacy of OAS silence and noninvolvement when dictatorships flourished in Latin America from the mid-1960s through the 1970s convinced many people that the OAS was not serious about its commit¬ ment to democratic solidarity in the Americas. It would take major changes inside and outside Latin America before the OAS began to address the necessity of a collective commitment to preserving democratic governments in the West¬ ern Hemisphere in the early 1990s. The studies of the role of the OAS in U.S.-Latin American policymaking during the 1980s continued to emphasize the decline and marginalization of the OAS. The Reagan administration eschewed multilateralism in favor of a doctrine of “peace through strength” that pushed for military solutions to the problems of the hemisphere. The Falklands/Malvinas war and the U.S. invasion of Gre¬ nada provide the prime examples of how U.S. policy exacerbated the decline, or marginalization, of the Organization of American States in dealing with Latin American and Caribbean issues. In the early stages of the Argentine “takeover” of the Malvinas Islands in April 1982, the Reagan administration turned its back on the OAS and maintained that the United Nations was the proper forum for the resolution of the crisis. At the outset of the crisis, most of the Latin American states were critical of the Argentine government for violating the nonintervention principle of the OAS by initiating a military attack. However, they soon reversed themselves and supported Argentina when it became apparent that the United States rejected the inter-American system and the “try the OAS first” strategy in favor of the United Nations Security Council. Argentina, accusing the United States of “betrayal” of the principles of the OAS and the Rio Treaty, clearly

The United States and the OAS

35

preferred a meeting of the OAS on the basis of the collective security measures of the Rio Treaty, largely because this would exclude the Commonwealth Car¬ ibbean members of the OAS because—with the exception of Trinidad and To¬ bago—they are not parties to the treaty. The impact of the South Atlantic War on the IAS and the OAS is examined by Child and Wilson in their respective chapters in Organization of American States, Anuario Juridico Interamericano 1983 (1984: 43-82 and 295-342). The United States accepted the nonunanimous vote and invitation to intervene militarily in Grenada in 1983 of the Organization of East Caribbean States (OECS), an organization to which it did not belong although OECS members are also members of the OAS. While Reagan’s motive in the decision to inter¬ vene in October 1983 was to prevent a Cuban takeover of the island, his official public justification was to (1) protect U.S. citizens, (2) end the chaos, and (3) restore order (an action that is contrary to the OAS Charter) in the aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. The legal and political dimensions of Reagan’s intervention policy are examined in Forsythe, The Pol¬ itics of International Law (1990: 68-73). President Reagan’s efforts to eliminate Soviet influence in Nicaragua—using both covert and overt intervention to overthrow the Sandinista government— overlapped with the Falklands/Malvinas war and the invasion of Grenada. The OAS served no purpose as the United States sought to achieve its foreign policy goals of “rolling back” communism through secretly mining Nicaraguan har¬ bors, organizing and supporting the Contras operating out of Honduras, and providing huge amounts of military and economic aid to El Salvador. The ability of the OAS to function as a peacekeeping force in Central America during the 1980s was hampered by the United States’ refusal to pay its allotted quota to the OAS. This contributed to a severe budget crunch at the OAS and further exacerbated its decline in the 1980s, as illustrated in “The OAS in Trouble” (1988), a lengthy special report from the Times of the Americas. Fearing U.S. military intervention against Nicaragua, four Latin American states—Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico and, Panama—formed the Contadora Group and started a process that they hoped would lead to peace in the region, independent of Reagan’s Central American policy. Although the United States claimed to support the process, most of the time it worked at cross-purposes of the Contadora efforts, thus making the search for peace even more difficult. (At times the United States threatened to involve the OAS and on one occasion it raised a critical question at a meeting about the role of the Secretary-General as a member of the Rio Group, which was created in 1986.) The Contadora Process later declined but was revived by a new peace proposal presented by the Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias, in early 1987, which served to revive the peace process. At this point, the OAS did become involved in an important way; however, the Central American presidents turned to the United Nations and requested the creation of a United Nations observer and verification group that would disarm the Contras. The United Nations Security Council approved the

36

The Inter-American Environment

request and created ONUCA (UN Observer Group for Central America), which became a joint OAS-UN operation, as well as a group to observe the Nicaraguan elections scheduled for March 1990. ONUCA was unprecedented, for it was the first time that the UN had become involved in peacekeeping in Latin America. An excellent study of the U.S. policy toward Nicaragua during this period is Forsythe, The Politics of International Law (1990: 34-40, 50-53). Child, The Central American Peace Process, 1983-1991 (1992), is the best account of the painful peace process throughout the 1980s. The decline and further marginalization of the OAS in the 1980s prompted Ronald Scheman, former OAS civil servant and Washington lawyer, to write The Inter-American Dilemma (1988). Scheman, former assistant secretary for Management at the OAS from 1975 to 1983 and a firm believer in the IAS, examines the roots of the organization’s “paralysis” and traces its many peace¬ keeping and security activities, making a strong case for the need for a regional approach to hemispheric problems and the political will to “renew” the OAS after its weakening by years of abuse by the Reagan administration in Central America. About the same time, the editor of the OAS’s Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia (1989) commissioned a number of articles for a special issue, “The First Century of the Inter-American System.” In this special edition, there were eight articles, three of which reflected a positive view of the future of the IAS and the OAS: Scheman, “Rebuilding the OAS”; Ray and Reyes, “The Inter-American System, the OAS and the Future”; and Wilson, “The OAS and Promoting Democracy and Resolving Disputes.” Guy (1989) speculates on the consequences of Canada’s entry into the “new” OAS in the 1990s. Of consid¬ erable value in this special edition (39, no. 4) is the treatment of the role of the OAS in the Central American peace process and in the disarming of the Nicar¬ aguan Contras, the monitoring of the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, the change in U.S. attitudes toward payment of its arrearages to the OAS budget, democ¬ ratization and economic liberalization trends, along with a host of other social and economic issues facing the OAS. Reinforced by earlier policies to promote democracy and human rights in Latin America by U.S. presidents, the OAS has made recent efforts to reaffirm its commitment to representative democracy and the protection of human rights, although these goals often clash with the nonintervention articles enshrined in the OAS Charter. Efforts to “try the OAS” in dealing with human rights and sustaining democracy in Latin America have been made easier by the transition to democracy throughout the hemisphere. At the General Assembly session in Paraguay in 1990, the OAS created the Unit for Democratic Development, which now has a small office at OAS headquarters in Washington. The following year, meeting in Santiago, Chile, the OAS General Assembly passed the Santiago Commitment to Democracy, which provides a basis for action when a demo¬ cratically elected president is overthrown in Latin America or the Caribbean. Shortly after this resolution was passed, the OAS faced its first test of this provision in Haiti (September 1991) when President Aristide was forcefully

The United States and the OAS

37

removed from office by the military and sent into exile. In keeping with the Santiago Accord, the secretary general quickly called a meeting of the OAS and a resolution was passed to impose economic sanctions, a move that was led by the United States. After months of unsuccessful efforts to negotiate the return of Aristide and to dislodge the military from power, the OAS turned to the United Nations in 1992 to work out a joint policy of sanctions and negotiations. Although an agreement, providing mutual conditions and steps leading to Ar¬ istide’s restoration by October 30, was signed by both sides in July 1993, the military reneged and an impasse resulted. The inability of the OAS, United Nations, and United States to resolve the situation is examined in recent works by Acevedo, “The Haitian Crisis and the OAS Response” (1993: 119-155), Schulz and Marcella, Reconciling the Irreconcilable (1994), and Wilson, “The Organization of American States and the Haitian Political Experience” (1993: 39—48). THE “NEW” OAS AND ITS FUTURE

The most recent works on the OAS offer contrasting views of the past and present roles of the IAS and OAS in United States-Latin American policymak¬ ing. Stoetzer, The Organization of American States (1993), is a reference book that is highly critical of the role of the United States in the LAS and the OAS. A second volume, published by the Twentieth Century Fund, offers two thought¬ ful essays by Vaky and Munoz, The Future of the Organization of American States (1993), who are optimistic and argue that the OAS can be reinvigorated. Stoetzer (1993), a historian and professor emeritus, in this second edition attempts to include all the major changes in the IAS, U.S.-Latin American relations, and the OAS that have occurred during the twenty-eight years since the first edition appeared. He provides three chapters on the changes in the OAS due to the amendments via the 1967 Protocol of Buenos Aires and the 1985 Protocol of Cartagena de Indias. He is generally critical of the United States’ approach to the OAS—often its neglect of—and its concern only with U.S. interests; he is especially critical of the Reagan administration’s policy toward Nicaragua. At the same time he criticizes the Latin American preoccupation with nonintervention. After noting that there is no Latin American alternative to the OAS, he stresses the “pivotal role” of the United States in the OAS. Considering the apparent failure of the OAS to restore Aristide in Haiti, Stoetzer (1993: 297, 300-302) states: It is clear that the Santiago Resolution has put the OAS in an extraordinary situation from which it must extricate itself if it does not want to look ridiculous.... [I]t will haunt the OAS because it is not realistic and exemplifies... the idealistic character of Hispanic civilization.

The slim book by Vaky and Munoz (1993) is important because it is up-todate and the authors are both diplomat-scholars with broad knowledge of the

38

The Inter-American Environment

inter-American system. Vaky served as a Foreign Service officer (FSO) spe¬ cializing in Latin America, was an ambassador to three Latin American coun¬ tries, and was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in the Carter administration. Munoz was a professor before becoming Chile’s ambassador to the OAS in 1990. Vaky is a believer in the OAS and the regional approach, and the OAS’ potential to meet the “challenge and opportunities” of the “new world order.” He notes (1993: 11), for example, how the United States’ “de¬ creased interest” in the OAS helped to marginalize it in the 1980s: Its Central American policy, its position on the Falklands crisis, and its invasion of Grenada all created disillusionment and a sense of aimlessness within the OAS. The 1989 invasion of Panama seemed to be the final nail in the coffin.

In the case of Panama, the Bush administration tried to work through the OAS in an effort to get Noriega to reschedule the elections he had aborted in May 1989, as well as his resignation from office. The U.S. position on the role of the OAS in collective efforts to remove General Noriega from Panama was put forth by the U.S. permanent representative to the Organization of American States, Luigi R. Einaudi. For example, in a December 1989 statement—two days after the invasion—to the Permanent Council of the OAS, Einaudi said: “By invoking the legitimate principle of non-intervention in this case, the OAS will find itself cast on the side of the dictators and the tyrants of this world who are en route to extinction. It [OAS] will find itself, in objective terms, defending the indefensible. It will find itself on the side of Noriega.”8 In Ambassador Vaky’s (1993: 64 nl5) view of the Panama crisis of 1988-1989, the Latin American nations felt that the operational and legal norms of the inter-American system limited [emphasis added] what that mission [getting rid of Noriega] could do. The United States, unwilling to be limited by abstract precepts of international law, acted unilaterally out of the con¬ viction that the realities of the crisis were so serious it needed to be “resolved.”

Vaky is also critical of how the United States contributed to the “financial crisis” of the OAS by refusing to pay its full quota and then being in arrears. But, according to Vaky (1993: 29), the OAS’ future “will be shaped to a sub¬ stantial degree” by the United States. He stresses the contribution of the OAS in promoting democracy in Peru and Guatemala (a contribution that some con¬ sider exaggerated) and admits the thorny problems concerning Haiti, but still sees a positive aspect because of the fact that the Clinton administration ‘ ‘clearly placed its support behind the OAS/UN mediation rather than autonomously exert its own power.” Munoz (1993: 90) stresses the fact that “most.of the critical issues of the post-cold war era—democracy promotion, free trade, drug traf¬ ficking—are regional in nature and cannot be addressed successfully except through cooperative, hemisphere-wide efforts.” The end of the Cold War has

The United States and the OAS

39

made it possible again to address issues collectively in the hemisphere without the rancor generated by the nature of U.S.—Latin American policy. As Munoz (1993: 91) points out, “Although some countries may prefer a low-profile and weak OAS so as to deal directly with Washington, most nation-states of the Americas seem to want to preserve a hemispheric forum for collective dialogue between Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.”

CONCLUSION

This survey of the leading works on the IAS, the OAS, and U.S.-Latin Amer¬ ican policymaking points to the central dilemma facing the state of interAmerican relations and the future role of the OAS: the observance of the principle of nonintervention by the United States in the internal affairs of the Latin American and Caribbean states. When the OAS has been bypassed or ignored, and unilateral military intervention resorted to by the United States, the OAS has been marginalized in inter-American relations. Its marginalization has been reinforced when the United States has used its assigned general budget quota as a bargaining tool or has become seriously in arrears, as was the case during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Among the three roles of the OAS in United States-Latin American policy— peacekeeping and peacemaking, anticommunist alliance, and antidictator alli¬ ance/promoter of democracy and protector of human rights—the second was successful for a while, but became problematical when the United States took unilateral action in the hemisphere. The first role—peacekeeper and peace¬ maker—was exercised successfully in Central America in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the Caribbean in the 1960s. The third role was partly successful in the Caribbean in the 1960s and in Central America in the 1970s (e.g., Nicaragua) but not against the Haitian military in the 1990s. The OAS was converted into an anticommunist alliance by the United States against Cuba and was effective in serving the former’s heightened security in¬ terests through Cuban suspension from the OAS in 1962, economic sanctions against it, legitimization of the U.S. action during the missile crisis, and military intervention in 1965 in the Dominican Republic. The pressure applied by the United States in the Dominican case to assure the expost facto approval of the Inter-American Peace Force, although successful, provoked great opposition and led some Latin American states to turn to the United Nations as a counterpoise to the United States and the OAS. The first United Nations involvement in the Dominican case had a detrimental effect on the “try the OAS first” strategy that many were stressing at the time. Since a number of the Latin American OAS members turned against the OAS sanctions imposed on Cuba, and the new Commonwealth Caribbean members were not bound by them, mounting pres¬ sure developed to lift them. This resulted in the OAS passage of the Freedom of Action resolution in 1975. The OAS was further marginalized during the Falklands/Malvinas conflict in

40

The Inter-American Environment

1982. By attacking first, Argentina violated the nonintervention pledge, but the United States turned to the United Nations as having jurisdiction over the con¬ flict, thereby rejecting the OAS. The Latin American members of the OAS united behind Argentina’s preference for the OAS. At the same time the Reagan administration began covert actions against the Sandinista government in Nic¬ aragua. These interventionary acts prompted a Latin American-initiated peace process in 1983 with the formation of the Contadora Group as a means to head off U.S. military intervention. The OAS was ignored as a result of its past marginalization, to which the United States had contributed, first, by the United States in dealing with Nicaragua, and, second, by the four Contadora states in responding to the threat posed by the United States. However, later, the OAS did become involved in an important way in preparing Nicaragua for elections and this was followed by OAS-United Nations cooperation. The Central American presidents developed more confidence in the United Nations and requested it to provide the principal peacekeeping force (ONUCA) for disarming the contras. This was unprecedented, for it marked the first major involvement by the United Nations in peacekeeping and peacemaking in Central America. Thereafter, the United Nations took over exclusive control of the pro¬ cess in El Salvador via ONUSAL and successfully negotiated an accord between the government and the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) in 1992. In Guatemala in 1994, the United Nations played the same role, helping to negotiate an accord between the rebels and the elected government. The OAS’ antidictator alliance and promoter of democracy/protector of hu¬ man rights role has been the least successful of its three roles. It made an important contribution to the transition to democracy in the Dominican Republic after Trujillo in the 1960s and contributed to the downfall of Somoza in 1979. It is obvious that an Inter-American Peace Force could have played an important role in removing Somoza, but the Carter administration’s proposal for one was rejected by the Latin American members of the OAS because of the coerced manner in which the force had been approved by the OAS in the Dominican case in 1965. The first test of the 1991 Santiago Resolution’s efficacy in returning demo¬ cratically elected Aristide to power by means of economic sanctions—first by the OAS and then joined by the United Nations—has been a failure, resulting in an impasse. Even though the OAS has added another future sanction (sus¬ pension of membership) for dealing with military governments that remove a democratic government (the Washington Protocol of 1993 is pending ratification at the present time), its contributions under the Santiago Accord to changing the situations in Peru (1992) and Guatemala (1994) have been most limited. The collective failure of the OAS, the United Nations, and the United States to resolve the situation in Haiti is a most serious matter. Clearly, the policy of economic sanctions has brought severe hardships on the destitute majority of the Haitian people, ironically those who elected Aristide in 1990. At the present time, military intervention is the only means that can assure the return of Aristide

The United States and the OAS

41

and his safety in office. However, there appears to be no consensus among OAS or United Nations members, or the Clinton administration, for some sort of collective military intervention. As the Haitian imbroglio dragged on through the summer of 1994, human rights organizations made it clear that the economic sanctions constitute a human rights violation against the Haitian people because the collectively imposed hardships are causing starvation and preventing hu¬ manitarian assistance from getting into the country. As the crisis deepened throughout the summer of 1994, a few liberal human rights groups and members of the Congressional Black Caucas expressed the view that military intervention was the only viable policy solution to remove the recalcitrant members of the Haitian military. The current situation in Cuba presents a similar case as the United States tries to force Castro from power through a more-than-thirty-year-old embargo—re¬ cently strengthened with the Cuban Democracy Act—against the Cuban people. On this issue, the United States stands alone in its efforts to rid Cuba of Castro. Many argue that with the end of the Cold War, the economic sanctions against Cuba serve no visible national interest of the United States and are counterpro¬ ductive to improving inter-American relations and strengthening the OAS. There may be a “new” OAS with the end of the Cold War, and a new secretary general from Colombia, but the future of the OAS will still depend more on the Latin American policy of the United States than the collective wishes of the other member states.

NOTES 1. John C. Dreier was a Foreign Service officer who became U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, a position he held for ten years in the late 1940s and 1950s. 2. The 1993 Protocol of Washington, now pending ratification, will provide for ex¬ pulsion mechanisms if a democratic government is overthrown in any manner. 3. There is an unwritten rule among the OAS members, which was agreed upon by the Latin American states and the United States, that the OAS secretary general would be a South American and the assistant secretary general would be from the United States. In the 1960s, the United States gave up the position of assistant secretary general (see note 5 regarding William Manger). The position was then held by Central Americans until it was taken over by the Commonwealth Caribbean states in the late 1970s. In an effort to take the secretary general position away from the South American countries during the 1994 election for secretary general of the OAS, Costa Rica organized the Central American and Commonwealth Caribbean states in an unsuccessful bid to have its foreign minister elected. Thus, for the second time in the history of the OAS, a former president of Colombia, Cesar Gaviria, was elected secretary general. 4. The first bona fide course on the OAS, based on documents and materials provided by the Pan American Union, was offered by Harold Eugene Davis at the American University in Washington, D.C., in spring 1949. 5. Dr. William Manger was a civil servant of the Pan American Union and then the

42

The Inter-American Environment

OAS for forty-three years, the last eleven as assistant secretary general. He refused almost certain reelection because he felt that the rules of the OAS required rotation of the position. 6. Dr. Charles Fenwick was a former professor and leading international law expert who served for fourteen years as director, Department of Legal Affairs, at the OAS. He was a well-known inter-Americanist and critic of United States intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean. 7. Although the United States’s Dominican intervention was considered by most mem¬ bers of Congress to be justified, there were two critics in the Senate—Senators Wayne Morse (D-Ore.) and William J. Fulbright (D-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Re¬ lations Committee. The former, a onetime professor of international law, had inserted in the Congressional Record (May 20, 1965, pp. 10736, 11120) a State Department docu¬ ment which had been prepared at the request of the committee, entitled “Legal Basis for U.S. Actions in the Dominican Republic.” Morse said that the document could be “tom to pieces—and... should be,” and that the lawyers in the statement have an “impossible task” in preparing an “ex-post-facto justification.” He also commented on the legal merits of the document and others: “If these memoranda constitute a fair evaluation of the international law field of the ... Department, one of the greatest needs ... [it has] is to hire a few competent international lawyers, because these memoranda would not receive a passing grade in any international law course in any law school in the United States.” 8. Luigi R. Einaudi, “Statement of Ambassador Luigi R. Einaudi, United States Per¬ manent Representative to the Organization of American States” (December 22, 1989), p. 2. For his remarks before the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs and the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 1, 1990, see Luigi R. Einaudi, “The United States and the OAS,” United States Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Current Policy No. 1279 (May 1, 1990). For a more positive and conciliatory position on the OAS by a top Bush policymaker, see Lawrence S. Eagleburger, “An Agenda to Promote InterAmerican Cooperation,” Current Policy No. 1283 (June 5, 1990).

REFERENCES Acevedo, Domingo E. 1993. “The Haitian Crisis and the OAS Response: A Test of the Effectiveness in Protecting Democracy.” In Lori Fisler Damrosch, ed. Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Atkins, G. Pope. 1989. Latin America in the International Political System. Second Edi¬ tion. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Ball, Margaret. 1969. The OAS in Transition. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Child, Jack. 1992. The Central American Peace Process, 1983-1991: Sheathing Swords, Building Confidence. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. -. 1984. “Present Trends in the Interamerican Security System and the Role of the Rio Treaty.” In Organization of American States (OAS), Anuario Juridico Interamericano 1983. Washington, D.C.: OAS. Claude, Inis L„ Jr. 1964. “The OAS, the U.N., and the United States.” International Conciliation. No. 547 (March).

The United States and the OAS

43

Connell-Smith, Gordon. 1966. The Inter-American System. London: Oxford University Press. Dent, David. 1990. Canada in Latin America.” Christian Science Monitor (March 22). Dreier, John C. 1962. The Organization of American States and the Hemisphere Crisis. New York: Harper & Row. Eagleburger, Lawrence S. 1990. “An Agenda to Promote Inter-American Cooperation.” Current Policy No. 1283. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs (June 5). Address by Deputy Secretary Lawrence S. Eagleburger before the General Assembly of the Organization of American States in Asuncidn, Paraguay. Einaudi, Luigi R. 1990. “The United States and the OAS.” Current Policy No. 1279. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs. -. 1989. “Statement of Ambassador Luigi R. Einaudi, United States Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States.” December 22 (mimeo). Farer, Tom J. 1979. The Future of the Inter-American System. New York: Praeger. -. 1978. The United States and the Inter-American System: Are There Functions for the Forms? St. Paul, Minn.: West. American Society of International Law, Studies in Transnational Legal Policy, No. 17 Fenwick, Charles G. 1963. The Organization of American States. Washington, D.C.: Kaufman. Forsythe, David P. 1990. The Politics of International Law: U.S. Foreign Policy Recon¬ sidered. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Franck, Thomas M., and Edward Weisband. 1972. Word Politics: Verbal Strategy among the Superpowers. New York: Oxford University Press. Gil, Federico G. 1971. Latin American-United States Relations. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Guy, James J. 1989. “Canada Joins the OAS: A New Dynamic in the OAS.” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 39, no. 4: 500-511. Jose, James R. 1970. An Inter-American Peace Force within the Framework of the Or¬ ganization of American States: Advantages, Impediments, Implications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. Kennedy, Robert F. 1969. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton. Manger, William. 1961. Pan America in Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press. Mecham, J. Lloyd, Jr. 1961. The United States and Inter-American Security, 1889-1960. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press. Munoz, Heraldo. 1993. “A New OAS for the New Times.” In Viron P. Vaky and Heraldo Munoz. The Future of the Organization of American States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. Organization of American States (OAS). 1989. “The First Century of the Inter-American System.” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia. 39, no. 4. “The OAS in Trouble.” 1988. Times of the Americas (Special Edition). Ray, James Lee, and Olga P. Reyes. 1989. “The Inter-American System, the OAS and the Future.” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 39, no. 4: 512-526. Rossi, Ernest E., and Jack C. Plano. 1992. Latin America: A Political Dictionary. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO. Scheman, L. Ronald. 1989. “Rebuilding the OAS: A Program for Its Second Century.” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 39, no. 4: 527-534.

44

The Inter-American Environment

-. 1988. The Inter-American Dilemma: The Search for Inter-American Cooperation at the Centennial of the Inter-American System. New York: Praeger. Schulz, Donald E., and Gabriel Marcella. 1994. Reconciling the Irreconcilable: The Trou¬ bled Outlook for U.S. Policy toward Haiti. Carlisle, Pa.: U.S. Army War College. Slater, Jerome. 1970. Intervention and Negotiation: The United States and the Dominican Revolution. New York: Harper & Row. -. 1969. “The Limits of Legitimation in International Organizations: The Organ¬ ization of American States and the Dominican Crisis.” International Organization (Winter). -. 1967. The OAS and United States Foreign Policy. Columbus: Ohio State Uni¬ versity Press. Stoetzer, O. Carlos. 1993. The Organization of American States. Second Edition. New York: Praeger. -. 1965. The Organization of American States. New York: Praeger. Thomas, Ann Van Wynen, and A. J. Thomas, Jr. 1963. The Organization of American States. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press. Vaky, Viron P. 1993. “The Organization of American States and Multilateralism in the Americas.” In Viron P. Vaky and Heraldo Munoz, The Future of the Organi¬ zation of American States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. Vaky, Viron P., and Heraldo Munoz. 1993. The Future of the Organization of American States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. Welch, Thomas L., and Rene Gutierrez. 1990. The Organization of American States. Washington, D.C.: OAS. Williams, Edward J. 1971. The Political Themes of Inter-American Relations. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth. Wilson, Larman C. 1993. “The Organization of American States and the Haitian Political Experience.” In Georges A. Fauriol, ed. The Haitian Challenge: U.S. Policy Considerations. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies. -. 1989. “The OAS and Promoting Democracy and Resolving Disputes.” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 39, no. 4: 477-499. -. 1984a. “The Nicaraguan Insurrection and the Delegitimization of Somoza: In¬ tervention and the Role of the OAS and the US.” In Henry H. Han, ed. Terrorism, Political Violence and World Order. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. -. 1984b. “The Impact of the Falkland/Malvinas Conflict upon the Inter-American System, OAS and Rio Treaty: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography.” In Or¬ ganization of American States (OAS), Anuario Juridico Interamericano 1983. Washington, D.C.: OAS. -. 1975. “Multilateral Policy and the Organization of American States: Latin American-U.S. Convergence and Divergence.” In Harold Eugene Davis and Lar¬ man C. Wilson, eds. Latin American Foreign Policies: An Analysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wyden, Peter. 1979. Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story. New York: Simon and Schuster.

International Economic Organizations Rene Salgado

As economic issues have become increasingly salient for public and private interests in the United States and Latin America, international economic organ¬ izations have evolved into important actors in the process of formulating and implementing development policies. According to Feinberg and Boylan, Mod¬ ular Multilateralism (1991: 35-36), most of the budgetary resources that the United States devotes to international economic development are channeled through multilateral agencies (World Bank, International Monetary Fund [IMF] and regional development banks) rather than through the Agency for Interna¬ tional Development (AID).1 With the Latin American debt crisis ebbing and the return of significant pri¬ vate financial flows to Latin America, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank are directing more financing to antipoverty projects in the hemisphere. The success of these new development projects will require greater involvement of private foundations and nongovernmental organizations than in previous decades. Krause and Nye, “Reflections on the Economics and Politics of International Economic Organizations” (1975), argue that institutions such as the World Bank and regional lending Organizations are more than arenas for policymaking or nonstate actors with their own international economic agendas; they also help to articulate U.S. development preferences vis-a-vis Latin Amer¬ ica. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for International Affairs is at the heart of Executive branch international economic policymaking with responsibility for conducting relations with various multi¬ national lending agencies. Irish and Frank, U.S. Foreign Policy (1975: 243), argue that the formulation and execution of international economic policy are much more complex than U.S. national security policy because “there is no single focus of economic power and no single focus for economic policy plan¬ ning” in a capitalist economic system. Both the Baker Plan (1985) and the Brady Plan (1989) originated in the Treasury Department to provide interna-

46

The Inter-American Environment

tional debt reform and debt-reduction measures for Latin America and other poor countries but required assistance from commercial banks and MDBs to implement the policies. However, serious systematic studies on the process through which the United States attempts to influence the lending and development policies of multilateral development banks (MDBs) in the Latin American region are rare. For example, of more than one hundred books and articles selected and annotated in the Handbook of Latin American Studies between 1970 and 1990 that refer to the relationship between multilateral development banks (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Inter-American Development Bank) and the individual Latin American countries, none of them treats the issue of how the United States goes about shaping its regional or country preferences in these organizations. Pro¬ vost’s “United States Policy Toward the Multilateral Development Banks” (1988) provides a brief account of the relationship between MDBs and U.S. foreign policy, but it is one of the few efforts to explore this important rela¬ tionship. Even the scholarly literature on the relationship between the U.S. gov¬ ernment and MDBs is quite scarce. Jonathan Sanford, of the Congressional Research Service, highlights the dilemma in U.S. Foreign Policy and Multilat¬ eral Development Banks (1982: 1): A number of books and articles have been written on the international development lending agencies, but there is very little literature available on the direction and formu¬ lation of U.S. government policy toward the banks. This is unfortunate, for there is a pressing need in academic and official circles for more information on this topic. A good deal of primary material in Congressional documents and executive reports has been waiting to be studied.

Not much has been done to rectify the paucity of scholarly work on inter¬ national development lending agencies since Sanford made his observation over ten years ago—much of the primary material is still waiting for some kind of scholarly analysis. Why is there such a serious gap in the literature on this important subject? Most of the reasons are contained in the peculiarities of the process through which U.S. government policy toward MDBs is formulated and implemented. First, because an enormous degree of complexity and secrecy still surrounds the relationship between the U.S. presidency and MDBs, probing the economic and political decision-making process is extremely difficult. Second, despite the fact that policy guidelines are set forth in the MDB authorizing and appropriating legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president, mul¬ tiple interpretations often emerge from the foreign policy bureaucracy. Third, no single policymaker speaks exclusively for the United States government be¬ fore these international institutions. Within the Executive branch, the Treasury Department has major responsi¬ bility for international monetary and multilateral aid policies while the Com¬ merce Department coordinates foreign commercial policies. Both Treasury and

International Economic Organizations

47

Commerce coordinate international economic policy with the Department of State, the major Executive branch department with responsibility for bilateral economic aid. Within the Treasury Department, the Working Group on Multi¬ lateral Assistance (WGMA) has the day-to-day responsibility for managing U.S. policy and reviewing the supporting documents for each proposed loan by thp MDBs. The National Advisory Council on International Monetary Policy (NAC) has broader responsibilities and analyzes the financial and administrative attri¬ butes of the MDB program (see Figure 4.1). The decision-making process in these agencies is complex and highly confidential, largely because the exercise of overt political leverage could easily jeopardize the legitimacy of the multi¬ lateral framework and redound negatively on the ability of the United States to influence MDB policies effectively. Cohen, The Making of United States Inter¬ national Economic Policy (1988), and Malmgren, “Managing Foreign Eco¬ nomic Policy” (1972), provide valuable overviews of the foreign economic bureaucracy and the U.S. policymaking process. In contrast to the Executive branch, the U.S. Congress is more open to special interests and has the constitutional power to investigate and generate information on economic policymaking through committee hearings and reports dealing with specific Latin American countries, but often the exact nature of the policy pro¬ cess has to be inferred from congressional documents. In the U.S. Senate, the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and its Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy have the major jurisdiction over MDBs. All matters relating to MDBs in the House of Representatives are dealt with through the Committee on Banking Finance and Urban Affairs and its Subcommittee on International Development, Finance, Trade and Monetary Pol¬ icy. Congress plays a more important role in international economic policy than it does in national security policy because frequently constituents’ interests are deeply involved. Unfortunately, Congress’s investigative and funding powers have not pro¬ duced a “gold mine” of published information available for scholarly discovery. Most congressional documents cited in the Congressional Information Service (for which there is a CD-Rom version in the Library of Congress) do not deal with specific Latin American and Caribbean countries, but instead are broad in content, covering such issues as development, the environment and energy, hu¬ man rights and needs, and MDB lending and management operations. Rules that sanction U.S. policy stances vis-a-vis the rest of the world usually follow that same pattern where U.S. opposition to lending requests from countries that back expropriation of property, terrorism, and drug trafficking are cast in general rather than country-specific terms. Sanford, “U.S. Policy Toward the Multilat¬ eral Development Banks” (1988b), provides a list of unusual instances where congressional action was directed to specific countries, such as congressional bills that outlawed MDB lending to Noriega’s Panama (drug trafficking) and Pinochet’s Chile (human rights abuses and failure to institute democratic re¬ forms), as well as congressional exhortations to the World Bank and the IMF

Figure 4.1 Major Actors in U.S. Policy toward Multilateral Development Banks

International Economic Organizations

49

to bolster Nicaragua’s and El Salvador’s private sector to help stabilize their economies during periods of revolutionary upheaval in the early 1980s. In addition to the secrecy and other peculiarities so typical of the input pro¬ cess, rules still in force with regard to the disclosure of information in inter¬ national economic organizations have served as obstacles to scholarly research. Under their articles of agreement these institutions have the prerogative to es¬ tablish rules with regard to the use and disclosure of any information they may possess. Although there are some grounds for optimism in the research com¬ munity with the World Bank’s new “open information policy,’’ announced in August 1993, important documents that include minutes from the executive di¬ rector’s board meetings where policy is made are still classified. Both by law and through Executive Order, the U.S. government is bound to give classified MDB documents at least the same level of protection under the U.S. security classification system as the MDBs have accorded to them. Furthermore, criminal and administrative penalties may apply to individuals responsible for any unau¬ thorized disclosure of such information. The extent to which any future policy will relax these rules and facilitate academic inquiry into MDB policymaking is still a matter of considerable uncertainty. In brief, the relative inaccessibility of information on U.S. actions to influence MDB policy toward Latin America, combined with the closeness of MDB de¬ cision-making process, makes serious research on the subject extremely difficult and cumbersome. With these difficulties in mind, this chapter will focus on (1) published materials on the input process, particularly the key actors that shape U.S. policy preferences toward the MDBs and the potential sources of influence in these organizations; (2) the policy goals pursued by the United States through its participation in MDBs; (3) the degree of U.S. influence on MDB policy toward Latin America; and (4) the political characteristics of the internal deci¬ sion-making process within the MDBs.

U.S. INSTITUTIONAL ACTORS AND POLICYMAKING TOWARD MDBs The best account of the role of key governmental actors in the process of policymaking toward MDBs is Sanford, U.S. Foreign Policy and Multilateral Development Banks (1982: 85-145). He focuses on the major U.S. participants in international economic policymaking in Congress and the Executive, using published documents and anonymous interviews with government officials. The Treasury Department is given particular attention, since it is the agency that leads day-to-day U.S. involvement in MDBs and its relationship with other Executive branch agencies, particularly the Department of State. Treasury’s ma¬ jor source of influence stems from its control over technical information, staff size and organizational resources, and bureaucratic prestige and its interaction with powerful domestic interest groups concerned with banking and commerce. With regard to policymaking, Sanford also provides interesting observations on

50

The Inter-American Environment

other forums where policies toward MDBs are occasionally discussed, such as the Economic Policy Group and the National Security Council—two important parts of the Executive Office of the president. Congress handles the terms of U.S. involvement in the MDBs, particularly the authorization and appropriation of U.S. contributions and the establishment of U.S. policy standards in the MDBs. Several congressional committees carry jurisdiction over the formulation of U.S. policy goals toward MDBs. The most important committees in the House of Representatives are the Standing Com¬ mittees on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and Appro¬ priations. In the Senate, the Committees on Appropriations, Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and Foreign Relations are the most important. Congress has become more active in the foreign policymaking process in the last two decades by expanding its ability to veto, amend, and/or legitimize economic lending proposals. Sanford (1982) stresses the different mind-sets in the House and Sen¬ ate toward international economic policy, and the importance of the style and ideology of the chairmanship of the committees. A useful complement to Sanford (1982) are two other publications that deal specifically with the role of Congress in the setting of U.S. policy preferences toward MDBs. In an early article on the subject, Sanford and Goodman, “Con¬ gressional Oversight and the Multilateral Development Banks” (1975), look at Congress’s ability to oversee MDB affairs, advancing the notion that it is gen¬ erally limited for several reasons. First, the multilateral framework of the banks means that they have immunities comparable in many respects to those normally exhibited by nation-states. For example, banking and lending officials from these international organizations cannot be called on to testify before the U.S. (or any other) Congress. Their archives and official communications are inviolable, and officers, representatives, and employees have legal immunity for all acts per¬ formed in their official capacities. Second, the structure of the U.S. govern¬ ment—notably the system of separation of powers—sets limits to certain data that may be critical for a complete appraisal of U.S. policy, such as summaries of MDB executive director’s meetings and external reports from consultants on specific aspects of MDB organization and operations submitted to top manage¬ ment. A third factor limiting congressional influence over MDBs stems from the size and fragmentation of Congress. The most authoritative study on the role and influence of Congress on U.S. policy toward MDBs is Sanford (1988b). He emphasizes the increased activity of Congress in the process of setting U.S. preferences toward MDBs, focusing on the method by which it influences MDB policy and the areas where it can be politically effective. What stands out in Sanford’s study is its comprehen¬ sive analysis of the laws governing policy, participation, use of the U.S. voice and vote in the MDBs, and general MDB reporting requirements. All stages of the contribution process—negotiation, authorization, commitment, appropri¬ ation, and disbursement—are discussed along with the typical instruments of congressional influence over MDB policy: restrictions on pending authorization

International Economic Organizations

51

requests, prohibitions to further contributions, deauthorization of U.S. contribu¬ tions, earmarking of appropriations, and/or diminution of appropriation levels. Schoultz, Politics, Economics, and U.S. Participation in Multilateral Devel¬ opment Banks (1982: 542-545), provides another brief discussion of the role of the Treasury Department and congressional committees in the process of policy formulation toward MDBs. Schoultz argues that the Treasury’s leading role is derived from its control over information, technical expertise, and dom¬ inance that has seldom been challenged by other agencies. The power of Con¬ gress over MDBs is related to its ability to set restrictions on the maneuverability of the U.S. Executive. It establishes broad directives to what the U.S. stance should be with regard to loan requests from governments that violate property rights of U.S. citizens or corporations, fail to take adequate measures against drug trafficking, develop nuclear explosive devices, try to use loan proceeds to expand production of exports that compete with those of the United States, and/ or violate their citizens’ fundamental human rights. Still, with more than sixty administrative units within the Executive branch responsible for various aspects of U.S. foreign economic policy, it is indeed a complex policymaking process.

U.S. POLICY GOALS IN THE MDBs What are the general goals that the United States pursues through its partic¬ ipation in international financial institutions? According to Sanford (1982)—one of the few studies to examine long-term policy concerns—these include (1) development goals (economic goals and wealth redistribution in developing so¬ cieties), (2) economic benefits to the United States (trade promotion, export opportunities, and internationalization of world development), (3) constructive economic cooperation, and (4) political and security concerns. Short-term policy goals often stem from the demands of powerful interest groups in the United States, often stimulated by Latin American governments that have expropriated U.S. property without compensation (notably Chile under Allende and Peru un¬ der Velasco Alvarado), systematically violated the human rights of its citizenry, or engaged in repressive policies leading to widespread emigration (Sanford, 1982: 19-40). In the context of long-range goals, Sanford (1988b: 23-24) shows that the laws governing U.S. participation in multilateral financial agencies are often conflictive. Bargaining and compromise are at the core of decision making in Congress, particularly when it comes to the growing number of issues that Con¬ gress must confront in formulating and implementing a Latin American policy: protecting the hemisphere’s environment, meeting the demands of free trade while protecting domestic producers and labor groups, denying aid to countries in the region that violate human rights, stopping terrorism, and putting a halt to the large illicit drug market. It may well be argued that harmonizing all these sets of interests is not an easy task for policymakers. What frequently happens is that Executive branch

52

The Inter-American Environment

policymakers must apply considerable discretion when interpreting or imple¬ menting general policy decisions or when deciding on specific loan proposals and programs. For example, MDB loan proposals from governments that do not meet basic human rights standards but produce commodities for the export mar¬ ket that compete with domestic U.S. producers can present policymakers with a quandary. How do policymakers deal with a loan request from a government that is experiencing high rates of economic growth and fosters free trade but is not terribly concerned with the human rights of its people? These and other problems are at the root of difficulties confronting both governmental and non¬ governmental policymakers in the United States. Inquiries on how policymakers cope with these dilemmas are absent from the academic literature on the MDB policy process. Most of what is available fo¬ cuses on specific policy issues. For example, Schoultz, Human Rights and U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (1981: 281-292), offers a useful discussion of U.S. human rights policy toward Latin America, emphasizing the gross human rights violations in Chile during the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship. The fact that Chile’s loan proposals had the wholehearted support of both the Nixon and Ford administrations, in spite of the regime’s human rights record, triggered U.S. legislative action in this area. Schoultz offers an analysis of the stormy process in Congress that eventually led to the enactment of legislation in 1977 designed to halt MDB loans to repressive governments in Latin Amer¬ ica, including Pinochet’s Chile.

U.S. INFLUENCE OVER MDB LENDING POLICIES The power of the U.S. governmental actors over international economic or¬ ganizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund is a subject of considerable controversy in the literature. Some consider MDBs as mere pawns of the U.S. government and any U.S. influence in Latin America as pernicious. Blake and Walters, The Politics of Global Economic Relations (1976: 66-73), examine the radical critique of the role played by MDBs in less-developed states. For those who adhere to the radical view of international economic institutions, according to Blake and Wal¬ ters (1976: 140), the “multilateral aid agencies are merely a subtler and more effective means of attaching poor states to the international imperialist system than the cruder devices of bilateral aid, military conquest, and explicit political control.” Others are less sweeping in their generalizations and indictments and take a more cautious and positive view of U.S. influence over the MDBs. Sorting out the answers to the degree and character of U.S. influence over MDB policies in Latin America is a complex, byzantine process, requiring difficult-to-obtain in¬ formation from private, behind-the-scenes, and informal consultations among and within member governments and their representatives. Moreover, regarding the formulation and approval of such preferences, the votes taken in policy-

International Economic Organizations

53

making boards are, at best, only partial indicators of political effectiveness and relative influence. Generalizations about the propriety of U.S. leverage are also difficult to make. Journal articles and scholarly books are of little assistance since they often say little about the day-to-day operation of MDBs where project teams assist country authorities to design country and sectorial strategies and to identify, prepare, and implement development projects. Instead, most of the literature on MDBs and U.S. influence tends to focus on MDB loan proposals to specific governments that the United States has vehemently opposed: Sandinista Nicaragua in the Reagan years, Chile under Allende, or Peru under Velasco Alvarado, immediately after the expropriation of U.S. oil companies. Unfortunately, most of these works convey the rather simplistic view that MDBs are merely devilish instruments of the United States and often leave the reader with the impression that U.S.-Latin American policy, and by extension Latin Americans, would be better off without the intermediation of international lend¬ ing agencies. Sanford, Restrictions on United States Contributions to Multilateral Devel¬ opment Banks (1981) and (1982: 181-222), argues that the United States has influence on but not direct control of the funds it contributes to the multilateral development banks because MDBs are not readily susceptible to pressure by individual countries. His main argument is that MDBs are complex organizations whose lending policies and programs cannot be swiftly modified according to the more immediate demands of international members, including the United States. Sanford notes that except in the case of concessional IDB loans, United States influence over MDBs is not determinative because it lacks the necessary votes to block initiatives on its own and, therefore, needs the support of member countries to stop loans of which it disapproves. For example, Sanford (1981) provides an extensive analysis of U.S. efforts that failed to be converted into MDB policy in 1975 when Congress made unsuccessful attempts to earmark specific contributions to the MDBs. Schoultz’s “Politics, Economics, and U.S. Participation in Multilateral Development Banks” (1982: 549-550) corroborates Sanford’s findings, providing a list of World Bank loans to Costa Rica, Hon¬ duras, and Brazil that were approved in spite of the abstention or opposition of the United States. Sanford (1982) also explores other sources of U.S. influence besides the large U.S. quota in the MDBs, such as the geographic location of MDB headquarters and the degree of supervision the U.S. government exercises over its represen¬ tatives. According to Sanford (1982: 107):

The U.S. Government is probably unique in the amount of supervision it gives its ex¬ ecutive directors at the multilateral banks and in the comprehensive detail to the instruc¬ tions its gives its bank representatives. Most governments appoint senior people to the international banks and allow them a great deal of flexibility and latitude in their daily activities at the multilateral organizations. The United States has developed instead an intensive interagency review system to assess policy questions and instruct the U.S.

54

The Inter-American Environment

executive directors both on day-to-day operating issues and on broad policy questions. Geographic proximity probably has a great deal to do with this, for the World Bank and the Inter-American Bank are located in Washington and this facilitates contacts between the U.S. agencies and the U.S. executive directors.

Sanford (1988b) offers specific comments on congressional influence on MDB policy, discussing two basic means of influencing their policies: (1) the adoption of laws that state what U.S. policy shall be and specify what negotiating posture U.S. representatives shall assume in the MDB boards, that is, provisions to control the United States’s “voice and vote’’; and (2) the use of the “power of the purse,” that is, changing the size of a U.S. contribution or conditioning its use in order to achieve specific political purposes. Sanford, however, is not willing to claim that the U.S. Congress has determinative power over MDB policies because its political effectiveness is not automatic. First, members of Congress must persuade the administration that a particular requirement pro¬ motes a worthwhile goal, so that the Executive agencies will advocate it with sincere enthusiasm. Second, the Executive agencies must persuade other member countries that the initiative is worthy of their support. Third, a bloc consisting of the United States and its allies must vote to require MDB management to adopt the new policy and to integrate it into the bank’s operating procedures. Fourth, the MDBs must convince their borrower countries that the initiative merits incorporation into new loans. In other words, the compatibility of con¬ gressional initiatives is a critical factor to congressional influence in the MDBs, and the study provides examples of issues in which congressional preferences were not actually observed by MDBs. Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System (1989), also sup¬ ports the view that U.S. influence in MDBs is important but not definitive. Focusing on the IDB, he points out that the issue of U.S. influence over IDB lending decisions has been debated throughout the life of the organization. With voting power weighted according to the proportion of each member’s total con¬ tribution to the bank, it is logical to assume that the United States could easily use the IDB to influence its Latin American policy. Beginning in 1976, the U.S. financial contribution to the IDB started to decline so that by 1988 it controlled only 31.5 percent of the weighted vote in contrast to 54 percent of the vote controlled by Latin American governments, and 11.5 percent by other members. During the Reagan administration, the United States often complained that there was too much reliance on the state in Latin America as a primary force for economic development, insisting on the need to provide greater support for private enterprise. To increase its influence over the lending policies of the IDB in the mid-1980s, the United States offered to contribute an additional $9 billion over a four-year period contingent on an increased share of the weighted voting. The United States delayed the increase in its capital contributions when the IDB Board of Directors rejected the proposal. These efforts to use funds as instru¬ ments of influence, according to Atkins (1989), generated considerable resent-

International Economic Organizations

55

ment among Latin Americans who felt that the United States already possessed too much power as reflected in their veto of proposals for new development assistance to Peru in the late 1960s, Chile in the early 1970s, and Nicaragua in the 1980s, when it was having bilateral political conflicts with those states. As a result of the efforts to politicize the IDB, Latin American governments have often argued that development loan decisions must be restricted to economic and technical criteria, rather than based on political and ideological considera¬ tions. In contrast to Sanford, who tends to downplay the influence of the United States in the MDBs, Dell, The Inter-American Development Bank (1972), argues that the United States has an enormous influence in the Inter-American Devel¬ opment Bank, but no case studies are offered to support his point. According to Dell (1972: 41), U.S. influence is derived from its control of the largest quota, particularly that applied to the Fund for Special Operations (FSO), which is larger than 50 percent of the total. Thus, as the chief source of funds, the United States is more likely to prevail on policy options, particularly when it feels strongly enough on a bilateral issue. The Latin American members of the IDB are known to have accepted certain lending policy changes if they could be convinced that the infusion of additional resources from the United States will benefit them in some way. Payer, “The Bretton Woods Twins” (1982b), pro¬ vides a critical account of the internal effects on less-developed nations, who, she claims, are forced to accept advice from the World Bank and the IMF. Brown’s study of the World Bank—The United States and the Politicization of the World Bank (1992)—regards U.S. influence over lending policies in Latin America as both substantial and counterproductive to the effectiveness of World Bank activities. He argues that United States efforts to “politicize” (the imper¬ missible compromise of the principles of the international and independent char¬ acter of international economic organizations) the operation of the MDBs have both economic and legal consequences. Economically, the large financial con¬ tribution which the United States makes to international economic agencies and the weighted voting system upon which they are based have allowed the United States to exert unilateral economic pressure and to block multilateral loans to countries targeted for political reasons. Legislation passed by the U.S. Congress is frequently inconsistent with the World Bank’s requirements to function as an independent international agency. When U.S. policymakers believe that inter¬ national law should not obstruct the use of its voting power to advance ‘ ‘polit¬ ical” objectives, the rules put forth in the bank’s Articles of Agreement are clearly undermined. Allende’s Chile is one case that Brown (1992: 169-170) examines, but his analysis does not provide “conclusive proof that Bank lending (or non-lending) to Chile was politicized during Salvador Allende’s presidency, [but]... the cir¬ cumstantial evidence of such politicization is very strong indeed.” Brown rests his case on the common explanation given by policymakers that Chile’s econ¬ omy failed to meet the test of creditworthiness—a legitimate reason to block

56

The Inter-American Environment

MDB loans to Allende—but the World Bank made loans to Chile immediately before and after Allende’s years, when Chile was similarly uncreditworthy. Thus, consistent economic standards on eligibility were not applied and therefore the United States “politicized” the process of lending to Chile. In another recent study of U.S. influence over MDBs, Ascher, “The World Bank and U.S. Control” (1989), refers to a variety of instances in which the World Bank served as a vehicle for the United States to channel its development policy preferences. In discussing the characteristics of the World Bank’s formal decision-making process, Ascher examines the links between the bank’s U.S. executive directors and the Treasury Department. Loan proposals that lead to U.S. abstentions and no votes from potential borrowers are usually cases in¬ volving the expropriation of U.S. property and human rights violations in Latin America. World Bank lending policies are also rooted in the fact that most of the World Bank’s staff has been trained in Western universities, subscribe to the values of free enterprise capitalism, and are well aware of the possibility of threats of withholding replenishment from U.S. policymakers. While the tech¬ nical rigor with which the World Bank manages its projects is sometimes men¬ tioned as a mechanism for countering U.S. influence over MDBs, little evidence is provided to sustain this claim. In Banking on the Poor (1983: 57), Ayres claims that the United States has an overwhelming amount of influence over MDB policies in Latin America. The World Bank, according to Ayres, is controlled by the United States almost to the same degree as any domestic or bilateral aid agency: There is no doubt... that the U.S. government retains an extremely preeminent role in the operations of the Bank. The Bank’s operations in Peru were minimal following the nationalization of the International Petroleum Company by the government of Juan Ve¬ lasco in 1969. The Bank made no new loans to Chile under Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. Nor did it loan to Peronist Argentina from 1973 to 1976.

In contrast to Sanford (1981; 1982), Ayres regards U.S. influence in the World Bank as almost automatic: the United States does not need to resort to coalition¬ building strategies, such as occur within the United Nations or the Organization of American States, because much of economic lending decisions are not open to public scrutiny. The more critical studies of the role of the United States in international economic organizations often use lending policies toward Nicaragua, Chile, and Peru as examples of unfair and excessive efforts by policymakers to dictate the fates of these countries for the benefit of the United States. Molineu, U.S. Policy Toward Latin America: From Regionalism to Globalism (1986), examines U.S. efforts to block IDB and World Bank loans to the leftist governments of Nic¬ aragua while the Sandinistas were in power, Chile under Allende, and Peru for a period of time during Velasco’s government. According to Molineu (1986: 169, 194), the IDB and the World Bank approved few loans for Nicaragua after

International Economic Organizations

57

1981, and the governments of Allende in Chile and Velasco in Peru suffered similar consequences after they decided to carry out expropriations of U.S. firms. The U.S. Senate’s report on the role of the United States in Chile between 1963 and 1973 Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (1975: 180-183)—covers the instruments of U.S. policy toward Allende. According to the Senate’s report (1975: 33), The U.S. would use its predominant position in international fi¬ nancial institutions to dry up the flow of new multilateral credit or other financial assistance.” Figures provided in the report show that U.S. bilateral aid to Chile dropped from $35 million in 1969 to $1 million in 1971; U.S. Export-Import Bank credits declined from $234 million in 1967 to zero in 1971; and loans from the IDB, where the United States held what amounted to veto power, fell from $46 million in 1970 to $2 million in 1972. The Senate’s report stresses the fact that American economic policy was driven more by political opposition to the Allende government than by purely technical judgments about Chile’s finances. The United States also used its influence with the MDBs to undermine the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s. Conroy, ‘‘Economic Legacy and Poli¬ cies” (1985), and ‘‘Economic Aggression as an Instrument of Low Intensity Warfare” (1987), discusses the economic situation in Nicaragua immediately before and after the 1979 revolution against Somoza, claiming that a policy of “economic aggression” was employed by the Reagan administration during the Sandinista years. The transfer of power from Carter to Reagan, and the appoint¬ ment of a new World Bank president, led to radical shifts in bank policies from cooperation to outright hostility against Nicaragua despite the fact that its eco¬ nomic model (essentially a mixed economy) was not profoundly different from other economic systems in Latin America. Yet, according to Conroy (1987: 71), in July 1983 the Reagan administration announced “that the United States would vote against all loans to Nicaragua ‘unless the revolutionary Sandinista govern¬ ment takes steps to revitalize the private sector and improve the efficiency of the public sector.’ ” The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is examined in Kahler, “The United States and the International Monetary Fund” (1989), one of the few attempts to measure U.S. influence over the fund’s policies, programs, and procedures. According to Kahler, the pillars of American influence within the IMF are tied to its weighted system of voting, which allocates quotas and voting shares that reflect international economic influence, and the changing pattern of special majorities, which subjects decisions of particular importance to the possibilities of a U.S. veto. Since the early 1970s, the U.S. weighted vote within the IMF has been reduced along with concomitant increases in the shares of the fund’s European partners and Japan. This has forced the United States to build coali¬ tions and engage in intensive bargaining within the IMF, often diluting its ability to influence Latin American countries through this organization. Southard, The Evolution of the International Monetary Fund (1979: 15), ex¬ amines the concept of “asymmetry” within the IMF to explain the contrasting

58

The Inter-American Environment

levels of IMF influence over developed country management, which is neglible, versus its influence over developing societies, which is considerable. The asym¬ metry stems from the fact that the fund’s influence is exercised when govern¬ ments are in need of IMF funding (usually as a result of balance of payment problems) and this is more likely to occur in Latin America. Southard alludes to the double standard in IMF policies where the penchant for balancing budgets is vigorously applied in Latin America but virtually ignored in the United States.

DECISION MAKING WITHIN THE MDBs MDBs are large, complex organizations devoted to addressing basic economic development problems in the Third World. For example, the World Bank—the largest, with more than seven thousand employees—is a matrix organization structured around regional departments (Latin America, Africa, Asia, etc.) and functional divisions concerned with individual country departments and agri¬ culture, energy, and economic infrastructure. Scoping the process of decision making within the MDBs is made difficult because country and sectoral docu¬ ments are not yet available to the public. As a result, studies of MDB decision¬ making processes—which could provide insights into organizational and operational characteristics—and the construction of formal models often lack substantive data. MDB decision-making processes are the major focus of studies by Gold, Voting and Decisions in the IMF (1972) and Voting Majorities in the Fund (1977), and Zamora, “Voting in International Economic Organizations’’ (1980). Each of these studies looks into the formal voting arrangements at the highest level of decision making. Both Gold and Zamora contend that voting power within the MDBs depends on the weighted quota system applied to each specific country. However, voting procedures provide only a very partial picture of the process of designing country and sectoral development strategies, and project preparation, monitoring, and implementation, all of which take place at the level of regional departments. Payer, The World Bank (1982a: 73), argues that power inside the World Bank is distributed very unevenly, with the presidency described as having absolute and unequivocal control over the process of formulation and implementation of all types of decisions. This is compounded by the fact that developed countries tend to have almost complete control of the bank’s decision-making powers while borrowers are merely passive bystanders, with little choice but to go along with the policy alternative decided by the bank’s top technocrats. Mason and Ascher, The World Bank Since Bretton Woods (1973: 91), suggest a number of patterns of the bank’s decision-making process. They also portray power within the World Bank as highly centralized. Although at times interdepartmental ac¬ tivities play an important role in loan operations, most professionals contribute little to the process of policy formulation but simply carry out guidelines handed down from above.

International Economic Organizations

59

Executive directors—representatives of member governments—are depicted as merely responding or reacting to presidential initiatives but without having any power of their own. Moreover, since voting is weighted in proportion to stockholding in the World Bank, the United States and the most industrialized nations manage to control the majority of the votes (74 percent in the late 1940? but down to around 60 percent in the early seventies). All these considerations set limits to the power that executive directors have on the formulation of policy guidelines. William Ascher’s study of the World Bank, “New Development Approaches and the Adaptability of International Agencies” (1983: 432-433), offers a dif¬ ferent interpretation of decision making. According to Ascher, the bank’s techn¬ ocrats, rather than top management, are the most influential actors in the power structure. Although the Executive Board is frequently perceived as a strong symbol of power, most power resides within the relatively decentralized com¬ ponents of the organization dominated by the professional-technical staff. It is the staff which sets guidelines or general policies with respect to specific coun¬ tries and is a source of development thinking. The professional-technical staff is divided according to their level of innovative thinking: mildly innovative, innovative, and noninnovative. The most innovative are responsible for much of the bank’s development thinking. Ascher suggests that professionals will continue to be very important in the bank’s decision-making process given the size of the organization, the extensive decision points, and the relatively large number of “boundary personnel” (those who mediate between the organization and its environment). In a similar study, Humi, The Lending Policy of the World Bank in the 1970’s (1980), focuses on the changes in lending policies from overhead projects to poverty-oriented loans in the early 1970s, emphasizing that bargaining predominates in bank-client relationships. The complexity of the decision-making process is conceptually subdivided into four successive phases or stages with six parallel branches of decision-making agents. Bank officials are subject to general policy guidelines or directives set by top-level management, but no single actor dominates all phases of the decision-making process. Killick, “IMF Stabilization Programs” (1984), also focuses on decisions per¬ taining to stand-by arrangements within the International Monetary Fund. Fund operations are supposed to be controlled by principles of uniformity or consis¬ tency as well as flexibility. Economists distributed in geographic departments and the Department of Exchange and Trade Relations (EAR) control the daily operations of the organization and are responsible for maintaining uniformity of treatment with member countries. EAR usually plays a very active role in the preparation of the relevant briefing papers before the departure of country mis¬ sions (which normally include at least one member of the EAR staff). On the other hand, geographical departments, which have more familiarity with country circumstances, are responsible for ensuring that programs are adapted to the specific country situation. This difference in scope occasionally gives rise to

60

The Inter-American Environment

disputes between the EAR and the geographic units, and at least to some extent the degree of flexibility or rigidity in the process of preparation of fund programs is often the outcome of interdepartmental bargaining. Personal characteristics (level of experience and self-confidence) of the mission chief, and the specific circumstances of the country applying for a program loan, are other important variables that affect the final outcome.

CONCLUSION

Research on the triangular relationship of the U.S. government, MDBs, and Latin America is still in its infancy and in most cases is affected in one way or another by the limited access to the decision-making process. Nevertheless, a handful of pioneer scholars such as Sanford, Ascher, Brown, and Dell have laid the foundation for the future development of this subject of investigation. For those interested in research on the politics and processes in MDBs, as indicated at the beginning of this chapter, the World Bank is currently expanding external access to its data, all of which may encourage more research on the IDB and the IMF. As of January 1994, the World Bank offers (through a computer net¬ work) a complete set of documents for public use combined with a catalog of World Bank documents available under the new open information policy guide¬ lines.2 Ideally, when fully implemented, the new set of policies will pave the way toward new research on the relationship between the Latin American policy of the United States and MDBs. With the availability of this kind of information, a better understanding of bank policies and procedures, and the making of U.S. policy toward Latin America, will no doubt follow. Moreover, many of the illfounded suspicions and misunderstandings of MDB policies will likely change with increased access to the process of formulating and implementing interna¬ tional economic policies. International economic organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, and IDB will continue to play important roles in addressing the changing array of issues confronting the hemisphere in the aftermath of the Cold War. Both the World Bank and the IDB now consider human rights, the environment, and antipoverty measures as important criteria for lending to potential borrowers. The U.S. for¬ eign economic bureaucracy—particularly the Treasury Department and the State Department—is now more visible and influential in the formulation and imple¬ mentation of U.S.-Latin American policy. With the creation of the North Amer¬ ican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the increasing importance of trade and investment throughout the hemisphere, international economic organizations will continue to play important roles in the Latin American policy of the United States. Whether this leads to a more or less “politicized” role for MDBs in the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America is a research puzzle that future scholars will have to solve.

International Economic Organizations

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NOTES 1. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a specialized agency of the United Nations, created by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1945 to promote international monetary and financial cooperation among its over 150 members. The Latin American states played a major role in the creation of the IMF and during the debt crises of th'e 1980s became increasingly dependent on the fund for making interest and loan amorti¬ zation payments and preventing national bankruptcy. Secretaries of the Treasury James Baker and Nicolas Brady arranged several plans to solve the Latin American debt crisis but without a great deal of success. The World Bank consists of four institutions which function together as the world’s largest lending group. It serves Third World countries, especially those in Latin America, by financing economic development programs. The Latin American and Caribbean regions have been the main recipients of World Bank loans over the past decade. All powers of the bank are vested in a Board of Governors (one per member nation), although most of their powers are delegated to the executive directors who decide on the rules of lending policies. The United States provides around 20 percent of the subscribed capital of the bank, which means it has the largest bloc of votes and considerable influence over loans to key Latin American countries. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the oldest and largest regional devel¬ opment institution, was established in 1959 by a special committee of the OAS to help accelerate economic and social development in Latin America and the Caribbean. The IDB’s original membership included nineteen Latin American and Caribbean countries and the United States; today forty-four countries make up the IDB’s membership, in eluding most of the Latin American countries, the United States and Canada, and a num¬ ber of Western European and other nonhemispheric countries such as Israel and Japan. Voting power in the IDB is weighted according to the size of a member’s contributions, which has historically meant considerable power for the United States in dealing with Latin America. However, the infusion of new capital from the new European members has served to dilute the power of the United States over IDB lending practices. For a brief sketch of these three lending agencies and their significance in U.S.-Latin American pol¬ icymaking, see Rossi and Plano, Latin America: A Political Dictionary (1992). 2. A new Project Information Document (PID) is now available for all projects under preparation for bank financing. This document will provide substantially more informa¬ tion on lending projects than is currently accessible, and at a much earlier stage in the decision-making process.

REFERENCES Ascher, William. 1989. “The World Bank and U.S. Control.” In Margaret P. Kams and Karen A. Mingst, eds. The United States and Multilateral Institutions. Boston: Unwin Hyman. -. 1983. “New Development Approaches and the Adaptability of International Agencies: The Case of the World Bank.” International Organization 37, no. 3: 415-439. Atkins, G. Pope. 1989. Latin America in the International Political System. Second Edi¬ tion. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

62

The Inter-American Environment

Ayres, Robert L. 1983. Banking on the Poor. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Blake, David H., and Robert S. Walters. 1976. The Politics of Global Economic Rela¬ tions. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Brown, Bartram S. 1992. The United States and the Politicization of the World Bank. London and New York: Kegan Paul International. Cohen, Stephen D. 1988. The Making of United States International Economic Policy: Principles, Problems, and Proposals for Reform. New York: Praeger. Conroy, Michael E. 1987. “Economic Aggression as an Instrument of Low Intensity Warfare.” In Thomas W. Walker, ed. Reagan versus the Sandinistas: The Un¬ declared War on Nicaragua. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. -. 1985. “Economic Legacy and Policies: Performance and Critique.” In Thomas W. Walker, ed. Nicaragua: the First Five Years. New York: Praeger. Dell, Sidney. 1972. The Inter-American Development Bank: A Study in Development Financing. New York: Praeger. Feinberg, Richard E., and Delia M. Boylan. 1991. Modular Multilateralism: North-South Economic Relations in the 1990s. Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council. Gold, Joseph. 1977. Voting Majorities in the Fund. IMF Pamphlet Series No. 20. Wash¬ ington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund. -. 1972. Voting and Decisions in the IMF. Washington, D.C: International Mon¬ etary Fund. Humi, Bettina S. 1980. The Lending Policy of the World Bank in the 1970’s: Analysis and Evaluation. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Irish, Marion, and Elke Frank. 1975. U.S. Foreign Policy: Context, Conduct, and Con¬ tent. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Khaler, Miles. 1989. “The United States and the International Monetary Fund: Declining Influence or Declining Interest?” In Margaret P. Kams and Karen A. Mingst, eds. The United States and Multilateral Institutions. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Killick, Thomas. 1984. “IMF Stabilization Programs.” In T. Killick, ed. The Quest for Economic Stabilization: The IMF and the Third World. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Krause, Lawrence B., and Joseph S. Nye. 1975. “Reflections on the Economics and Politics of International Economic Organizations.” International Organization 29 (Winter): 323-342. Lister, Frederick K. 1984. Decision-Making Strategies for International Organizations: The IMF Model. Denver, Colo.: University of Denver. Malmgren, Harald B. 1972. “Managing Foreign Economic Policy.” Foreign Policy 6 (Spring): 42-63. Mason, Edward S., and Robert E. Ascher. 1973. The World Bank since Bretton Woods. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. Molineu, Harold. 1986. U.S. Policy toward Latin America: From Regionalism to Glob¬ alism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Payer, Cheryl. 1982a. The World Bank: A Critical Analysis. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Payer, Cheryl. 1982b. “The Bretton Woods Twins.” Counter-Spy 7, no. 1 (SeptemberNovember): 12-17. Provost, Michele M. 1988. “United States Policy towards the Multilateral Development Banks.” The Rostrum 5, no. 1 (May).

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Rossi, Ernest E., and Jack C. Plano. 1992. Latin America: A Political Dictionary. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO. Sanford, Jonathan E. 1988a. Access to World Bank Information. CRS Report for Congress No. 89-89 F. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Library of Con¬ gress. Sanford, Jonathan E. 1988b. “U.S. Policy toward the Multilateral Development Banks: The Role of Congress.” George Washington Journal of International Law and Economics 22: 1-115. -. 1987. Multilateral Development Banks: Legislation Affecting U.S. Participation. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service Report 87-585F. -. 1986. The World Bank: 18 Questions and Answers. Washington, D.C.: Con¬ gressional Research Service Report 86-769F. -. 1982. U.S. Foreign Policy and Multilateral Development Banks. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. -. 1981. ‘‘Restrictions on United States Contributions to Multilateral Development Banks.” Journal of International Law and Economics 15, no. 3: 401-413. -. 1979. Issues and Options in the Reorganization of U.S. Foreign Aid Policy. Prepared for U.S. Congress, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 96th Congress, 1st Session. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. -. 1977. U.S. Policy and the Multilateral Development Banks: Participation and Effectiveness. Report Prepared for the U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on For¬ eign Relations, 95th Congress, 1st Session. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Sanford, Jonathan E., and Margaret G. Goodman. 1975. ‘‘Congressional Oversight and the Multilateral Development Banks.” International Organization 29 (Autumn): 1055-1064. Schoultz, Lars. 1982. ‘‘Politics, Economics, and U.S. Participation in Multilateral De¬ velopment Banks.” International Organization 36, no. 3: 537-574. -. 1981. Human Rights and U.S. Policy Towards Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Southard, Frank. 1979. The Evolution of the International Monetary Fund. Princeton, N.J.: International Finance Section, Princeton University. U.S. Department of the Treasury. 1982. United States Participation in the Multilateral Development Banks in the 1980s. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Senate. 1975. Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Covert Action Chile, 1963-1973. Wash¬ ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Senate, Committee on Governmental Affairs. 1979. U.S. Participation in the Mul¬ tilateral Development Banks. Committee print, 96th Congress, 1st Session. Wash¬ ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Zamora, Stephen. 1980. ‘‘Voting in International Economic Organizations.” The Amer¬ ican Journal of International Law 74: 566-608.

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V

II THE U.S. DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENT

Elite Values Mark P. Lagon Elites are groupings of “opinion shapers” who have a disproportionate influence on policymaking in the United States. They include elected, appointed, and career officials within the government, as well as experts outside the govern¬ ment. Their values—ideological and ethical preferences—condition their behav¬ ior as important actors in the policymaking process. Various elites, distinguished by belief systems which establish their identities and agenda, compete to shape U.S. foreign policy. The end of the Cold War has increased the competition within the various groupings of elites over the direction of U.S. policy toward Latin America. This chapter will first seek to identify which individuals constitute the elites shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America, and what their principal beliefs are.1 Then it will examine two bodies of academic literature: (1) studies of the sources and impact of elite beliefs regarding U.S. foreign policy generally, and (2) the literature on U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. The purpose of this chapter is to integrate these two bodies of scholarship to gain a better understanding of the role of elite values in the making of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. After reviewing the literature on elites and U.S. foreign policy, this chapter will examine how elites and their attitudes shaped U.S. policy toward Latin America during three historical periods: pre-Cold War (1823-1945), Cold War (1945-1990), and post-Cold War (the 1990s). In each of these three periods, the impact of elite values on the formation of policy at the doctrinal level will be compared with their impact on U.S. behavior in practice, allowing for judg¬ ments concerning continuity and change in the formulation of Latin American policy. This chapter will ultimately explore how changes in the values in the minds of elites in a post-Cold War era may alter the U.S. approach to Latin America and the Caribbean.

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

THE ELITES AND VALUES WHICH HAVE SHAPED U.S.LATIN AMERICAN POLICY In discussing the role of elite values in U.S.-Latin American policymaking, it is appropriate to step back and assess just which elites and which values have influenced that policy. There are two varieties of governmental elites. First, there are policymakers at the highest levels of government. These chiefly consist of political appointees such as a secretary of defense, a National Security Council aide for Latin American affairs, or the assistant secretary of state for interAmerican affairs. These elites actually formulate policies. Second, there are a variety of lower-level government officials who influence policy. These elites within government are implementers of policy. These in¬ clude career bureaucrats and military officers in bureaucracies in Washington and indeed in U.S. embassies abroad. This latter category deserves attention, since the mind-set of U.S. emissaries in Latin American capitals is crucial to the substance of U.S. policy toward nations in the region. The image of a patronclient relationship in the minds of Foreign Service officers (FSOs) shapes the intrusive character of U.S. diplomacy toward Latin American nations greatly. Allison and Halperin (1972) as well as Hilsman, The Politics of Policy Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs (1987), have stressed the importance of this category of bureaucrats, arguing that they often alter or revise policy mandates which have been sent down from the level of actual policymakers. Outside government, numerous other elites contribute to the debate about American policy toward Latin America. These include elites discussed in other chapters in this book. They consist of interest groups concerned with particular issues that affect Latin America, experts in universities in and “think tanks” (institutes independent of universities), journalists who write on Latin America and U.S. policy in the region, and businessmen with interests in Latin America. In particular, Kristol, “American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy” (1967), high¬ lights the role of academics trying to shape the terms of debate. Schoultz (1990: 15) has noted the increased influence of “ ‘the liberal foreign policy community’—human rights organizations, church groups, university students and faculties” in the foreign policymaking process since the 1960s. These non¬ governmental elites are criticized by Kristol and lauded by Schoultz. Elite analysis here benefits from an eclecticism which incorporates actors which are the foci of pluralist and neo-Marxist theories of foreign policy. In a study of U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and other insurgencies, Lagon, The Reagan Doctrine (1994b), has called these leaders “the outer circle” of elites— in contrast to “the inner circle” of policymakers and implementers in govern¬ ment. What ties these inner and outer circles of elites together are shared beliefs, which define their common identity and agenda. “Elites” as a concept subsume such diverse groups of leaders as Cabinet members, FSOs, scholars, and business executives because they have similar values. As such it is a very powerful

Elite Values

69

Figure 5.1 Perceptual Filters of U.S. Elites Influencing Policy toward Latin America ARTICULATED ENDS

MEANS IN PRACTICE

Values to Be Promoted in Latin America

Chief Instruments of Policy

The "Political Prism"

Freedom Democracy Pluralism Human Rights Political Development

The "Economic Prism"

Economic Development Economic Growth Prosperity Alleviating Poverty

Development Assistance Trade

The "Security Prism"

U.S. National Security Stability Preventing Revolutionary Change Maintaining Strategic Access Preventing Strategic Denial

Military Aid Economic Sanctions Use of Force

Diplomacy

concept for understanding foreign policymaking which liberates analysis from sterile discussion of states as rational actors or flow charts rendering the chain of command of authoritative decision makers. Precisely what values held by these elites have shaped U.S. policy in Latin America? In terms of the concepts of perceptions and preconceptions as sources of elites’ beliefs, elites look at the region thorough a particular “prism.” A prism refracts light which passes through it; it distorts the vision of reality one sees. In the case of elites understanding developments in Latin America, pin¬ pointing U.S. goals, and recommending instruments of policy, they have tended to look through one of three prisms: political, economic, or security.

PERCEPTUAL FILTERS, ELITE VALUES, AND U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICYMAKING The Political Prism The first of these perspectives is the “political prism” (see Figure 5.1). Some elites have focused on expanding human rights and democratization in Latin America. This is not only a Cold War era phenomenon. As Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987: 171), observes, “American policy makers displayed hostility toward revolutions that diverged from the American norm, especially

70

The U.S. Domestic Environment

those on the left.... They were convinced that national greatness depended on making the world safe for liberty.” In examining elite views on Third World development, Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World (1973: 69), associates President Kennedy with what he calls the “explicit democratic ap¬ proach”—seeking above all to promote political pluralism, particularly in Latin America. While Kennedy might have been most explicit, his administration was not alone in viewing Latin America through the political prism during the Cold War. Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1981: 23), for instance, stresses not the uniqueness of the Carter human rights policy but its continuity with the values (spirituality and human liberty) pro¬ moted by leaders in the past. Similarly, Ronald Reagan’s controversial Contra aid policy stemmed from this political prism for viewing the U.S. role in the region. Pastor, Condemned to Repetition (1987: 376), notes that elite attitudes— rather than mass attitudes—were the determinant of this policy: “Because the contra program did not enjoy public support, each time the administration re¬ quested funding from Congress, it had to intensify its rhetoric. Increasingly, the administration sought to justify its support for the contras by stressing its global commitment to democracy.” As Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (1930), asserts, in the study of elites, it is not very useful to question the sincerity of the values they espouse; they may be fooling themselves, but it is not very useful to assume they seek to fool others with their justifications. These two apparently diametrically opposed administrations, for instance, were both influ¬ enced by elites looking at Latin America through a political prism. Whether called “human rights,” “freedom,” “democracy,” or some other term, U.S. elites looking through the political prism have sought to inculcate the U.S. form of political pluralism in Latin America. Martz, “Images, Inter¬ vention, and the Cause of Democracy” (1988: 326), aptly observes, “There is in the tradition of U.S. foreign policy a belief in the obligation to share national values with others—if necessary, with energetic insistence.” Whether Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, whether Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, U.S. leaders have sought to export the U.S. form of government to its hemispheric neighbors. Wiarda, The Democratic Revolution in Latin America (1990: xx), contends, however, that Latin American culture has offered unfertile soil into which U.S. elites have sought to plant the U.S. form of political pluralism:

The Latin American conception of democracy ... has often been dose to Rousseau’s notion of the general will, which is intuitively known through the person of an allpowerful leader or “man on horseback”; it has not historically been based on popular suffrage and one-man-one-vote. In Latin America, this notion descended from Rousseau is gradually being supplanted by a system of regular competitive democratic elections but the legacy from that earlier tradition is still present.

Elite Values

71

Thus, the political prism through which elites have viewed Latin America has distorted efforts of policymakers to implant permanent democratic values in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Economic Prism

«.

The second perceptual filter espoused by American elites might be called the “economic prism.” Schoultz, National Security and U.S. Policy toward Latin America (1987: 86-87), notes that a majority of U.S. elites believe that poverty is the source of instability in Latin America, and therefore American policy should be committed to promoting economic development. According to Schoultz, [A] substantial group of policy makers believes that for several decades a number of forces, most of them foreign in origin, have been attacking the foundation of Latin America’s traditional societal structure. Modernization is occurring, and one aspect of this modernization is a new consciousness among many Latin Americans that their pov¬ erty need no longer be accepted with the fatalistic passivity of an earlier era. That oldfashioned term, the revolution of rising expectations, is alive and well in the minds of many Washington officials.

This alternative prism for viewing conditions has led elites to offer various means for promoting economic growth in the region over time: “Dollar Diplo¬ macy,” bilateral foreign assistance through the Agency for International Devel¬ opment, multilateral programs through the Inter-American Development Bank, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, just to name a few. This prism is what Packenham (1973) calls the “economic approach.”

The Security Prism The third perceptual perspective can be called the “security prism.” Since the Monroe Doctrine, elites have focused principally on excluding the military presence of other great powers from Latin America as by definition a threat to American security. Elites’ concern with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada in the 1980s as being surrogates for Soviet power was couched in the same terms as was the Monroe Doctrine: rejection of a military foothold in the region for another great power besides the United States. Schoultz (1990: 3-4) argues that this concern is simply the latest manifestation of a consistent “paradigm or conceptual framework” of “strategic denial”—the exclusion of extrahemispheric rivals as the primary goal of U.S. policy in Latin America over the past 180 years. Elite preoccupations with U.S. security in Latin America are largely based on perceptions rather than objective threats for the simple reason Pastor, Whirlpool

72

The U.S. Domestic Environment

(1992: 25), has raised: “No country in Latin America has the capacity to threaten the United States directly.” The “security prism” is not unrelated to the political or economic prisms. Its exponents, however, see political and ec¬ onomic development as problems deriving from American security interests. In the Cold War era, the main security interest in the minds of elites was containing Soviet influence in Latin America. As Pastor (1992: 221) comments, “This strategic objective has activated the four recurring problems that have preoc¬ cupied U.S. policy makers, namely, how to manage succession crises and rev¬ olutionary regimes, and how to promote democracy and development.” This perspective, putting American security first in a hierarchy of values, is labeled the “Cold War approach” by Packenham (1973: 87-88), for instance, leading the Johnson administration to place more emphasis on security objectives in foreign aid programs than had the previous administration. Elites have shaped the U.S. role in Latin America by fighting over which values the United States should promote in its policy. As a result of the differ¬ ences among the political, economic, and security prisms refracting conditions in Latin America in the eyes of elites, policymaking appears to be the process of rationalizing trade-offs between competing values. As Alden and Schurmann (1990: 44) point out, “ideological competition results in inconsistent and in¬ coherent policies.” Senator J. William Fulbright, “The Two Americas” (1966: 23), comments on the irreconcilable trade-offs between elite values: The United States ... pursues two largely incompatible policies in Latin America—dis¬ criminating support for social reform and an undiscriminating anticommunism that often makes us the friend of corrupt and reactionary oligarchies. These incompatible policies are an expression of the two Americas—the one humane and tolerant, the other strident and Puritanical, the one disposed to help its neighbors to be happy, the other disposed to force them to be virtuous.

The “irreconcilable trade-offs” that Fulbright detects raise important questions as to how elites have rationalized conflicting values in the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America. There are four possible conclusions offered by scholars about how values were rationalized. First, some scholars believed that trade-offs were never solved because elites sought to pursue all values at once as inherently compatible. Packenham (1973) emphasizes the notion widely held by government officials and academics that “all good things go together.” Because elites believed that political development, economic development, and American security could be pursued simultaneously through an integrated approach, trade-offs were largely ignored—to the detriment of effective U.S. policy. A second possible proposition offered by scholars is that issues were decided by whichever coalition among elites had the upper hand in domestic politics at a particular time. Those elites in power at a particular time (in the rotation of influence characteristic of American domestic politics) incorporated their own

Elite Values

73

value concerns in the policy made at that time. As Alden and Schurmann (1990: 21) assert: “Each of the issues which raised these value concerns was resolved by the temporary triumph of an elite representing one or the other of the com¬ peting visions.” Third, some scholars believed trade-offs between values were solved ad hoc, on a case-by-case basis. Subscribing to this proposition, Schoultz (1981: 5) concluded of U.S. policy in the region, “The nature of an issue determines the values that impinge upon decision making and the process by which decisions are made.” Feinberg and Boylan, “Modular Multilateralism” (1991), stress this ad hoc quality of U.S. policy in the attitude of elites toward the developing world. The fourth and most convincing view is that during the Cold War the security prism was more meaningful than the political or economic prism. More pre¬ cisely, during that era, the political and economic prisms, while influential, ul¬ timately served the higher ends suggested by the security prism. In this respect the Reagan administration’s hierarchy of values was archetypical rather than unique. The way, for instance, that Pastor and Feinberg have portrayed the Reagan elite coalition’s worldview indicates a dominance of the security prism over the other two prisms. Pastor (1992: 66) describes Reagan’s “organizing prism” as assuming the Soviet Union was the primary disruptive force in the world, human rights would be best served by combatting communism, and ec¬ onomic development would result from the removal of Marxist governments in the region who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its command economy model. Feinberg (1987: 148) comments that “in seeking to apply pressure to unfriendly states, the administration often subordinated American economic in¬ terests to perceived strategic objectives.” Despite more incendiary rhetoric of the Reagan administration, its formula of emphasizing the security prism was more typical than atypical. Often, for in¬ stance, the policy of the Carter and Reagan administrations regarding Central America is contrasted by scholars. Still, in the terms of Martha Cottam (1992), the 1980 election brought about a shift from “modified cold warriors” domi¬ nating Carter’s elite coalition to “traditional cold warriors” dominating Re¬ agan’s elite coalition. The security prism, as the lowest common denominator of shared beliefs among elites, prevailed during both presidencies and indeed throughout the Cold War. Scholars studying elite values would attribute this not to a continuity of international conditions during the Cold War era but to a consensus among political leaders. Thus, the Cold War established a clear hi¬ erarchy of values in which security concerns were given a higher priority than political and economic goals.

ELITE VALUES IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY The literature on the sources of U.S. foreign policy emphasize the importance of elites in spite of the influential role of public opinion in a democracy. These

74

The

U.S. Domestic Environment

studies assert that public opinion, or mass attitudes, matter much less than elite level attitudes. Barry Hughes, The Domestic Context of American Foreign Policy (1978: 107) goes so far as to assert that “the day to day conduct of foreign policy by the executive branch is almost completely unrelated to public opin¬ ion.” This observation has been made with specific reference to Latin America by Schoultz (1981: 46), who argues that “the insignificance of public opinion can be attributed to several interacting invariables, including the low salience of Latin America among the public, an elitist value system among State De¬ partment officials, and the host of competing pressures on policy makers.” Alden and Schurmann (1990: 17) conclude that elites frequently fail to build legitimacy for the policies they pursue by not linking their own values to those at the mass level. From this perspective, it is indeed elites, more than the general public, who shape foreign policy. Their growing influence was for instance acknowledged by one of the most controversial members of the foreign policy elite. Jeane Kirkpatrick (1990: 42) points out, “In the long years of World War II and the Cold War, the United States developed a foreign policy elite based in the bu¬ reaucracy, academic institutions, and heavily associated with nonprofit institu¬ tions.” These elites were not just in policymaking positions in the Executive branch, but also in the legislative branch. Schoultz (1981: 45) notes the detach¬ ment of elite beliefs among members of Congress from mass attitudes: “In regard to human rights legislation aimed at Latin America during the 1970s, the opposition of Charles Wilson and Robert Lagomarsino and the support of Don¬ ald Fraser, Tom Harkin and Edward Kennedy were so firm that no amount of public opinion could have changed their votes.” Even elites outside government had an impact. Governmental and nongovernmental elites are not separate, since they often exchange places. Lowenthal (1983: 315-316), for instance, observes that some critics of the Carter approach to Latin America (Jeane Kirkpatrick, for example) went on to serve in the Reagan government.

Sources of Elite Beliefs The literature on American foreign policy emphasizes four basic sources of elite beliefs. The first source of elite attitudes is personality, particularly lifelong socialization experiences. The most far-reaching research in this area has been done by Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1965); Greenstein, Personality and Politics (1987); and George, “The Operational Code” (1969). Lasswell, for example, pioneered the idea that political leaders pursue policies which serve their own psychological needs, rationalized in terms of national interest or national security. The second source of elite beliefs are the perceptions and preconceptions of political leaders. Holsti and Rosenau (1979: 56) observed, “Because of the ambiguity and uncertainty that characterize so many important issues in inter¬ national relations, leaders with competing belief systems are likely to see what

Elite Values

75

they expect and want to see in the course of world affairs.” Jervis, The Logic of Images (1970: 248), argues that American elites believe events in underde¬ veloped areas have an impact on American national security even when objec¬ tively speaking they do not. Shafer, Deadly Paradigms (1988: 276), shows how U.S. Cold War counterinsurgency doctrines were shaped by biased policy mak¬ ers’ focusing on certain international phenomena and ignoring others. Schoultz (1987: 12) explores how policy makers’ beliefs shape their perceptions of reality, which in turn shape the policies they create. Schoultz (1990: 5) describes the process by which mental paradigms are formed: [A]s junior officials are socialized into the policy-making environment, their crude [men¬ tal] lists are enlarged to include all of the most important features of a country or a region (in our case, Latin America), and then the features are organized and weighed in terms of their salience to U.S. policy makers. The result is a paradigm—the structured thought process that officials use to make sense out of the bewildering array of incidents and problems that constitute the raw data of international relations.

Like Schoultz, Martz (1988: 307) argues that such perceptual images have in¬ fluenced U.S. policy in Latin America specifically: “Images of the mind nourish the assumptions and preconditions of U.S. policymakers toward Latin America. Whether founded on fantasies, realities, or an admixture of both, these constitute the foci about which hemispheric relations have revolved.” All of these works stress the perceptual filters through which elites interpret problems abroad on the basis of a priori preconceptions and which inform policies they subsequently craft. A related third source of elite beliefs are historical analogies. Whether the analogies have been read in history books, observed firsthand during socializa¬ tion, or experienced in the recent past, elites tend to connect contemporary foreign policy problems with parallel chapters in history. Either seeking to repeat previous successes or to avert previous errors, elites draw on lessons from the past to order their thinking on foreign policy. Holsti and Rosenau (1979: 47) subscribe to this view in noting “that the propensity to look to the past for guidance and decision rules is spread widely throughout the [American] socie¬ ty’s leadership culture.” In particular, they note the overwhelming importance of the Vietnam experience in shaping the mind-set of elites. Smith, The Closest of Enemies (1987), emphasizes the attention paid to Castro’s establishment of a Communist regime in Cuba by President Carter in evaluating the FSLN gov¬ ernment in Nicaragua. Similarly, Pastor (1992: 66) notes Ronald Reagan’s ref¬ erence to the Monroe Doctrine as an appropriate commitment of the United States to police the hemisphere in his view. The fourth source of elite beliefs is political ideology. The literature on ide¬ ology in U.S. foreign policy is concerned more with the philosophical orientation of elites than with cognition. Alden and Schurmann (1990: 20) stress the role of an ideological debate between competing elites in the foreign policy process,

The U.S. Domestic Environment

76

which “is not a regional, generational, or class-based division, but rather a dispute over values that cut across interest cleavages.” Treating governmental and academic elites, Packenham (1973) emphasizes how the liberal creed in the American culture determined U.S policy toward the developing world in the 1950s and 1960s. Carothers, In the Name of Democracy (1991), highlights the ideological conflict among elites in policymaking in Central America during the Reagan era. Most recently, the literature on so-called epistemic communities informs the study of elite values and U.S. foreign policy. Haas (1992) and other contributors to a symposium he edited in International Organization have noted how policy is shaped by groups of experts who share the same jargon, concerns, training, and goals. In brief, they share the same epistemology and form what he calls “expistemic communities,” composed largely of political elites. Specialized ex¬ perts inside and outside government with a common set of beliefs defining their identity and agenda influence foreign policy outcomes. Classic examples of an epistemic community are regional specialists on Latin America in government, universities, and independent research institutes. Smith, The Idea Brokers (1991), and Ricci, The Transformation of American Politics (1993), observe how think tanks have become particularly important organs within epistemic com¬ munities of “experts.” In short, the literature on elite beliefs proposes that U.S. foreign policy is determined by governmental and nongovernmental elites, rather than interna¬ tional conditions or public preferences. Elites make policy based on their belief systems, which spring from their personalities, perceptions, use of historical analogies, and ideological values.

ELITE VALUES IN U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICY The scholarship on elite values and U.S. policy toward Latin America can be divided chronologically into three periods: the pre-Cold War era, the Cold War era, and the post-Cold War era. For each period, the literature identifies elite values as sources of American statecraft both at the doctrinal level and at the level of actual implemented policy. Since most of the literature is on the Cold War era, the following survey of scholarship will mainly treat that period. The study of this most recent era is useful because it provides the standard against which to identify continuities and changes with respect to the past in contem¬ porary U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere.

Pre-Cold War Latin American Policy Elite values played a major part in U.S. policy toward Latin America in the era before the Cold War, both at the doctrinal level and in implemented policies. First, at the level of broad, universalistic policy doctrines, elite values played an acutely important role. It is only logical that the beliefs of elites should have

Elite Values

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a particularly pronounced role in shaping doctrines, as declaratory policies iden¬ tifying broad goals in American foreign policy. Crabb, The Doctrines of Amer¬ ican Foreign Policy (1982), argues that doctrines have played a crucial role in American foreign policy as a function of the peculiar American mass and elite culture. The first, and perhaps the most famous, of these doctrines is the Monroe Doctrine. Hunt (1987: 62) makes the case that elite images of Latin American inferiority helped in formulating the Monroe Doctrine: ‘ ‘These images ... sup¬ ported the ripening claim of the United States to the role of natural leader and policeman of an American system of states.” Hunt (1987: 166), in fact, notes the long-standing legacy of the doctrine in conditioning U.S. policy in the re¬ gion; the promotion of development in the Cold War era maintained the premise of superiority embodied by the Monroe Doctrine. A number of other works, including Gil, Latin American-United States Relations (1971), and Humes, My Fellow Americans (1992), highlight how the predisposed views of the Latin Americans of U.S. elites inspired the Monroe Doctrine’s promulgation. The second most notable doctrinal statement about American policy toward Latin America before 1945 was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Humes (1992) observes that Theodore Roosevelt was concerned about the moral failings of Latin America, and that its lack of civilization welcomed great powers from outside the hemisphere to fill the moral void in the region. This doctrinal perspective toward Latin America extended the role of regional policeman to that of model of civilization for the region. Regarding actual practice, rather than doctrine, a number of key works have noted how elite values have determined policy in the pre-Cold War era. In the area of diplomacy, one sees an elite worldview shaping American policy in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Wiarda (1990) stresses the Wilsonian approach of trying to reconcile the pursuit of interests and the idealistic promotion of democracy in Latin America. This view is typical of the confidence of some American elites that interests and ideals are not mutually exclusive. Pastor (1992: 187) also noted the desire of Wilson to champion constitutional govern¬ ment (which he studied as a political scientist) in Latin America. Another diplomatic policy in practice in the pre-Cold War era springing from elite beliefs was FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy.” Seeking to set out the dip¬ lomatic position that the United States would uphold a norm of nonintervention in the region, FDR announced this policy in his 1933 inaugural address. Wiarda (1990: 101) points out that, stressing mutual respect of political sovereignty, FDR’s approach was to favor diplomacy over intervention as a product of his beliefs. In economic relations, U.S. foreign policy was highly influenced by elite beliefs in the pre-Cold War era as well. On the one hand, Elizabeth Cobbs (1991: 125-127) observes the salience of business interests in Latin America in U.S. foreign policy in the early part of the twentieth century. However, in a comprehensive study of American responses to threats to raw materials invest-

78

The U.S. Domestic Environment

ments in the Third World, Krasner, Defending the National Interest (1978), identifies an emphasis on ideological concerns rather than business interests. Among several case studies of U.S. responses to revolutionary change in Latin America, Krasner (1978: 151) argues that “in American reactions to Bolivian and Mexican nationalizations of their oil industries in 1937 and 1938, U.S. policy was guided by broader political concerns associated with the fear of Nazi penetration of Latin America rather than any specific corporate interests.” Elite ideology influenced U.S.-Latin American policy even before the Cold War had begun. A number of scholars have pointed to elite perceptions as the sources of military intervention as well. Even the most idealistic of U.S. leaders, Woodrow Wilson, ultimately used intervention as an instrument of policy, as for example, Hunt (1987: 132) points out: He thought of his approach as more altruistic than either Roosevelt’s “big-stick” style or William Howard Taft’s “dollar diplomacy.” He often spoke of performing neighborly service and teaching Latin peoples to elect good men. But his self-righteousness, com¬ bined with his anxiety over the political ineptitude of wild-eyed Mexican revolutionaries or unruly Haitian blacks, led him to a policy that was strikingly aggressive.

Wilson played an important role in attaching ideological concerns of elites to the traditional role of the United States as regional policeman. Wiarda (1990: 99) argues, “It was under President Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) that the urge to intervene was combined most strongly with a now-secularized Calvinistic vision of the United States as a ‘redeemer nation’ with a special destiny and proselytizing mission.” This redeemer model led the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of Central American and Caribbean nations in the twentieth century in the name of idealistic purposes formulated by elites. For instance. Pastor (1992: 235) points out an example of this intermingling of intervention and idealism in Nicaragua: “The elections of 1928 and 1932 were regarded as fair, but because both were supervised by U.S. marines, they can hardly be considered ideal examples of self-determination.” In diplomacy, economic re¬ lations, and even intervention, the ideology of elites had an enormous influence on outcomes in U.S. policy in Latin America before 1945.

The Cold War Era The U.S. role in Latin America and the Caribbean during the Cold War was frequently molded by public and private elites—both on the doctrinal level and in concrete policy. On the doctrinal level, of course, the guiding light for U.S. policy was the containment paradigm. Yergin, The Shattered Peace (1977: 11), argues that in the late 1940s and 1950s the identification of the Soviet Union as the focal threat to Western interests in the world “triumphed in American policy circles ... and provided a foundation for the anticommunist consensus.”

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Over time, however, the consensus over containment among elites revealed a fault line between those who defined the American mission in the Third World negatively (containing Soviet influence) and those who defined it positively (pro¬ moting American values, such as freedom). Packenham (1973: 133) observes that governmental and academic elites who defined the mission negatively acted upon the American cultural precept that revolution and radicalism are unnec¬ essary to political and economic development—since they were absent in the American context. He asserts that this set of elite beliefs rooted in liberalism is exemplified by “the political development doctrines that favored anti¬ communist, stable, pro-American governments in the Third World—in other words, the Cold War Approach.” Some have explored how American policy in the Third World during the Cold War era was also defined positively by elites. Jervis (1970: 248) surmises, for instance: Most American decision-makers place a high value on seeing other countries independ¬ ent, internally free, and on the road to economic development even if this does not contribute markedly to American security. As President Kennedy put it in his inaugural address: “We pledge our best efforts to help [the underdeveloped countries] help them¬ selves ... not because the Communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” A combination of egotism (the desire to have other states form in our mold) and altruism can explain a great deal of current American policy.

The same desire of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to spread Amer¬ ican civilization and goodwill abroad ultimately complemented the strategic ra¬ tionale of containment in the United States approach to the Third World in the Cold War era. In light of containment as the central doctrine guiding American policy after 1945, Schoultz (1987) has explored the impact of elites in defining the proper American role in Latin America. He concludes that the debate between elites centered upon the sources of instability in Latin America. Some elites located the primary source of instability in communism. Others pinpointed poverty as the source of instability. This controversy raged on into the 1980s, reflected by the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1984) acknowledg¬ ment that both communism and poverty were sources of Central American in¬ stability. Fearful of revolutionary change, as Cobbs (1991: 133) observes, U.S. elites sought policies to bolster regional stability. Shafer (1988: 20) observes that, from Eisenhower on. Cold War administrations pursued varied means for achieving the same doctrinal ends in the region: stable development and neu¬ tralization of revolutionary insurgencies. While elite beliefs—as ideas—obviously have the most potent impact on policy at the doctrinal level, they also had a significant impact on U.S. policy in practice in Latin America during the Cold War. In the area of diplomacy, the liberal creed of elites conditioned American policy. In studying the diplomatic

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approach of the Kennedy administration toward Latin America, Packenham (1973: 115) concluded that the Alliance for Progress, for instance, was based on the belief among elites that political and economic change is easy, given the American experience. Moreover, Packenham (1973: 156) argues that Kennedy’s diplomatic efforts to promote liberal democratic rule were based on another liberal assumption of American elites. The Kennedy administration’s policy re¬ flected the belief, grounded in the values of the federalist tradition, that it is better to distribute political power than to consolidate it. It is this latter premise among academic and political elites that Huntington, Political Order in Chang¬ ing Societies (1968), criticizes so thoroughly. The U.S. approach to inter-American economic relations during the Cold War period was also shaped by elite perspectives. Despite the propensity for scholars to set the Reagan administration apart from other presidential administrations as uniquely motivated by ideology, Feinberg (1987: 158) identifies a continuity between Reagan’s policies and those of past administrations: “Although the administration understood the usefulness of economic ties to bolster friendly states, its assumption that radicals are incorrigible blinded it to the strategic value of economic links to radical regimes.” In economic interaction with Latin American nations, all Cold War administrations—including Reagan’s—acted upon the elite-level preconception that radicals and radicalism contradict Amer¬ ican interests and ideals. American economic assistance to Latin America has been highly influenced by elite values. Foreign aid was aimed at bringing Latin American nations closer to the “take-off’ point for self-sustaining economic development, as Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), postulated, exemplifying the beliefs of elites in both government and academic spheres at the time. Krasner (1978: 223) also identifies liberal ideology among political elites as the source of U.S. for¬ eign aid policy, particularly the beliefs that contributed to the creation of the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s. To this end, the United States funneled some $25 billion in economic assistance to Latin America, and U.S. leadership facil¬ itated the flow of over four times that amount in loans from multilateral organ¬ izations, over the span of the Cold War.2 Finally, military intervention in the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War has been often explained in terms of the worldview of U.S. leaders. In the case of the intervention in Guatemala, the beliefs within the foreign policy establish¬ ment during the Eisenhower era had a great deal to do with the decision to assist Guatemalan rebels in overthrowing the Arbenz government. Krasner (1978: 280) writes that “American decision-makers did not perceive Arbenz’s policies being limited to narrow economic matters: they felt that his actions would lead to communist domination in Guatemala.” Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (1982: 10-11), recount, for instance, how before the U.S. intervention Eisen¬ hower criticized Guatemala for accepting Czech weapons, warning of a possible communist “outpost on this continent” on May 19, and then-Secretary of State Dulles declared that Guatemalans were living under a “Communist-type reign

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of terror” on June 15. Blasier, The Hovering Giant (1985: 154-158), also sur¬ mises that the exaggeration of the threat posed by a leftist government carrying out land reform was in part grounded in ideological fear of revolutionary change, ultimately leading to the use of force. Another case of intervention clearly shaped by elite values was the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (1972: 25), argues that the prevailing mind-set among elites during the Domin¬ ican crisis was to prevent a “second Cuba” because of its perceived threat to U.S. security. The Johnson administration has highly sensitized to the possibility of being blamed by Republicans in the domestic debate for having lost another nation to communism. Given the example of Republicans’ blaming Truman for somehow having “lost” China, this preoccupation was ever-present in the John¬ son era. It contributed greatly to that administration’s escalation of U.S. involve¬ ment in Vietnam. So too did it set the context for the Johnson administration’s anxieties that the recently toppled leftist government of Juan Bosch might be restored in the Dominican Republic. Krasner (1978: 298) notes how elites within the administration agreed to use force more or less unanimously given their shared anxieties, which he characterized as “nonlogical” (i.e., perceptual or ideological). He observes, “The American obsession with the dangers of another communist takeover in the Caribbean had led to a severe distortion of the in¬ formation that was being received.” As in these two notable cases of American intervention, elite beliefs consistently played a prominent role in decisions to use military power in the region.

Cold War Case Studies: Elite Values and U.S.-Latin American Policy Much of the scholarship on U.S. policy toward Latin America takes the form of case studies. The literature on the role of elites devotes a disproportionately large amount of pages to (1) President Kennedy’s confrontations with Cuba, (2) President Nixon’s manipulation of regime change in Chile, (3) President Carter’s emphasis on human rights in Latin American policy, and (4) President Reagan’s approach to Central America. While elite influence is perhaps overemphasized compared to other aspects of U.S. policy in the region between the late 1940s and the late 1980s, because they highlight the role of elite attitudes in American policy, the studies on these four cases deserve more in-depth explication here. Kennedy and Cuba. The case of Cuba is particularly important not only be¬ cause of the literature on the Kennedy administration’s confrontation with it but because of the metaphor it represented for subsequent policy. Like the Munich analogy, avoidance of “another Cuba” was an ordering principle for elite think¬ ing on Latin America throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, as argued by Pastor (1987) in relation to Carter and Reagan policy regarding Nicaragua. The Kennedy administration’s dealings with Cuba really comprise two cases: the Bay of Pigs affair and the Cuban missile crisis. These two incidents represent

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the bookends of a short period of intense conflict in which the Kennedy admin¬ istration moved from a half-hearted attempt to overthrow the Castro regime to a pledge not to invade Cuba as part of the bargain to resolve the missile crisis. General hostility among U.S. elites toward Castro’s government has persisted, in fact, outliving the Cold War itself. As for the Bay of Pigs affair of April 1961, Packenham (1973: 81-82) ob¬ serves that John Kennedy was divided in his thinking about Castro—divided between a respect for Castro as an antiimperialist leader in the tradition of Bolivar and an antipathy toward Castro as a Marxist he had criticized in his presidential campaign. This ambivalence may have shaped Kennedy’s response to learning of Eisenhower’s plan to use the CIA to help exiles invade Cuba and oust Castro; Kennedy neither scotched the idea nor supported it fully with Amer¬ ican military power. Krasner (1978: 286-287) concludes that it was the conclu¬ sion that Castro was aligning Cuba with the Communist bloc—rather than economic threats to U.S. property—which motivated Kennedy’s policy. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976: 278 and 312), identifies two ideas as contributing to the decision to support the Bay of Pigs invasion: (1) the idea that the United States could effectively assist exiles in a regime change as it had in Guatemala in 1954, and (2) the assumption that the indigenous population would rise up against Castro with the spark of the in¬ vasion because it was only supporting him out of fear or opportunism. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (1972: 40), argues that “the sense of group unity con¬ cerning the advisability of going ahead with the CIA’s invasion plan appears to have been based on superficial appearances of complete concurrence, achieved at the cost of self-censorship of misgivings by several members.” Elite cohesion created a form of “groupthink,” leading to a domestic and international fiasco. Elite beliefs are also important for understanding the Cuban missile crisis.3 According to Jervis (1976: 34-35), “Kennedy assumed that the Russians were willing to run high risks to expand their influence in an area of only marginal importance to them. If their future behavior was consistent with this action, they would then be much more aggressive in places and on issues in which their concern (or, to be more exact, the excess of their concern over our concern) was greater.” Janis (1972: 157) examined the use of analogies by governmental and nongovernmental elites during discussions in the so-called Ex Comm group formed as an adjunct to the National Security Council (NSC) during the missile crisis. He noted “wise man” Dean Acheson’s citation of the Monroe Doctrine as a justification for any suitable action if the missiles were determined to be a national security threat (i.e., introduced by a great power from outside the West¬ ern Hemisphere). Moreover, Janis (1972: 157) noted President Kennedy’s fix¬ ation on the lessons of 1914—that inadvertent escalation can lead to global war—which was based on his recent perusal of Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1963). Thus, elites inside and outside government relied on historical parallels for their reasoning in making policy. Nixon and Chile. The second case study is the Nixon administration’s in-

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volvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. The Chilean case warrants inclusion because of its unique focus on a South American nation rather than a Caribbean or Central American one. Pastor (1992: 195) aptly character¬ ized the impact of Nixon’s belief system on Latin American policy by noting, “President Richard Nixon paid attention to only two Latin American issues: Soviet naval facilities in Cuba and the election of a Marxist president in Chile [because he was a ‘classic realist’]”. The Nixon policy largely stemmed from the elevation of security over human rights in the hierarchy of values held by Henry Kissinger. Schoultz (1981: 112) observes, “Overall, the message from the Secretary of State to his diplomats was that human rights, while deserving of greater attention, should not distract foreign policy officials from the pursuit of their more traditional national security interests.” Martz (1988: 323) argues that the motivating factor was more ideology than a sincere concern for U.S. security. According to Martz, “The very idea [of an elected Marxist in Chile] seemed insulting to North American officials, produc¬ ing such sentiments as the demand that the United States make the Chilean economy ‘scream.’ The Secretary of State explicitly stated that Washington’s duty was to correct the misguided or naive electoral choice of the Chilean cit¬ izenry.” Whether as a result of true fears that the Chilean government would become a Soviet client in the global balance of power or of the ideological repulsiveness of its inclusion of Communists, U.S. elites in the Nixon era worked to rid Chile of Allende. The degree of complicity of the United States in the overthrow of Allende is, of course, the subject of bitter debate. Elizabeth Farnsworth, ‘ ‘More Than Ad¬ mitted” (1974: 134-135), makes the case that U.S. elites in the government and the banking and business communities collaborated to prevent Allende from taking power and, once he was in power, collaborated to destabilize his gov¬ ernment. With the instrument of an “invisible blockade” on credit, Farnsworth claims American elites sought to cause capital flight from Chile via the mach¬ inations of the ITT corporation, the Eximbank, the World Bank, and the IDB. This policy was based on the perception that Allende’s Unidad Popular coalition threatened American security and business interests. Interlocking elites in and out of government shaped the Nixon policy which on the margins contributed to the ouster of Allende. Carter and Human Rights. The Carter administration’s focus on human rights throughout the world, but especially in the Western Hemisphere, is another case that illustrates the role of elite values in foreign policy. That policy ranged from rhetoric to specific programs, such as the one Shafer (1988: 96) highlights, exposing Latin American military officers to U.S. officers to inculcate a vision of the role of the military in a stable democracy (the International Military Education and Training program). Schoultz (1981: 27) contends that it was indeed the beliefs of elites rather than the public at large which drove the Carter human rights policy. Muravchik (1986: 1) identifies the source of Carter’s focus on human rights in a moral rather than an operationalized political ideology.

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According to Lowenthal (1983: 312), “The Carter administration moved force¬ fully to show its concern with protecting fundamental human rights, to try to disassociate the United States from authoritarian repression, and to build closer relations with the region’s democratic forces.” Hence, these scholars character¬ ize the Carter policy as a clear departure from the security prism of the earlier Cold War years engineered by a new set of elites with a new set of values. Still, other scholars identify continuities between the Carter approach and previous policy. Pastor (1987), who was charged with the Latin American port¬ folio on Carter’s National Security Council, stressed the traditional security di¬ mension as a component of the Carter approach. Anthony Lake, on the State Department Policy Planning staff in the Carter era, Somoza Falling (1989), also notes how a concern with human rights was not as much of a departure as critics of the administration held. Cottam (1992: 135) asserts that the human rights policy revealed continuities between the Carter worldview and similar images held by earlier administrations—such as the Kennedy administration’s view of the Alliance for Progress. Cottam’s article examines Carter’s policy toward Nicaragua, which serves as a particularly useful window to view the impact of elite beliefs in that era. Cottam pinpointed three “perceptual groups” within the elite coalition in the Carter administration: “traditional Cold Warriors,” “modified Cold Warriors” who sought to achieve containment through new tactics, and the “human rights group” who rejected containment. She explores how dependent various U.S. elites believed the Latin Americans were on the United States for models of democracy and human rights. Traditional Cold Warriors saw the Latin Ameri¬ cans as children; the modified Cold Warriors saw them as teenagers in need of benign guidance; and the human rights advocates saw them more or less as adults or equals to Americans. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (1980: 910), makes a similar point, arguing that widely accepted negative stereotypes of Latin Americans have tended to guide U.S. policy. Thus, the pulling and hauling process between elite groupings—Cold Warriors and human rights advocates— has helped to shape U.S. policy toward Latin America. Cottam (1992: 135) argues that metaphors and stereotypes in the minds of elites ordered their respective perceptions of policy options. The competition between these elite groupings explains the U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. Pastor (1992: 60) asserts, “As seen in the Nicaragua case, the Carter Administration shifted its emphasis from human rights to a traditional security agenda: war, revolution, instability in the Caribbean basin, and Soviet-Cuban expansion.” Cottam (1992: 146) explains this shift in the Nicaragua policy not in terms of the relative strength of her three elite groupings, but more in terms of policy made by the consistently dominant middle group—those who sought to pursue containment “by other means.” The shift from supporting the removal of Anastasio Somoza to a cutoff of aid to the FSLN government did not result from a change in the balance between elite groups but the muddling through of one group which was essentially in charge, the “modified Cold Warriors.”

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Reagan and Central America. The problem of the U.S. relationship with Nic¬ aragua leads, of course, to the fourth case stressed in the literature on elite beliefs—namely Reagan administration policy in Central America. Here the traditional cold warriors” in Cottam’s formulation came to dominate the elite coalition shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America. Rubin, ‘‘Reagan Admin¬ istration Policymaking and Central America” (1984), notes a battle between ‘‘hard-liners” and ‘‘pragmatists” in the administration, in which the former asserted control over Central American policy by 1983. The Reagan adminis¬ tration was indeed uncommonly focused on Central America. Ullman (1983: 43) points out that the concern of governing elites in the Reagan era focused on ‘‘the Sandinistas as carriers of a revolutionary virus that came from the Soviet Union by way of Cuba, and with which they will surely attempt to infect the rest of Central America.” This perceptual filter helps to explain the Reagan administration policy of simultaneously aiding counterinsurgency efforts by the government in El Salvador and the contra war against the Sandinistas. The aid the United States offered to El Salvador was aimed at bolstering an ally to resist the efforts made by the Soviet Union through Cuba and Nicaragua to sponsor the FMLN’s quest for revolutionary change. Initially justified by Moore (1987) and others as a policy to divert Sandinista resources from their effort to export revolution to El Salvador, the Reagan administration’s aid to the insurgents sought to unseat the FSLN government in Managua. Schoultz (1987: 270) explains the Reagan administration policy in terms of elite perceptions of a zero-sum East-West competition perceived by elites: ‘‘With all sincerity they held that the global balance of power was at stake in Central America. The U.S. loss of Central America would cause a dangerous, perhaps uncorrectable tilt in favor of the Soviet Union.” Feinberg (1987: 146) has written that given the ends determined by this image of a zero-sum struggle with the Soviet Union, the means used by the administration were chosen ac¬ cordingly. To assist Third World clients in the Cold War best, the Reagan elite coalition preferred military aid to economic aid, and bilateral aid to multilateral aid. Shafer (1988: 96) observed that this emphasis on military aid was so pro¬ nounced that the administration pressed Congress to grant exceptions to the proscription of aid to internal police forces in Central America. A contentious debate about the Reagan administration’s commitment to de¬ mocratization in the region is evident in the literature. Wiarda (1990: 133) argues that Reagan’s pursuit of democratization as a tool to combat communism did not invalidate the true concern of elites with policies designed to promote de¬ mocracy. In contrast, Lowenthal, Exporting Democracy (1991), and Carothers, In the Name of Democracy (1992), are more skeptical about the sincerity of elites in the Reagan coalition about promoting political pluralism and even more skeptical about their actual causal impact on the wave of democratization in the region in the 1980s. Carothers (1992: 4) stresses the point that “the resurgence of democracy in Latin America” is not the result of strongly stated democracy rhetoric in shaping U.S. policy.

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The Post-Cold War Era There are now a few studies that provide clues to the role of elite values and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America since the end of the Cold War. The key to understanding the role of elite values is to see how the landscape of elite debates has been altered since the Cold War ended. In writing about the break¬ down of consensus among elites after the Vietnam War, Holsti and Rosenau (1979: 56) write: “It may well take some dramatic international developments— on the scale of another Pearl Harbor or Vietnam—to bring about rapid convergence of a new set of unifying beliefs about international relations and American foreign policy.” Clearly, the demise of the Cold War and indeed of the Soviet empire (including Third World clients. Eastern European satellites, and non-Russian republics in the former USSR) is a sufficiently dramatic set of developments to reorient elite beliefs. Krauthammer (1989-1990: 47) suggests that a broad form of internationalism crossing the now meaningless chasm be¬ tween the “left” and “right” may evolve into the basis for a new elite con¬ sensus now that “Communism is a spent force.” Others are more certain that the end of the Cold War will only further fissure the consensus among elites about America’s role in the world. Lagon, “In the Eye of the Beholder” (1994), notes a breakdown of elites into six distinct cat¬ egories (“market internationalists,” “market pragmatists,” “libertarians,” “in¬ terventionists,” “mercantilists,” and “autarkists”) caused by the end of the Cold War. This breakdown will result in cross-cutting cleavages and tactical alliances on discrete issues. For instance, in Lagon’s formulation, “market in¬ ternationalists,” “market pragmatists,” and “libertarians” would support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while the other groups would not. “Market internationalists” and “interventionists” would welcome the use of force in Latin America, “market pragmatists” and “mercantilists” would evaluate proposals for military intervention on an ad hoc basis, and “libertari¬ ans” and “autarkists” would consistently oppose military action in the region. These cross-cutting cleavages promote the impression of a chaotic dealignment of elite values and mask the actual “complex realignment” of elite values into six groups, replacing “left” and “right” as alternatives in a unilinear spectrum. Whether the end of the Cold War forges a new consensus among elites or further splinters elite views, it is clear that elite values continue to influence American policy in the region, especially at the doctrinal level. The broad ap¬ proach to the region in a new era has not been fully determined. On the one hand, the approach may be one of “benign neglect.” As Fauriol, “The Shadow of Latin American Affairs” (1989-1990: 117), observes, in its first year, the Bush administration tried to “put Latin American affairs on the back burner,” where it belonged after the Cold War, in its view. Nonetheless, it was the Bush administration itself which put together the first building blocks of more Amer¬ ican involvement in the region. The creation of a hemispheric free trade zone as an extension of the North American Free Trade Area could serve as the

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foundation for a new “benign engagement’’ in the region. Especially with the growing concern over a German-led European trade bloc and a Japanese-led East Asian trade bloc, numerous scholars predict the possibility of American retrenchment into regionalism: creating an inter-American bloc as a counter¬ weight. The authors of Oye et al., Eagle in a New World (1991), discuss this possibility in several regional and functional essays, including one on Latin America by Pastor. Bouzas, “U.S.-Latin American Trade Relations” (1992: 171), predicts that a “regional approach reinvigorated in the 1980’s” may spur on the creation of such a bloc. Lowenthal, “U.S. Policy Toward Latin America” (1993), also states that retrenchment into a regional bloc is a distinct possibility. On the level of policy in practice, American diplomatic, economic, and in¬ tervention policies are changing direction. Diplomacy is removing some of the patron-client dynamics which Gasiorowski (1986) observed in inter-American relations in the Cold War era. As Lowenthal (1993: 363) writes, “There is a drift away from the historical Washington-based ‘hegemonic presumption’ de¬ rived from U.S. political and economic formidability.” Just how much an image of a patron-client relationship in the minds of elites continues to inform Amer¬ ican diplomacy—as a legacy of the American historical role in the region even before the Cold War—remains to be seen. As for economic policy, NAFTA may represent the wave of the future in two ways. First, the passage of NAFTA is now being considered on a hemispheric basis. According to the Clinton administration, Chile is being discussed as an early candidate to join an inter-American free trade area. Second, as Pastor (1992) argues, NAFTA establishes a precedent for a policy of trade over aid because trade (1) serves American interests as well as those of other nations in the hemisphere, and (2) will be a more effective tool for development in Latin America. Both of these propositions flow from the beliefs of elites. The first is derived from the American idea that American interests and those of other nations are not mutually exclusive. For instance, Pastor (1992: 285) noted, “When it doubled its exports to Mexico between 1986 and 1990 (from $12 to 28 billion), the United States created 320,000 jobs.” The second proposition flows from the common liberal vision among American elites of free market economics and free trade as the path to a “growing pie” or positive-sum game. Finally, it is not clear how elite beliefs will affect the future frequency or justifications for U.S. intervention in Latin America, now that ideological com¬ petition and superpower conflict are gone. The American invasion of Panama and discussion of intervention in Haiti have been justified in terms of promoting democracy. But as Pastor (1992: 93) notes, the invasion of Panama stemmed largely from President Bush’s feeling that Noriega “was thumbing his nose at him.” Moreover, a failure to invade Haiti when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was first ousted demonstrates that it will take more than promoting democracy to con¬ vince elites to push for intervention. However, for justifying intervention, pro¬ moting democracy may be a necessary condition in the minds of elites, but not a sufficient one. Lowenthal (1993: 360) aptly observes, “The United States, in

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short, may find itself in the 1990’s freer to intervene in Latin America but less motivated to do so than in recent decades.”

LOOKING AHEAD AT ELITE VALUES IN A POST-COLD WAR WORLD Given that the conflict between values was resolved in favor of the security prism during the Cold War, how will they be resolved in a post-Cold War era? The hypothesis that one prism will prevail over others seems less plausible than the aforementioned alternative hypotheses that (1) all three prisms will be pur¬ sued concurrently given their compatible values, (2) elites in power will win temporary domestic victories for their favored value systems, and (3) issues will be resolved case-by-case in an ad hoc manner. Without the Cold War context, all three prisms are likely to be equal contenders to influence policy. Their respective values will be more compatible in a post-Cold War era: victories will be more temporary in what Lagon (1994a) observes will be a system of increas¬ ingly fissured elite worldviews, and as Feinberg and Boylan (1991) assert, with¬ out an overwhelming reason to stress one prism, policy will tend to be solved one issue at a time through a paradigm of what they call ‘ ‘modular multilater¬ alism.” Many scholars and analysts have been critical of the Cold War paradigm shaping elite thinking on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America from the 1950s through the 1980s. However, that era did have the virtue of at least having an ordering principle—a hierarchy of values with the security prism prevailing. Schoultz (1990) goes further in declaring that the late 1980s jettisoned not only the Cold War paradigm dating from the 1950s, but the whole “strategic denial” that had conditioned elite beliefs for the past 180 years. The post-Cold War era will benefit from the removal of an overly rigid strategic logic, but no imminent replacement is apparent on the horizon to guide contemporary policy. A coherent agenda is unlikely to be pursued by U.S. elites without a clear new hierarchy of values to replace the Cold War era’s hierarchy. Pastor and others hope the economic prism or the political prism will top the list of elites’ priorities in the future, but right now no such clear new hierarchy has materialized. Moreover, a change in the values of elites is compounded by changes in the makeup of the elites in the policymaking process. Schoultz (1990: 14-15), for example, argues that the traditional structure of elites shaping policy toward Latin America is being altered by a democratized process and by the rising power of a liberal counterelite which has institutionalized itself in the form of interest groups, control of the academy in the Latin America field, and a rising voice of human rights concerns resonating in the American mass culture. The interest in elite values in the study of U.S. policy toward Latin America will no doubt continue into the future. Those involved in this subject of inves¬ tigation should not mistake a fractionated array of belief systems among elites

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or a replacement of traditional elites by new ones as evidence that those belief systems are no longer important determinants of policy. Future scholarship should be devoted to (1) the impact of the fractionated set of values among elites on the U.S. role in the Western Hemisphere, and (2) anticipation of that future juncture in which a new hierarchy of perceptual prisms crystallize in elite circles, should it come to pass. This is an important research agenda for under¬ standing the Latin American policy of the United States, but it is still in its infancy.

NOTES I am grateful to Liliana Briseno, Edward Lee, and Jeffrey Moran for their assistance in completing this essay. In addition to valuable research, they offered useful substantive suggestions. 1. This chapter will refer to “elite values,” “elite beliefs,” “elite attitudes,” and “elite ideology” because the terminology used in the literature varies. Despite the subtly different connotations of these terms, they all refer to the ideas which motivate elites as they influence U.S. policymaking toward Latin America. 2. This estimate of funds is based on Agency for International Development statistics cited in Robert Pastor, Whirlpool (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 182. 3. Some would argue that the Cuban missile crisis is misleading as a case study. See, for instance, Eliot A. Cohen, “Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis,” The National Interest (Winter 1985-1986): 3-13.

REFERENCES Adler, Emanuel, and Peter M. Haas. 1992. “Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program.” International Or¬ ganization 46, no. 1: 367-390. Alden, Edward H., and Franz Schurmann. 1990. “Why We Need Ideologies in American Foreign Policy.” Policy Papers in International Affairs. No. 37. Berkeley: Uni¬ versity of California. Allison, Graham. 1971. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bos¬ ton: Little, Brown. Allison, Graham T., and Morton H. Halperin. 1972. “Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications.” World Politics 24: 40-80. Almond, Gabriel A. 1960. The American People and Foreign Policy. New York: Praeger. Ashby, Timothy. 1987. The Bear in the Back Yard: Moscow’s Caribbean Strategy. Lex¬ ington, Mass.: Lexington Books. Bachrach, Peter. 1967. The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique. Boston: Little, Brown. Blasier, Cole. 1985. The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1910-1985. Second Edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Bodenheimer, Thomas, and Robert Gould. 1989. Rollback! Right-Wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy. Boston: South End Press. Bottomore, T. B. 1964. Elites and Society. New York: Basic Books. Bouzas, Roberto. 1992. “U.S.-Latin American Trade Relations.” In Jonathan Hartlyn, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds. The United States and Latin America in the 1990's: Beyond the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Burch, Philip H., Jr. 1980. Elites in American History: The New Deal to the Carter Administration. New York: Holmes and Meier. Burgess, Philip M. 1967. Elite Images and Foreign Policy Outcomes. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Carothers, Thomas. 1991. In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years. Berkeley: University of California Press. Christian, Shirley. 1985. Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family. New York: Random House. Cobbs, Elizabeth A. 1991. ‘‘U.S. Business: Self-Interest and Neutrality.” In Abraham F. Lowenthal, ed. Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America: Themes and Issues. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cohen, Eliot. 1985-1986. ‘‘Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis.” The National Interest 2: 3-13. Cottam, Martha L. 1992. ‘‘The Carter Administration’s Policy toward Nicaragua.” Po¬ litical Science Quarterly 107, no. 1: 123-146. Crabb, Cecil V., Jr. 1982. The Doctrines of American Foreign Policy: Their Meaning, Role, and Future. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press. Dallek, Robert. 1984. “Symbolic Politics and Foreign Affairs: Past and Present.” SA1S Review 4, no. 2: 1-12. Dallin, Alexander, and Gail W. Lapidus. 1987. “Reagan and the Russians: American Policy Toward the Soviet Union.” Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild, eds. Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy. Boston: Little, Brown. De Rivera, Joseph. 1968. The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill. Etheridge, Lloyd. 1978. A World of Men: The Private Sources of American Foreign Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Eulau, Heinz. 1963. The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics. New York: Random House. Falcoff, Mark. 1984. “The Apple of Discord, Central America in U.S. Domestic Poli¬ tics.” In Howard J. Wiarda, ed. Rift and Revolution: The Central American Im¬ broglio. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press. Falcoff, Mark, and Robert Royal, eds. 1987. The Continuing Crisis: U.S. Policy in Cen¬ tral America and the Caribbean. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center. Farnsworth, Elizabeth. 1974. “More than Admitted.” Foreign Policy no. 16: 127-141. Fauriol, Georges A. 1989-1990. “The Shadow of Latin American Affairs.” Foreign Affairs 69, no. 1: 116-134. Feinberg, Richard E. 1987. “American Power and Third World Economies.” In Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild, eds. Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy. Boston: Little, Brown. Feinberg, Richard E., and Delia Boylan. 1991. “Modular Multilateralism.” 1991. In

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Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild, eds. Eagle in a New World. New York: Harper/Collins. Fulbright, J. William. 1966. “The Two Americas.” Lecture delivered at the Ninth Annual Brien McMahon Lecture, at the University of Connecticut, March 22. Gasiorowski, Mark 1986. “Dependency and Cliency in Latin America.” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 28, no. 3 (Fall): 47-66. v George, Alexander L. 1980. Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effec¬ tive Use of Information and Advice. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. -. 1979. “The Causal Nexus between Cognitive Beliefs and Decision-Making Be¬ havior: The ‘Operational Code’ Belief System.” In Lawrence F. Falkowski, ed. Psychological Models and International Politics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. -. 1969. “The Operational Code: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making.” International Studies Quarterly 13: 190-222. Gil, Federico G. 1971. Latin American-United States Relations. New York: Harcourt Brace. Gleijeses, Piers. 1984. “Nicaragua: Resist Romanticism.” Foreign Policy no. 54: 122138. Green, Philip. 1966. “Necessity and Choice in Foreign Policy.” In A Dissenter’s Guide to Foreign Policy. New York: Praeger. Greenstein, Fred I. 1987. Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization. Second Edition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gutman, Roy. 1988. Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua, 1981-1987. New York: Simon and Schuster. Haas, Peter M. 1992. “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46, no. 1: 1-35. Hartlyn, Jonathan, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds. 1992. The United States and Latin America in the 1990’s: Beyond the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hatcher, Patrick Lloyd. 1990. The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Hermann, Margaret G. 1976. “Foreign Policy Viewed Cognitively.” In Robert Axelrod, ed. The Structure of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. -. 1974a. “Effects of Leader Personality on National Foreign Policy Behavior.” In James N. Rosenau, ed. Comparing Foreign Policies. New York: Halsted Press. -. 1974b. “The Study of International Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows: Theories of the Radical Right and Left.” American Political Science Review 68: 217-242. -. 1967. “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy.” In David J. Finlay, Ole R. Holsti, and Richard R. Fagen, eds. Enemies and Politics. Chicago: RandMcNally. Hilsman, Roger. 1987. The Politics of Policy Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs: Conceptual Models and Bureaucratic Politics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall. Holsti, Ole R., and James N. Rosenau. 1984. American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus. Boston: Allen and Unwin. -. 1979. “Vietnam, Consensus, and the Belief Systems of American Leaders.” World Politics 32, no 1: 1-56.

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Hughes, Barry. 1978. The Domestic Context of American Foreign Policy. San Francisco, Calif.: W. H. Freeman. Humes, James C. 1992. My Fellow Americans: Presidential Addresses That Shaped His¬ tory. New York: Praeger. Hunt, Michael H. 1987. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Ikl6, Fred. 1987. “Toward Victory.” In Robert S. Leiken and Barry Rubin, eds. The Central American Crisis Reader. New York: Simon and Schuster. Janis, Irving L. 1972. Victims of Group think: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jervis, Robert. 1976. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. -. 1970. The Logic of Images in International Relations. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Johnson, John J. 1980. Latin America in Caricature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. 1990. “A Normal Country in a Normal Time.” The National In¬ terest 21: 40-42. -. 1982a. “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” In Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster. -. 1982b. “U.S. Security and Latin America.” In Dictatorships and Double Stan¬ dards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster. Klineberg, Otto. 1964. The Human Dimension of International Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Klingberg, Frank L. 1952. “The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy.” World Politics 4: 239-273. Knutson, Jeanne N. 1972. The Human Basis of the Polity: Psychological Study of Po¬ litical Men. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. Krasner, Stephen D. 1978. Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Krauthammer, Charles. 1989-1990. “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar Mo¬ ment.” The National Interest 18: 46-49. Kristol, Irving. 1967. “American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 45, no. 4 (July). Lagon, Mark P. 1994a. “In the Eye of the Beholder: Realignment of American Elite Beliefs after the Cold War.” Perspectives on Political Science 23, no. 2. -. 1994b. The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War’s Last Chapter. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. Lake, W. Anthony. 1989. Somoza Falling: A Case Study of Washington at Work. Am¬ herst: University of Massachusetts Press. Larson, Deborah W. 1984. “The Open Door for Reagan.” SAIS Review 4, no. 2. Lasswell, Harold D. 1965. World Politics and Personal Insecurity. New York: Free Press. -. 1930. Psychopathology and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leiken, Robert S., ed. 1984. Central America: Anatomy of Conflict. New York: Pergamon Press. Little, Richard, and Steve Smith, eds. 1988. Belief Systems and International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Lowenthal, Abraham F. 1993. “U.S. Policy toward Latin America.” In Robert J. Art and Seyom Brown, eds. U.S. Foreign Policy: The Search for a New Role. New York: Macmillan. -. 1983a. “Changing the Agenda.” Foreign Policy 52: 68-77. -. 1983b. “Ronald Reagan and Latin America: Coping with Hegemony in De¬ cline.” In Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild, eds. Eagle Defiant: United States Foreign Policy in the 1980’s. Boston: Little, Brown. -. 1972. The Dominican Intervention. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. -. ed. 1991. Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America. Themes and Issues. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Martz, John D. 1988. “Images, Intervention, and the Cause of Democracy.” In John D. Martz, ed. United States Policy in Latin America: A Quarter Century of Crisis and Challenge, 1961-1986. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. May, Ernest R. 1973. “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. McLellan, David. 1971. “The ‘Operational Code’ Approach to the Study of Political Leaders: Dean Acheson’s Philosophical and Instrumental Beliefs.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 4: 52-75. Mennis, Bernard. 1972. American Foreign Policy Officials: Who They Are and What They Believe Regarding International Politics. Columbus: Ohio University Press. Moore, John Norton. 1987. The Secret War in Central America: Sandinista Assault on World Order. Frederick, Md.: University Press of America. Muravchik, Joshua. 1986-1987. “The Nicaraguan Debate.” Foreign Affairs 65, no. 2: 366-382. -. 1986. The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute. National Bipartisan Commission on Central America. 1984. Report of the National Bi¬ partisan Commission On Central America. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. 1986. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers. New York: Free Press, 1986. Oldendick, Robert W., and Barbara A. Bardes. 1981. “Belief Structures and Foreign Policy Opinions: Comparing the Dimensions of Elite and Mass Opinions.” Social Science Quarterly 62: 432—442. Osgood, Robert E. 1953. Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations. Chi¬ cago: University of Chicago Press. Osgood, Robert E„ et al. 1981. Containment, Soviet Behavior and Grand Strategy. Berke¬ ley, Calif.: Institute of International Studies. Oye, Kenneth A., Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild, eds. 1991. Eagle in a New World. New York: HarperCollins. Packenham, Robert A. 1973. Liberal America and the Third World: Political Develop¬ ment Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni¬ versity Press. Pardo-Maurer, R. 1990. The Contras, 1980-1989: A Special Kind of Politics. New York: Praeger. Pastor, Robert A. 1992. Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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-. 1987a. Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. -. 1987b. “The Reagan Administration and Latin America: Eagle Insurgent?” In Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild, eds. Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy. Boston: Little, Brown. Petras, James F., and Robert La Porte. 1972. “Can We Do Business with Radical Na¬ tionalists?” Foreign Policy 7: 132-158. Plischke, Elmer. 1991. Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy: Documents and Commentary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Putnam, Robert D. 1976. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. -. 1973. The Beliefs of Politicians: Ideology, Conflict, and Democracy in Britain and Italy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Quester, George H. 1982. American Foreign Policy: The Lost Consensus. New York: Praeger. Ricci, David. 1993. The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Rosati, Jerel A. 1987. The Carter Administration’s Quest for Global Community: Beliefs and Their Impact on Behavior. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. -. 1984. “The Impact of Beliefs on Behavior: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration.” In Donald Sylvan and Steven Chan, eds. Foreign Policy De¬ cision-Making: Perception, Cognition and Artificial Intelligence. New York: Prae¬ ger. Rosenau, James N. 1963. National Leadership and Foreign Policy: A Case Study in the Mobilization of Public Support. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Rostow, W. W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, Barry. 1984. “Reagan Administration Policymaking and Central America.” In Robert S. Leiken, ed. Central America: Anatomy of Conflict. New York: Pergamon Press. Rustow, Dankwart. 1966. “The Study of Elites: Who’s Who When and How.” World Politics 18, no. 4: 690-716. Schlesinger, Stephen C., and Stephen Kinzer. 1982. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Schoultz, Lars. 1990. “Inter-American Security: The Changing Perceptions of U.S. Pol¬ icy Makers.” Paper for the Working Group of the LAS A Task Force on Scholarly Relations with Cuba. -. 1987. National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America. Prince¬ ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. -. 1981. Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Shafer, D. Michael. 1988. Deadly Paradigms. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sigmund, Paul E. 1974. “Less than Charged.” Foreign Policy 16: 142-156. Smith, James Allen. 1991. The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite. New York: Free Press. Smith, Wayne. 1987. The Closest of Enemies. New York: W. W. Norton. Stoessinger, John G. 1979. Crusaders and Pragmatists: Movers of Modem American Foreign Policy. New York: W. W. Norton.

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6

_

Think Tanks Howard J. Wiarda

Think tanks have become major new actors in the formulation and execution of U.S. foreign policy. The proliferation of policy-oriented think tanks in Wash¬ ington, D.C., is a relatively new development—largely the result of a confluence of factors over the past thirty years. Smith, The Idea Brokers (1991: 23), charts the emergence and growing influence of think tanks, calling them “the new policy elite,” but also noting the relative absence of serious scholarship on the nexus between think tanks and foreign policy. Watson, U.S. National Security Policy Groups (1990), provides institutional profiles of 135 nongovernmental public interest groups that expanded dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s, noting the growth of think tanks and their role in the national debate over defense and security policy. Despite the paucity of academic literature on the subject, it can be argued that with the acceleration of funding for think tanks in the 1980s, these nongovernmental organizations have become important com¬ ponents of the policymaking process. Wiarda’s Foreign Policy Without Illusion (1990: 176) provides a general treatment of the role of think tanks and foreign policy, arguing that private power has shifted from the more ideologically cen¬ trist Council on Foreign Relations in New York to a newer generation of more ideological and politicized scholars and academic professionals working in think tanks in the nation’s capital. The ascendancy of think tanks is related to five factors that constitute potential agents of change in the American polity. The first and most obvious of these is the increasing need for, and use of, experts in all realms of U.S. policymaking. Global television has generated a demand for “electronic experts” to provide legitimacy to network interpretation of fast-breaking news stories. Second, the increased routinization and bureaucratization of American politics and the ac¬ companying paralysis and “gridlock” have led policymakers to turn to private think tanks as a way of cutting through the multiple layers of official bureauc¬ racy. Third, the perceived absence of new or innovative ideas in the public

Think Tanks

97

bureaucracy and the difficulty of getting them accepted have also contributed to the growth of think tanks. As private agencies, think tanks can funnel ideas to policymakers in a matter of days (hours, or minutes with FAX machines) as compared with months (or longer) in the large public bureaucracies in Wash¬ ington. Fourth, the rise of think tanks is also due to the fact that they are part of a broader trend toward direct representation in the foreign policymaking pro¬ cess. It is easier and more effective to affect policy through think tanks, political action committees (PACs), the media, or interest groups rather than through the more common political intermediaries such as parties, elections, or Congress. Lastly, the growth of think tanks parallels the trend toward the privatization of public functions (government contracts with private groups now total a stag¬ gering $103 billion), in which the think tanks and other agencies have become a key part of what is sometimes called the “shadow government” of the une¬ lected. Snow and Brown, Puzzle Palaces and Foggy Bottom (1994: 182-184), also discuss the major reasons for the increasing impact of think tanks on U.S. foreign policy. Think tanks are the new powerhouses of policy, aggressively and skillfully disseminating their views to key governmental actors, the media, and the public to influence the policymaking process. Over the past several years, a number of studies of think tank influence on government policymaking have emerged: George, Presidential Decision-Making in Foreign Policy (1980); Guttman and Wilner, The Shadow Government (1976); Peschek, Policy-Planning Organiza¬ tions (1987); and Weiss, Organizations for Policy Analysis (1992). After re¬ viewing the definitional problems and the historical evolution of think tanks, we will turn to a more detailed examination of the role of the major think tanks and their Latin America programs, and specialized Latin America-focused think tanks, in the formulation and implementation of U.S.-Latin American policy.

THINK TANKS: DEFINITIONS AND FUNCTIONS The contours of think tanks vary in size, function, political orientation, and policy effectiveness. One of the early studies to examine the nature of think tanks is Dickson, Think Tanks (1971); more recent studies of the complexity of think tanks include Steward, Think Tanks (1987); Weaver, “The Changing World of Think Tanks” (1989); and Smith (1991). The National Journal (1990: 3010ff.) lists three hundred think tanks and interest associations. Smith (1991) found about one thousand think tanks spread throughout the United States. Only a handful of think tanks are large and have several score researchers. The ma¬ jority think tanks are small, having only a few professional scholars, and many others are so tiny they consist of only one or two persons plus a post office box. Think tank budgets also vary widely, from approximately $18 million for the larger ones such as the Brookings and Hoover institutions, to $l-$3 million for smaller (fifteen to twenty person staffs) ones, such as the Foreign Policy Research Institute, to only a couple hundred thousand for those of the post-

98

The U.S. Domestic Environment

office-box variety. The Foundation for Public Affairs, Public Interest Profiles, 1992/93 (1992), includes a chapter on think tanks that contains lengthy organ¬ izational profiles—including current budgets—for thirty Washington organiza¬ tions, some of which focus on U.S. Latin American policy. Watson’s (1990) treatment of national security policy groups is well organized and bountiful, but the focus is on national security, not Latin America. Multipurpose think tanks—the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—concerned with U.S. foreign policy are usually organized so that Latin America is only one part of a larger foreign policy program. They are generally older, better established, and well funded and possess greater access to the corridors of power in Washington. The newer, more specialized think tanks that concentrate exclusively on Latin American policy issues have had to struggle for adequate funding and political influence. The smaller ones, such as the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies, tend to come and go depending on the fickle nature of the Washington public policy community, which assigns Latin America a high priority during some periods and a low priority during others, rising and falling depending on how much the region matters to the policy elite in Washington. Think tanks can also vary in their type of research, degree of independence of the U.S. government, and partisan affiliation. Weaver (1989: 564-567) ex¬ amines three kinds of think tanks: (1) studentless universities, (2) contract re¬ search organizations, and (3) advocacy tanks. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) would fit into the first category. These are entirely private, nongovern¬ mental organizations. Others such as the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) are official government-sponsored “tanks.” The RAND Corporation, as illustrated in Smith’s classic study. The Rand Corporation (1966), is an example of the second category; originally founded as an Air Force think tank, it has grown more independent and now has a somewhat murky organizational status between private and public. The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is known for its cen¬ trist orientation within the Democratic party and gained attention for the policy ideas it generated for the presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. The Her¬ itage Foundation represents the advocacy tank category with a strong policy or ideological bent combined with zealous salesmanship designed to influence pol¬ icy debates. Heritage also carried the distinction during the 1980s of being Pres¬ ident Reagan’s favorite think tank, although he also appointed a large number of representatives from AEI and the Hoover Institution in California. As a result of the kaleidoscopic nature of today’s think tanks, it is difficult to find a precise definition that covers such diverse organizations. Our definitional problem is made easier if we say what think tanks are not. Unlike universities, think tanks have no students (although many have student interns); they do not offer courses for credit (although they frequently hold seminars and conferences); and they do not attempt to cover all scholarly fields, instead concentrating primarily on a few public policy issues. Although most think tanks have political points of view, they are not like political parties and

Think Tanks

99

they usually avoid the appearance of excessive partisanship, since their taxexempt status bars them from overt political activities.1 Nor are think tanks like foundations: they rarely give away any money except to contracted scholars; in fact, they try themselves to raise money for their projects from other sources. Think tanks are not companies or corporations: while they have a product to “sell”—their research reports and other publications—they are not profit¬ making organizations. Think tanks are different from interest groups in that their primary activity is research, not lobbying—although it needs to be said that some think tanks do engage in lobbying and at times join in coalition with other nongovernmental organizations involved with Latin American policy issues. Fi¬ nally, some interest groups such as FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform)—a restrictionist segment of the immigration lobby—have found it ad¬ vantageous to form their own think tank such as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Building on these preliminaries, think tanks may now be defined as research organizations that have as their primary purpose public policy analysis and influence. The most important think tanks, for example, Brookings, AEI, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), are headquartered or have major offices in Washington, D.C.; others such as the RAND Corporation, the Hoover Institution, and the Hudson Institute are centered elsewhere in the country but all have branch offices in Washington. Washington is where most of the national public policy action is, especially in the area of foreign policy, and having a base there means a think tank can more effectively influence the outcome of the policy debate. Most of the think tanks concentrated historically on domestic economic, social, and political issues; however, with a greater con¬ vergence of domestic and international issues, the larger think tanks and some of the specialized ones as well have developed an interest in foreign and national security policy. Think tank scholars most often have advanced degrees, but, unlike in uni¬ versities, this is not necessarily a prerequisite for appointment. Many think tanks also have non-Ph.D. journalists, lawyers, speech writers, former ambassadors, and policy specialists among their ranks. The diversity of personnel involved in think tank research and analysis tends to present a greater plurality of view¬ points, approaches, and perspectives than is true of most university political science or economics departments, which are rarely multidisciplinary in their approach to policy issues. In a collegial atmosphere that emphasizes both indi¬ vidual and group research, think tank writers can draw upon both their own research as well as the ideas of their colleagues in analyzing public policy issues. Some scholars are associated with several think tanks at the same time. Jeane Kirkpatrick, for example, is an adjunct scholar or board member of six major think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Think tanks function as generators of information and ideas for the govern¬ ment, helping to define the issues and set the public policy agenda in an era of

100

The U.S. Domestic Environment

scarce resources. Neither the White House, the Congress, nor the policymaking departments within the Executive branch have the requisite time, freedom, or specialized knowledge to do the background research, explore the options, and make policy recommendations as the think tanks can. By hosting conferences in which think tanks are able to tap the ideas of other leading scholars, research analysts are then able to put the ideas of a number of academic scholars in reports that are readable, understandable, and usable to the foreign policy com¬ munity. What this means is that think tanks pay less attention to models and theories and more attention to specific, practical solutions to policy questions. Policymakers tend to abhor methodological debates, “grand theory,’’ and the frequent academic arguments over rival approaches to a policy question; what they require are clear recommendations and rationales that tell them how to vote or respond to a particular issue. For example, during the congressional hearings and policy debates over Central American policy in the 1980s, the Heritage Foundation became adept at doing rapid analysis and presenting their results and recommendations to members of Congress on an overnight basis. The Amer¬ ican Enterprise Institute and Brookings, in contrast, specialized in larger tomes and long-range policy recommendations. Think tanks often perform an integrating and linkage function. They link academic scholarship as carried out in universities and private research centers to the more public policy-oriented research that is required in Washington, D.C. The importance of think tanks is that they connect the world of scholarship with the world of policymaking and its application. In these ways the research, writ¬ ing style, and uses to which research is put by the government are quite different from most research carried out in a university environment. Thus, think tanks often function as essential intermediaries and transmission belts between aca¬ demic and government policymaking. The advantages and disadvantages of this “brokerage’’ function are examined by Sundquist, “Research Brokerage: The Weak Link” (1978). Think tanks are also part of the process of privatization of public functions that has become prevalent in recent years. It is not just policy ideas that originate in think tanks. Think tanks have taken on a greater role in preparing presidential speeches, testimony of secretaries of state, the formulation of the defense budget, and the preparation of options papers for the National Security Council—all ostensibly public areas of policymaking. What has happened in recent years is that government officials, members of Congress and their staffs, and White House personnel—caught up in the enormously busy and time-consuming pre¬ occupations of their jobs—simply lack the time to do the research and writing required for the preparation of reports, testimony, or other statements of greater depth. Hence, increasingly the think tanks have stepped in, or been called on, to perform these essential roles. In “Think Tanks at Work” (1992), StevensonYang reviews a number of think tank documents advocating foreign policy strat¬ egies for U.S. presidents in the 1990s. Carnegie produced Changing Our Ways (1992), a measured set of proposals to deal with the post-Cold War world.

Think Tanks

101

Heritage s Making the World Safe for America (1992) is a conservative mani¬ festo stressing that American foreign policy needs to be designed to act defen¬ sively with more military engagement, if necessary, to deter hegemony by any hostile foreign power. But while it is undoubtedly true that think tanks play a policy role unheard of thirty years ago, the question of responsibility and ac¬ countability of these new actors must also be raised. Moreover, the validity of many think tank assumptions—often the basis for a great deal of foreign policy direction—needs to be more carefully examined and criticized than it has in the short history of these influential organizations. Some of these questions and assumptions are analyzed in Guttman and Wilner (1976) and more recently in Williams, Mismanaging America (1990). We will turn to a discussion of this important dimension of think tanks and foreign policy later in this chapter.

THINK TANK HISTORY The phenomenon of the think tank grows out of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century determination in America, according to Smith (1991), to se¬ cure good, honest, responsive, and effective government. It was in the context of big-city political bosses then prevalent, the widespread patronage and cor¬ ruption, and the growing salience of the new public policy issues in Washington that the good government movement took root. It is reflected in the organization of the League of Women Voters as well as a variety of presidential commissions designed to bring probity and informed discussion of public issues to the poli¬ cymaking process. Most of the early think tanks conducted their activities de¬ tached from policy debates instead of mounting advocacy campaigns to sway foreign policy. It is within this “good government” movement during the early part of the twentieth century that the first think tanks in the United States were organized. For the first several decades they grew slowly. All of the large, multipurpose think tanks—Brookings, Hoover, AEI, CSIS, and Heritage; IPS is the exception—grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. In each of them the personnel grew to one hundred to two hundred persons of whom about 30 to 40 percent were scholars and policy analysts. The annual budgets of these larger organizations, buttressed with significant grants from liberal and conservative foundations, reached the $12-$ 15 million range, or even higher in the cases of Brookings and Hoover. Influenced by the pervasiveness of television, deepening U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, threat of nuclear war, and events in Central America, new think tanks with a strong ideological bent began to proliferate. These think tanks soon took their place as major actors and influences in American politics. The successes and large budgets of the major think tanks led in the late 1970s and 1980s to an enormous proliferation of other, smaller, usually more special¬ ized think tanks. Among other things, these new think tanks dealt with such issues as health care, urban affairs, Africa, Latin America, race relations, the economy, and strategic policy formulation. We cannot review all of these here

Phillips Memorial Library

102

The U.S. Domestic Environment

but we do need to note (1) the large number of these organizations (now over one thousand) combined with their policy importance and influence, and (2) the emergence of a number of significant think tanks—the Center for Hemispheric Security, the Inter-American Dialogue, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and the Christie Institute—focusing specifically on Latin America. It should be said in closing this section that while the think tanks rose very quickly as major influences on policy in the 1970s and 1980s, there are signs that they are presently fading in importance. The first cause of this decline is financial: because of the changes in the tax laws as well as of the changed priorities of their major financial donors, several of the think tanks are facing budget crises of unprecedented proportions that are leading to curtailments of staffs and programs while converting their resident scholars more and more into active fund-raisers. Second, under President Bush, the administration relied on its own staff and resources as well as the considerable foreign policy expertise of the president himself; very rarely did it turn to the think tanks for ideas. And third, reflecting events in the Latin America area itself, the election of February 1990 of a democratic government in Nicaragua and the movement toward cen¬ trism and a negotiated peace in El Salvador forced Central America off our television screens and out of the public consciousness. Think tanks are quite fickle about following the headlines on policy issues and with Central America no longer a ‘ ‘hot’ ’ policy issue, many have started to phase out or sharply reduce their Latin American programs. For the small, single-issue think tanks devoted to Latin America alone, the shift away from Central America in the 1990s has caused some to disappear altogether and has put others in very precarious cir¬ cumstances. Others have tried to stay alive by addressing the policy issues in¬ volved in the national debate over the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

MAJOR THINK TANKS AND THEIR LATIN AMERICA PROGRAMS The following discussion offers a brief treatment of the history and organi¬ zational characteristics of nine multifunctional think tanks and four Latin Amer¬ ica-focused think tanks. The large multifunctional think tanks include the Brookings Institution; Heritage Foundations; Hoover Institution on War, Rev¬ olution and Peace; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Council on Foreign Relations; American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; Center for Strategic and International Studies; Institute for Policy Studies; and Progressive Policy Institute. Smith (1991) and Wiarda (1990) provide handy thumbnail sketches of each of the major multifunctional think tanks discussed in this section. The smaller, specialized Latin America policy think tanks include the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), the Council on Hemispheric Se¬ curity, the Christie Institute, and the Inter-American Dialogue. There are two important characteristics of think tanks with Latin America program speciali-

Think Tanks

103

zation that need to be mentioned before we proceed to examine the thirteen think tanks individually and in greater detail. The most striking fact to the outside observer is how small most of these programs are, as compared to a typical college or university Latin America program. Most of the larger think tanks have one or maybe two persons, usually one senior and one junior, who comprise their Latin America programs. They' may also have a full- or part-time secretary, usually two or three college interns, a research assistant who is often a graduate student or has an M.A., often a military or civilian fellow from one of the government agencies; and that’s all! Among the smaller think tanks such as the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, the professional staff consists basically of one person (Lawrence Birns) plus a corps of college interns. Any small college- or university-based Latin America pro¬ gram can put together a large cadre of staff than can any of the Washington think tanks. And yet it is the latter that have influence in the formulation of U.S.-Latin American policy in Washington and not so much the former. A second feature of think tanks, with some notable exceptions to be analyzed later, is how thin the research analyst talent frequently is. Contrary to many misperceptions, think tanks do not necessarily house the leading scholars in the field. Some very able scholars may be found in think tanks, but often the den¬ izens of these organizations are persons who were denied tenure in colleges and universities, journalists with only a superficial background in Latin America, and some persons who like to be called “doctor” but lack the Ph.D. degree. We should not overstate this point because the best of the think tank scholars are often among the top in their fields. But there are enough of the other kinds that we ought to recognize the varied levels of talent present and therefore to receive some of their policy pronouncements with considerable skepticism. We can now turn to a more detailed examination of the major think tanks and their respective Latin America programs.

Multipurpose Think Tanks The Brookings Institution. The oldest and most venerable of the think tanks is the Brookings Institution. Its origin goes back to 1916 but it was not incor¬ porated in its present form until the Institute for Government Research, the Institute for Economics, and the Robert Brookings Graduate School of Econom¬ ics and Government merged into a single public policy research institution sev¬ eral years later. Early on, as demonstrated in Critchlow’s study. The Brookings Institution, 1916-1952 (1984), Brookings helped define the federal budget proc¬ ess, opposed the St. Lawrence Seaway as too expensive, criticized many features of the New Deal, and was one of the principal architects of the Marshall Plan. But by the 1950s Brookings’s economists were mainly Keynesian and thus op¬ posed many of the economic policies of the Eisenhower administration; later, these same policy outlooks made Brookings especially influential during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The first fifty years of Brookings activ-

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

ities as a Washington public policy think tank can be found in Saunders, The Brookings Institution (1966). Brookings has recently moved to the center of the ideological spectrum and devotes most of its interest in Latin America to such policy as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and debt issues throughout the Latin American and Caribbean region. Brookings’s foreign policy program is strong on Europe, NATO, and the Middle East, but it has seldom shown much interest in Latin America. Joseph Grunwald, an economist and former deputy secretary for Inter-American Affairs in the Department of State, was the senior scholar on Latin America at Brook¬ ings for many years, but after his departure in the mid-1980s, the position re¬ mained open for nearly a decade. President Carter’s director of Latin American and Caribbean affairs on the National Security Council, Robert Pastor, spent a year at Brookings, but his position never became a permanent one. Eventually, the economist Nora Lustig was recruited to fill the Grunwald position, which gave a shot in the arm to the Latin America program and greatly augmented its research efforts and publications. But essentially Brookings, whose main re¬ search interests lay elsewhere, was largely a by-stander to the great debates over Latin American policy in the 1980s. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. The Hoover Institution was founded immediately after World War I. As head of the American Relief Administration which channeled postwar relief to Europe, Herbert Hoover found great ignorance about Europe and about world affairs in general in the United States. In 1919 he gave $50,000 to his alma mater, Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, to collect materials on the war and to serve as the base for one of the world’s largest library collections on international affairs. During the 1950s, at the former president’s insistence, the Hoover Institution focused par¬ ticularly on communism to, as Hoover put it, “demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx.” During the 1960s and 1970s, the Hoover Institution followed a hard-line, Cold War approach to foreign policy but moderated its ideological position somewhat in the 1980s while focusing more on domestic social and economic issues than foreign policy. Hoover also paid little sustained attention to Latin America, although in the 1960s it published several studies devoted to Cuba and Latin American revo¬ lutionary movements and collected vast library materials on leftist movements and revolutions in Latin America. Eventually it persuaded the Soviet scholar Robert Wesson to coordinate its Latin America work, and over the course of the 1980s he produced an impressive array of largely scholarly, but not so policy-oriented, studies of Latin America. Hoover’s more political position pa¬ pers on Cuba, Nicaragua, and U.S. policy were largely the work of conservative William Ratliff; however, like Brookings, Hoover was not a major player in Washington’s policy battles over Latin America in the 1980s. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was established in 1910 with a substantial gift from the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Its lofty early goal, according to Lan-

Think Tanks

105

gemann’s The Politics of Knowledge (1989), was to abolish war. Operating with an $85 million endowment, Carnegie has limited need to engage in fund-raising. It sponsors study groups and roundtable discussions and has approximately twenty resident and senior associates—mostly journalists, former government officials, and scholars. It has no permanent program in Latin American affairs, but it has had several Latin American scholars on a nonpermanent basis working' on various issues concerned with U.S.-Latin American relations. The Carnegie Endowment was a sporadic participant in the debate over Latin American policy in the 1980s. Its activities varied throughout the Reagan and Bush years but generally displayed the following characteristics. First, Carnegie sponsored a series of breakfasts and dinners featuring provocative speakers that drew together the Washington Latin America community on a bimonthly basis. But while Carnegie hosted these interesting events, it seldom staked out a clear policy position of its own. Second, Carnegie serves as the home of the influential journal Foreign Policy, which aired some of the debate over Latin America and overall American foreign policy. Third, Carnegie has its own associated schol¬ ars, but they have seldom stayed longer than one or two years, hardly enough time to put a consistent stamp on the research agenda. The Latin American specialists in residence at Carnegie during this period—the former U.S. ambas¬ sadors Robert White, Wayne Smith, and Viron “Pete” Vaky and two Mexicans, Alfonso Aguilar and Jorge Castaneda—produced some interesting studies and were closely associated with Democratic political causes, but no clear line of thinking on Latin America emerged from Carnegie. The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI). AEI was founded during World War II as a businessman’s lobbying organization. The best account of the early history and transformation of AEI is included in Dick¬ son’s (1971) treatment of think tanks. Gradually over the course of the 1950s and 1960s it emerged as a full-scale think tank. It stressed the free market ideas of Friedrich von Hayek and Gottfried Harberler and thus gradually transformed itself into a conservative counterpart to Brooking’s Keynesianism. In contrast to Brookings, it supported most Eisenhower proposals and was strongly critical of Democratic party policies of Kennedy and Johnson. Like Brookings, AEI gradually developed in the 1960s and 1970s a foreign policy arm to go along with its economic and social policy divisions. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) was one of the most active of the major think tanks on Latin America in the Reagan years. During the early and mid-1980s AEI had two senior scholars (Howard J. Wiarda and Mark Falcoff), several military interns, a research assistant, several student interns, a secretary, and several visiting adjunct scholars. In addition, AEI had a number of other well-known scholars—Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Ben Wattenberg, and Howard Penniman—who also conducted research and wrote on Latin American policy issues during this period. AEI is usually thought of as a conservative think tank, but its positions on Latin America were more complicated than that. Stone, “Conservative Brain

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

Trust” (1981), examines the ideological complexity of AEI and other think tanks, but much of the literature misses some of the political nuances involved in policy analysis at the conservative think tanks. Whereas Falcoff articulated a conservative ideological position at AEI, Wiarda saw himself as a centrist and pragmatist dedicated to educating both the Reagan administration and the many ‘‘instant experts” on Latin America who surfaced in Washington during this period about the value of moving Central American policy back into the main¬ stream. This is the major reason he served as lead consultant to the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America and published a steady stream of publications that tried to forge a middle ground in the debate.2 The fact that AEI was widely thought of during the 1980s to be the font of Reagan admin¬ istration ideas provided the policy clout to get its views across to a much wider audience. Despite the successful collaborative research efforts of Falcoff and Wiarda— Falcoff pushing his hard-line conservatism combined with Wiarda’s more cen¬ trist policy orientation—by the mid-1980s AEI began to experience heretofore unprecedented financial troubles which translated into an administrative crisis as well.3 The president of AEI was forced out, AEI did away with its separate area studies programs, and all international activities were concentrated in a single, reduced foreign policy program. During this period also, Jeane Kirkpa¬ trick returned to AEI from her UN post and with her a number of individuals better known as skillful advocates than scholars. These developments diminished AEI as a serious, scholarly think tank and in 1986-1987 produced an exodus of its leading foreign policy scholars. Mark Falcoff worked at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a time but eventually returned to AEI in a significantly diminished role; Howard Wiarda severed his ties with the institute altogether. Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (1986), develops some in¬ teresting themes on think tanks and the political difficulties associated with AEI, but it is unfortunately a factually erroneous and biased book. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). CSIS, formerly asso¬ ciated with Georgetown University but now divorced, originated in the early 1960s as an offshoot of AEI. Its two principal founders—Ambassador David Abshire and future Reagan National Security Adviser Richard Allen—had pre¬ viously done research work for AEI. In its formative years, CSIS received both financial and administrative advice from AEI. Several of its early position papers were hard-line Cold War in orientation, not very different from those of the Hoover Institution. But as it grew and evolved in the 1970s and saw that effec¬ tive politics was mainstream, middle-of-the-road politics, it took increasingly centrist and moderate positions. CSIS attracted to its scholarly ranks such mod¬ erate Republicans as Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger and such moderate Democrats as Harold Brown and Zbigniew Brzezinski.4 CSIS, a multifunctional foreign policy think tank, was one of the most active on the Latin American front during the 1980s and early 1990s. Its Latin America scholars included the following individuals and their specialties: George Fauriol

Think Tanks

107

(Caribbean and Central America), William Perry (Brazil), Delal Baer (U.S.Mexico relations, debt, immigration), Eva Loser (Central America, Cuba, U.S.Panamanian relations), Norman Bailey (national security issues), Sidney Weintraub (Mexican economy, international trade and finance), and Otto J. Reich (trade and development in Latin America, Venezuela). In addition, CSIS’s Americas Program set up a vast network of boards, panels, and advisory councils' that included prominent members of Congress, journalists, and businessmen. CSIS personnel probably published less than did AEI personnel during this period, but through its seminars, media contacts, and high-level political con¬ nections it came to be equally influential.5 When AEI went into its financial tailspin, some of its personnel (including Wiarda) joined CSIS. The Heritage Foundation. The last of the large, all-purpose think tanks to be founded was the Heritage Foundation. It was organized in 1973 by former con¬ gressional staffers Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich, with Feulner serving as president for the first two decades. Feulner’s Ideas, Think Tanks and Govern¬ ments (1985) examines the origins and policy influence of the Heritage Foun¬ dation. It was very conservative in its early years, producing analyses that were known for their ideological slant but not for their academic excellence. Accord¬ ing to Bellant, The Coors Connection (1991: 1), it was known more as a center that creates justifications for preconceived positions than a traditional think tank with a more balanced research agenda. Still, Heritage made its influence felt among conservative members of Congress, staffers, and Executive branch per¬ sonnel. When Reagan was elected president in 1980, and then as AEI went into a financial decline in the mid-1980s, Heritage became more acceptable and es¬ tablishment. By the end of the 1980s its policy position papers had become more mainstream and somewhat less ideological in their issue orientation. The Heritage Foundation also had influence in some quarters and on some issues dealing with Latin America, but it was different from the other think tanks. It favored short, quick analyses that it could place on the desk of members of Congress on an overnight basis telling them how to vote. In keeping with this kind of research product. Heritage did not hire senior, established scholars but persons at the senior graduate student level whom it could work hard for several years, pay little, and then discard when it was ready to move on to other issues. In other words, Heritage already had the answers, which could be found in its conservative ideology; it wanted low-level scholars who could provide the rationalizations for policy solutions already decided by Heritage’s professional staff. For these reasons Heritage, though certainly influential (it was sometimes referred to as Ronald Reagan’s “favorite think tank”), was not thought of during the 1980s by other think tanks or outside scholars as a serious research center. It was more like a lobbying organization than a think tank—a line that would become increasingly blurred in other research institutes as well. Over the years, especially during the Bush administration, Heritage moved toward the center-right of the ideological spectrum. This was particularly true of its foreign policy program under the successive direction of Bruce Weinrod

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

and Kim Holmes. Its research products improved as well—no longer “instant analyses” but thoughtful, analytical background pieces. When Wesley Smith and Michael Wilson joined the Latin America program at Heritage, the quality of that division improved greatly as well. By the early 1990s, the more dynamic Heritage Foundation replaced the tired and financially troubled AEI as the focus of center-conservative think tank activity in Washington. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)— a left-wing think tank—was formed in 1963, about the same time that CSIS was organized. The institute sees itself as a center for “progressive” politics with responsibilities more as an activitist-scholarship organization than as an impartial observer of foreign policy. Studies critical of IPS such as Powell, Covert Cadre—Inside the Institute for Policy Studies (1987), consider it radicalleft or Marxist in its policy interpretations with unfounded opposition to weap¬ ons systems in particular and American foreign policy in general. During the 1960s, IPS joined a loose coalition of radical and anti-Vietnam War groups and several of its founders were arrested for their antidraft activities. It continued its criticisms of U.S. national security policy in the 1970s and, in Latin America, was particularly exercised over the overthrow and death of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the involvement of the CIA in his downfall. The killing of the Chilean diplomat and IPS scholar Orlando Letelier by Chilean secret police gave IPS publicity and a cause. During the turbulent and conflictual 1970s and 1980s, EPS watched its influ¬ ence rise and fall with the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Through the efforts of its founder, Richard J. Barnet, IPS gained influence on Capitol Hill in the 1970s by placing a number of its scholars on the staffs of senators involved with foreign policy issues. During the conservative Reagan years, IPS experi¬ enced a decline in influence over policy debates due to its insistence on ‘ ‘radical restructuring,” often suffering the wrath of conservatives who considered IPS to be outdated in its policy prescriptions. Others insisted on calling IPS the “think tank that time forgot.” According to Watson (1990: 137), “It [IPS] has been vilified by the conservatives in the United States, while liberals have seen it as a shining light.” However, IPS did provide a serious and continual rebuttal to official govern¬ ment statements by challenging the Cold War assumptions in U.S.-Latin Amer¬ ican policy. The following IPS publications provided direct hits on Reagan’s Central American policy: In Contempt of Congress: The Reagan Record of Deceit and Illegality on Central America (1985), Outcast Among Allies: The International Costs of Reagan’s War Against Nicaragua (1986), and Peter Kombluh’s Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention (1987). More recently, IPS has developed some influence with the Clinton administration, but after thirty years as one of the few foreign policy think tanks on the left, it continues to elicit criticism and controversy.6 The Institute for Policy Studies’ overall decline was not due just to time and the influence of the Reagan administration, but also to reduced funding, the absence of serious scholars in its ranks, rifts within the leadership, and its hard-left ideological position. IPS’s budget during the Reagan

Think Tanks

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and Bush years averaged around $2 million—far below those of the other major think tanks. IPS personnel such as Saul Landau and Richard Barnet would some¬ times appear at Washington policy forums in the 1980s, but their voices had less impact on policymaking than during the 1960s and 1970s. With its influence on Latin America policy considerably reduced, IPS found its only channel for influencing policy was through opinion articles and sporadic interviews with' journalists from major newspapers. According to Soley (1992: 137), “Network television and CNN completely neglected analysts associated with the Institute for Policy Studies and World Policy Institute, but newspaper reporters weren’t exactly beating down their doors, either.” The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR was also founded after World War I to educate Americans on foreign affairs and to help encourage U.S. participation in the League of Nations. The council, anchored by the wealthy establishment elite in New York, published Foreign Affairs and served as the backbone of the consensus-based foreign policy that prevailed until the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Schulzinger’s history of the CFR, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs (1984), points out that the council was always Europeoriented and in the past paid scant attention to Latin America. Until recently, the CFR lacked its own research program and therefore did not qualify as a think tank by our definition. For many years the CFR remained a lobby organ¬ ization devoted to expanding international awareness and foreign policy discus¬ sion. More recently, Susan Kaufman Purcell and then Kenneth Maxwell have anchored the council’s Latin America agenda. Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). The Progressive Policy Institute deserves some mention, although it is of recent origin (1981), has a small budget and staff, and spends most of its time on domestic issues rather than Latin America policy. The PPI is the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist group within the Democratic party out of which President Bill Clinton rose. It helped provide ideas and position papers for the 1992 Clinton campaign and issued a large volume—Changing America: Blueprint for a New Democracy (1992)—that focused mainly on domestic issues (except for NAFTA, it had little to say about Latin America policy) and accompanied Clinton into office after his electoral victory. It remains to be seen whether the PPI will continue as a separate think tank and develop some Latin America expertise, or whether it will quickly fade into obscurity now that the president has other research sources (not necessarily think tanks) available to him. What the PPI illustrates is a theme developed earlier: does it function mainly as a genuine think tank or, more accurately, as a domestic and foreign arm of the centrist wing of the Democratic party?

Specialized Latin America-Focused Think Tanks Most of the Latin America-focused think tanks can be discussed briefly, since they are often smaller in organizational size, are shorter-lived, and have less clout than the larger, more established, think tanks in Washington.

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA). COHA is essentially a oneman operation with a small office, a group of often energetic undergraduate interns, and a letterhead that lists some important persons on its board. COHA’s leadership lacks the requisite academic credentials and is rarely taken seriously by the Washington policymaking community. Its public statements are often glib and smart-alecky but certainly not scholarly, and therefore its influence on Latin America policy is very weak. COHA’s method of operation places a lot of attention on media outreach strategies—news releases and op-ed pieces penned by its director or student interns—but it has no serious research program. The Council on Hemispheric Security. The Council on Hemispheric Security was organized during the Carter administration to oppose what it felt was his dangerous neglect of security issues in the hemisphere, particularly the com¬ munist activities in Nicaragua, Grenada, El Salvador, and elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. The council’s membership overlapped somewhat with that of the Committee of Santa Fe and included both civilians and retired military officers, many of whom had considerable access to the White House in the early 1980s. It played a key role in the transition from Carter to Reagan in 1980 with The Committee of Santa Fe’s publication of “New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties” (1980), crafted by the editor, Lewis Tambs, and others, such as L. Francis Bouchey, Roger Fontaine, David Jordan, and Gordon Sumner. Under David Jordan’s editorship, it sought to influence post-Reagan Latin Amer¬ ica policy through “Santa Fe II: A Strategy for Latin America in the Nineties” (1988), but was far less successful than with the Santa Fe I document. With no permanent staff and little interest in serious research and analysis, the Council on Hemispheric Security resembled an advocacy group more than a typical Washington think tank and therefore faded from the policymaking scene. The Christie Institute. Christie came together in the 1980s to oppose U.S. policy in Central America, particularly the funding of covert operations asso¬ ciated with the Iran-contra affair. In an effort to expose and discredit the covert aspects of U.S. policy, the Christie Institute filed a federal civil lawsuit against twenty-nine participants in the covert war against Nicaragua and published In¬ side the Shadow Government (1988), a detailed account of their legal case. The institute’s members included people from the religious community, journalists, ex-CIA personnel, and remnants of the New Left, which in this era often were the same individuals. Its interest in CIA activities in Nicaragua, particularly the scandal associated with the La Penca bombing, as well as drug trafficking in Central America, helped the Christie Institute gain the ear of Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), whose subcommittee investigated and took seriously its charges against the CIA. However, its lawsuit was eventually dismissed by Federal Judge James L. King, who said that it was a frivolous case and ordered the Christie Institute to pay court costs and the defendant’s legal bills totaling $1.2 million. Christie lost whatever credibility it once had even with Kerry’s subcommittee, suffered financially, and slowly faded into obscurity as Central America issues disappeared from the headlines of major newspapers. The Christie Institute, and

Think Tanks

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other small groups that attacked Reagan’s Central America policy, are best de¬ scribed as single-issue political advocacy groups rather than legitimate think tanks. The Inter-American Dialogue. The Inter-American Dialogue is one of the newer, more interesting, and increasingly influential of the Latin America-fo¬ cused Washington-based think tanks. The Dialogue grew out of Abraham F.' Lowenthal’s work at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he was secretary of the Latin America program in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Using his skills as an organizer and fund-raiser, Lowenthal made the Latin America program at the Wilson Center more active and visible than any of the other regional programs. He organized major dinners and conferences, served as a stimulus to several large published research projects, attracted mem¬ bers of Congress and White House staffers to his programs, and functioned more in the mode of a large think tank than that of a small publicly financed organ¬ ization (most of the center’s budget is appropriated by Congress). He also tied the Latin America program closely to the Carter administration and, during the 1980s, in opposition to Reagan’s Latin American policy.7 This politicization of the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program angered Reagan administration officials, as well as the Wilson Center’s director, who recognized that Lowenthal was doing far more and on a much larger budget than the other area programs, all of which alienated the other Wilson program directors. Lowenthal soon left the Wilson Center and founded the InterAmerican Dialogue.8 In creating the Dialogue, Lowenthal employed the ingenious device of having compatible participants join together from the United States and Latin America in roughly equal numbers. Without having to pay these members to join the Dialogue, his recommendations gained legitimacy and media attention from the simple fact that they emerged from prestigious members and a cross-national “dialogue.” But some claimed that the Inter-American Dialogue was not a real dialogue since most of its members—both U.S. and Latin American—came from the Carteresque, social-democratic ideological and partisan side of the po¬ litical spectrum, as did Lowenthal and his main collaborators. Major business, centrist, and conservative political members from the United States and Latin America were woefully underrepresented or not included in the dialogue at all. As a result, the Dialogue’s reports were viewed as not always the products of serious research and discussion but as statements drafted by the leadership and staff, given a political twist, and then, after discussion, approved by the Dialogue members, who occasionally added a dissenting comment or point of view. Nev¬ ertheless, the organizational structure, membership, and method of operation of the Inter-American Dialogue contributed to its rapid success in the Latin Amer¬ ica policymaking arena. Originally the Dialogue was not a traditional think tank since it did not engage in extensive original research but served as a coordinator and disseminator for an already defined policy agenda. Lowenthal eventually conceived a plan to

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

raise sufficient funds to convert the Dialogue into a full-scale think tank with a full-time research staff. In the less strident discussion of U.S.-Latin American policy that developed after Reagan left office, the Dialogue’s annual reports moved closer to the center of the political spectrum, putting the Dialogue in the advantageous position of being able to help shape the Latin America policy of the Clinton administration beginning in 1993. Two of the Dialogue’s reports— reflective of this ideological shift—were published at crucial times and in cir¬ cumstances aimed at securing maximum publicity: The Americas in a New World (1990) and Convergence and Community (1992). Meanwhile the Dia¬ logue began a serious research agenda on such topics as equity, social move¬ ments, indigenous peoples, and Cuba. Toward the end of the Bush administration, the Dialogue made an audacious move by creating a new organization designed to pull together all the major Washington-based interest groups and think tanks with Latin America programs. Lowenthal moved into a less active role with the Dialogue in 1992 as Richard E. Feinberg—formerly with the Treasury Department under Carter and vice president of the Overseas Development Council—replaced him as president of the Inter-American Dialogue.9 The new coordinating agency, called the D.C. Liaison Committee on Latin America, comprised representatives of the Brook¬ ings Institution, the Overseas Development Council, the Washington Office on Latin America, the Environmental Defense Fund, Freedom House, and many other interest groups associated with the business, human rights, and labor lob¬ bies. While the ostensible purpose of the Liaison Committee was to provide greater unity to Latin America programs and think tank activities in Washington, other think tank members were bothered by the Dialogue’s efforts unilaterally to establish itself as the coordinating agency for the whole Washington area. Critics were also quick to point out the partisan nature of this new enterprise as many members took up posts in the new Clinton administration (including Fein¬ berg, replaced by Peter Hakim) and they resented having their research agendas subordinated to that of the Dialogue. While the Liaison Committee did coor¬ dinate some useful activities, the partisan character of the program and the ap¬ pearance of a power grab served for a time to reinvigorate the ideological debate that prevailed among think tanks during the Reagan years but had largely sub¬ sided after President Bush came into office.

PRESIDENTS AND THINK TANKS: THE EBB AND FLOW OF INFLUENCE The ebb and flow of think tank influence on U.S.-Latin America policy often depend on the ideology and leadership style of the president. Although the Brookings Institution prides itself on nonpartisan research, it quickly became the most important think tank in Washington while Kennedy and Johnson oc¬ cupied the White House during the 1960s. Yet, while Brookings has done con¬ siderable public policy research on defense and national security issues, it never

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organized a serious Latin America program. The general lack of interest in Latin America among the major think tanks such as Brookings contributed to the rise of center-to-conservative think tanks in the 1970s and 1980s. During the time that Central America dominated foreign policy debate, the lack of effective center-left think tanks interested in Latin America gave rise to such highly vocal but seldom effective opposition programs such as the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), the Christie Institute, and the association of scholars and ac¬ tivists called Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America (PACCA). Eventually, during the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, the InterAmerican Dialogue emerged to fill the large think tank gap on the center-left. Today, the Dialogue has several of its members in top Latin American policy¬ making positions in the Clinton administration. Despite the influence on Latin America policy of the center-right think tanks in the Reagan years, their dominance proved to be less long-lasting than was thought at the time. The fluctuation of think tank influence is examined in Blumenthal (1986) and in Reeves, The Reagan Detour (1985). The reasons given for this shift in think tank power are threefold: (1) The Reagan administration failed to take advantage of the favorable political climate to consolidate the dominance of ideas emanating from center-right think tanks; (2) thinks tanks located on the center-right ideologically such as AEI went into a combined financial-administrative-political tailspin from which they have not yet fully re¬ covered; and (3) the Bush administration (the process had actually begun during Reagan’s second term) put its own foreign policy team in place and decided not to rely on think tanks at all, producing a major negative impact on think tank influence on foreign policy. The Bush administration was strongly process-oriented in its decision-making style and more pragmatic and centrist than the Reagan administration, an ap¬ proach to foreign affairs that often brought charges that Bush lacked policy “vision.” President Bush appointed trusted friends and colleagues to key foreign policy posts and mainly used Department of State Foreign Service officers (FSOs) to staff the National Security Council (NSC). When President Bush did need foreign policy ideas and individuals, he turned to the more centrist, establishmentarian Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Kondracke, “New Kids on the Block” (1989), looks at the sources of recruitment of a foreign policy team during the first year of the Bush administration. Among the major center-right think tanks such as AEI, Heritage, Hoover, and CSIS, only one person (from Heritage) landed a job in the Bush administration at the level of assistant sec¬ retary or above. With many think tanks declining in influence during the Bush years, it is no surprise that many think tank scholars deserted President Bush and supported candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. The Clinton administration also illustrates several patterns in the frequent shifts in think tank influence and personnel recruitment in Washington. First, the inauguration of the Clinton administration produced a definite swing back to the liberal think tanks such as Brookings and Carnegie, and, on Latin America

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

policy, the Inter-American Dialogue. Oppenheimer, “Think Tank Can Shape Clinton’s Latin Policy’’ (1993), examines the link between members of the InterAmerican Dialogue and key Clinton appointees, speculating on how the Dia¬ logue’s ideas are likely to be translated into a Latin American policy. Second, as a baby-boomer and former anti-Vietnam War protestor, Clinton brought in some of the former antiwar groups and members of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) who had operated mostly at the margins of the mainstream think tanks. Third, Clinton also recruited personnel from the Carter administration, particularly those members who made up what was called at the time the ‘ ‘hu¬ man rights lobby.” And fourth, Clinton relied heavily on a few new think tanks closely associated with the Democratic party—the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). It is perhaps a bit too early to begin to map out the contours of think tank influence on U.S.-Latin America policy during the decade of the 1990s, but it appears that the new powerhouses are here to stay even though some think tanks will gain or lose influence on the basis of presidential politics.

SOURCES OF THINK TANK INFLUENCE How do think tanks actually go about influencing foreign policy? Why do their scholars on Latin America and other issues have the capacity to shape policy outcomes? Why do think tank scholars have so much influence and their colleagues in academia, generally, so little? Think tanks use at least nine meth¬ ods of operation, some employed quite deftly, to get their messages into the Washington foreign policy arena: the presumption of expertise and access, lunches and dinners, manipulation of the media, personal connections, congres¬ sional testimony, advisory panels, revolving doors, writing and publications, and political or ideological orientation. The literature on sources of think tank influ¬ ence is rather limited, but the following works provide an introduction to this type of analysis: Easterbrook, “Ideas Move Nations” (1986), and Linden, “Powerhouse of Policy” (1987). Abelson, Descending the Ivory Tower (1989), provides an excellent treatment of think tank influence on Central American policy. The following discussion is a brief examination of the strategies that think tanks use to influence Washington policymakers.

Presumption of Expertise and Access Washington policymakers tend to believe that think tanks attract only the best and the brightest in all fields of inquiry. While this may or may not be true, what is more important is that political Washington thinks that it is. So poli¬ cymakers call on the think tanks presuming that they will get the best answers from the most knowledgeable scholars working in a particular policy area. The presumption of access works on two sides. In the early years of the Reagan administration, for example, it was widely thought that AEI was mapping out

Think Tanks

115

administration policy. As a result, virtually every party, faction, and presidential candidate visiting Washington from Latin America came through the offices of AEI’s Latin America program. Their assumption was that after their visit to AEI, the scholars there would call up President Reagan or the secretary of state and give their group or movement AEI’s blessing. This assumption was not entirely accurate but, because it reemphasized the influence of AEI’s Latin America program, AEI did not disabuse these visitors of such notions. Much of the same happened with interest groups, Washington representatives and lobbies, and various PACs that wanted to influence U.S.-Latin America policy because of AEI’s reputation as the Reagan administration’s favorite think tank. All of these thought (at times correctly) that AEI had a direct pipeline to the White House.

Lunches, Seminars, and Dinners The think tanks often host a dinner, a program, and several luncheon meetings every day. At these events, their scholars, members of Congress, ambassadors, aides, journalists, and Executive office personnel mingle freely over food, drinks, and informal conversation. At AEI in its properous years, for example, the Latin America program hosted a lunch for key policymakers two to three times per week. Whenever its scholars heard of anyone doing anything inter¬ esting on Latin America, that person would be invited for lunch. Most ambas¬ sadors headed for Latin America, NSC personnel such as Lt. Colonel Oliver North, journalists on their way to Latin America, and Pentagon personnel came together in AEI’s elegant dining room. The Heritage Foundation, Brookings, and CSIS use the same techniques, giving the particular think tank and its schol¬ ars visibility and influence over policy. These informal get-togethers create points of contact for journalists or government policymakers the next time they need information or policy advice.

Television and Public Appearances Think tank representatives at the major institutions in Washington have the opportunity frequently to appear on Nightline, MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Good Morning America, or one of the evening news programs. Think tank scholars can also be found expressing their views and ideas at the Foreign Service In¬ stitute (recently renamed the National Foreign Affairs Training Center), in sem¬ inars or forums in Washington, or on college campuses. There was a high demand for think tank representatives during the vigorous Central America de¬ bates of the 1980s, but these public discussions virtually ended with the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in early 1990 and the precipitous drop in interest in Central American issues. The reason think tank representatives have more opportunities to influence policy debates is largely the result of logistics, not that they are so much better

116

The U.S. Domestic Environment

than university-based scholars. The major think tanks are all located in close proximity to the television studios (literally across the back alley in the case of AEI and ABC News), it costs the networks very little to send a camera crew there, and the networks can get think tank representatives on their programs on a moment’s notice. Such appearances, needless to say, often influence not only the outcome of the policy debate but the debate agenda as well.

Access to Policymakers Being in Washington, at one of the major think tanks, gives one ready access to policymakers at high levels, although this varies depending on the think tank, the think tank representative, the administration in power, and the policy issue. For example, during AEI’s heyday in the 1980s, members of its Latin America program were at the White House or State Department about once per week on average, at the Defense Department or CIA about once every two months, at Latin American embassies at least twice per week, and at other Washington think tanks for various programs two to three times every week. Such frequent social cum political appearances are undoubtedly hard on the liver and blood pressure over a period of time, but they also open doors at high levels—and this access is critical in influencing U.S.-Latin American policy.

Congressional Testimony Preparing testimony to deliver to congressional committees and subcommit¬ tees is another strategy for influencing policy. Particularly during the “great debates” over Central America policy in the Reagan years, think tank represen¬ tatives were called on to testify at congressional hearings. Again, as with the frequency of media appearances, these individuals were called on so frequently for chiefly logistical and geographical proximity reasons. The major think tanks are close to Capitol Hill (Heritage, for example, is right across the street), and quite often the think tank representatives are close acquaintances with the pro¬ fessional staff persons of the key committees and subcommittees. In an empirical examination of think tank appearances before the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees (and subcommittees) between 1981 and 1992, it is revealing as to which think tanks dominate the hearing testimonies (see Table 6.1). For example, AEI and Heritage appeared frequently between 1982 and 1985, but as Latin America policy shifted to the center in the mid-1980s CSIS and the Inter-American Dialogue gained in appearances. It is also worth noting the almost total lack of influence of either Brookings or the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) throughout the entire period. These data may be considered interesting and suggestive of influence but certainly not conclusive, given the nature and purpose of congressional hearings. The fact is that preparing written congressional testimony takes care and time, plus the committees (unlike virtually every other agency in Washington) do not

118

The U.S. Domestic Environment

provide honoraria for these appearances. Moreover, in the context of the debates over Central America policy, the committee hearings had become such a ‘ ‘cir¬ cus” by the mid-1980s that a number of think tank scholars, including AEI’s Latin America specialists, eventually refused to accept invitations to present testimony. There were instances under Congressmen Michael Barnes (D-Md.) and George W. Crockett (D-Mich.), who chaired the House subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs, and Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) on the Senate side that the hearings became frivolous forums and ideological sounding boards for policy discussion. With witnesses carefully selected to reflect the chair’s viewpoints, testimony often gravitated to the ideological extremes, leav¬ ing little room for a serious discussion of the issues. Reasoned debate does not always materialize and is often replaced by loud, ideological harangues, and many serious scholars simply refused to testify before Congress under these conditions. Thus, the number of times think tank representatives who appear before congressional committees to offer “professional” testimony does not explain everything we need to know about think tank influence over Latin Amer¬ ica policy. This is certainly an area of think tank activity that needs further investigation.

Advisory Panels Most of the larger think tank programs, including those with Latin America centers or programs, have high-level advisory boards and councils on whom they rely for advice (occasionally) and funding (more often). The reference here is not to the boards of trustees of the think tanks themselves, who are often prominent bankers and CEOs and therefore extremely helpful to the operation of the think tank, but rather to the advisory panels of their Latin America pro¬ grams. These usually consist of prominent diplomats, members of Congress, foundation officials, and business people. The importance of these advisory pan¬ els is that they not only assist the program with fund-raising but also serve as avenues of access to corporate boardrooms, foundation grants, and policy influ¬ ence. Among the various think tanks, CSIS has probably the most elaborate web of such advisory boards cum policy connections agency; there, Lloyd Bentsen, Anne Armstrong, and numerous other former members of Congress and diplo¬ mats have been recruited to assist the Latin America program with various proj¬ ects.

Revolving Doors Think tanks tend to be prime recruiting centers for filling high-level policy positions. For example, in the early years of Reagan’s term thirty-one scholars from AEI went into the administration, Heritage placed twenty-seven, and the Hoover Institution twenty-five. At the same time, out-of-office politicians with academic credentials tend to find havens at the think tanks when their party is

Think Tanks

119

defeated at the polls. For example, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Har¬ old Brown, James Schlesinger, Robert Hunter, and many others from the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations hold positions at CSIS. Conservative Repub¬ licans such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Constantine Menges, and more recently Richard Cheney found homes at AEI after the Reagan and Bush ad¬ ministrations. Elliott Abrams, former assistant secretary of state for interAmerican affairs in the second Reagan administration, joined the Hudson Institute as a foreign policy analyst in addition to gaining appointments on sev¬ eral boards of trustees involved with Latin America policy issues. The Brookings Institution has long been a favorate location for out-of-office Democrats. These revolving doors generate ample opportunities to influence policy without holding a formal government position. There are significant differences between Republicans and Democrats with regard to revolving door opportunities and position funding, although it is dif¬ ficult to judge the number of opportunities and dollar amounts that fit each category with any degree of precision. The estimate for former officials of Re¬ publican administrations is that there are only fourteen or fifteen positions for out-of-office Latin America specialists in all of Washington, D.C., with only about $1 million in funding. These positions would include not just those at Heritage, AEI, and Hoover, but also at such quasi-think tanks/lobbying interests as the Council on the Americas, the Republican Institute for International Af¬ fairs, the Institute for National Security Studies, or (further afield) the RAND Corporation. In contrast, out-of-office Democrats with Latin America speciali¬ zations have probably seventy-five to one hundred positions available and per¬ haps upward of $50 million in funding. This would include positions available not just at Brookings or Carnegie but also at the Inter-American Dialogue, the Overseas Development Council, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Re¬ search Council, the Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Mac Arthur Foundation, and congressional staff positions. In short, there are consid¬ erably more opportunities for out-of-office Democrats than out-of-office Repub¬ licans. The issue of think tanks as recruiting centers merits more study, but there is no doubt this factor adds to the influence of Washington-based think tanks.

Political Orientation or Ideology Think tanks not only are the product of corporate philanthropy but gain or lose in the policymaking arena depending on their prevailing political or ideo¬ logical orientation. Table 6.2 places each category of think tank—multipurpose or Latin America-focused—along a left-right ideological spectrum. Conserva¬ tive foundations such as Coors and Olin have been major sponsors of such think tanks as Heritage and Freedom House. The Area Foundation funds a number of think tanks and interest groups on the far left interested in improving relations with Cuba, promoting human rights advocacy, and informing Congress about developments in Central America. Williams, “Mobilizing Forces” (1988), maps

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

Table 6.2 Think Tank Political Orientation, by Type and Political Ideology Far Left

Moderate Left

Center

Moderate Right

Far Right

Multipurpose: IPS

X

Carnegie

X

Brookings

X X

CSIS AEI

X

Hoover

X X

Heritage Latin America: Christie

X

COHA

X

IAD

X

COHS

X

LEGEND: • IPS = Institute for Policy Studies • Carnegie = Carnegie Endowment for International Peace • Brookings = Brookings Institution • CSIS = Center for Strategic and International Studies • AEI = American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research • Hoover = Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace • Heritage = Heritage Foundation ■ Christie = Christie Institute ■ COHA = Council on Hemispheric Affairs ■ IAD = Inter-American Dialogue • COHS = Council on Hemispheric Security

out the rush of activity of nonprofits and foundations making grants to liberal, conservative, and moderate groups in Central American causes. According to Williams (1988:32), “Grants are made to nonprofits with a particular program or point of view, and they [think tanks] put the money to work.” Writing in the early 1980s, Crawford, Thunder on the Right (1980), argues that Heritage Foundation studies were less likely to be balanced public policy research than professionally packaged justifications for New Right views and opinions. The frequent shifts in political power in Washington often mean that think tanks in the middle have influence in all administrations while those on the ideological fringes can expect their influence to rise and fall on the basis of ideological makeup of the White House and key committees in Congress.

Think Tanks

121

Publications The major Washington think tanks not only turn out a plethora of research publications but also have sophisticated computer-based, multitargeted mailing lists that enable them to reach select audiences with precisely the right kinds of publications for maximum policy effectiveness. Think tanks do not wait for their scholars to be “discovered” in obscure academic journals; rather, they often have their own publishing outlets, in-house editorial staffs, and often magazines and book series which they also target to influential readers. In addition, the larger think tanks have public relations offices that prepare press releases about their research products, summarize the results for op-ed pieces, solicit invitations to appear on radio and TV talk shows, and send out large numbers of free copies of their publications to influential policymakers in Washington. It is difficult to measure precisely how much influence all these publications have on policymaking, but several indicators are worthy of mention. The first indicator of think tank publication effectiveness is the professional calibre of the writers. Linden (1987) points out that some of AEI’s scholars were rated in one survey by their professional colleagues as among the ten most influential scholars on Latin America in the United States. Abelson (1989) examines the relationship between think tank publications and policy influence regarding Central America. A second indicator of influence is the impact that think tank representatives have had on policymakers through presidential commissions, congressional testimony, or campaign or candidate advising. For example, there is ample evidence that AEI and CSIS contributions to the Kissinger Commission had a considerable influence in pulling Reagan’s Latin America policy back into the mainstream from the more ideological viewpoints contained in the first report of the Santa Fe Committee several years earlier. The details of this shift can be found in Wiarda, American Foreign Policy toward Latin America in the 80s and 90s (1992). The Center for Strategic and International Studies played a strong role in shaping President Bush’s campaign pronouncements on Latin America and the ideas contained in the platform statements of the Republican party in 1988. AEI, Brookings, and CSIS have also run programs designed to brief new members of Congress on Latin American policy issues. The InterAmerican Dialogue played a major role in formulating candidate and then Pres¬ ident Clinton’s positions on Latin America, particularly with regard to Haiti and trade issues.10 We can now turn to the differences in influence between think tanks and academics. In the arena of U.S. policymaking, some political scientists have pondered the intriguing question of why think tanks have considerably more influence over policy than university-based scholars. Wiarda (1990) examines this ques¬ tion in considerable detail; another effort to answer this question can be found in Herspring, “Practitioners and Political Scientists” (1992). Although the em¬ pirical work on this subject is rather skimpy, there are several plausible answers as to why think tank scholars have more influence than university-based schol-

122

The U.S. Domestic Environment

ars. The first is simply logistic: the main think tanks are located in Washington, close to Capitol Hill and the major media outlets, and many think tank scholars are well known to policymakers and opinion leaders on a personal level. Second, think tanks are much more skilled in getting their product distributed widely and placed quickly in the hands of key policymakers. Third, the style of think tank writing is influential. The process of influencing policymakers involves information that must be closely attuned to the political and bureaucratic envi¬ ronment in which the policymaker operates; it cannot be utopian or intensely ideological and must offer advice that is eminently practical. If think tank in¬ formation does not tell the member of Congress how he or she should vote on a given issue and why, then it is not likely to be of much use to the policymaker and will be quickly discarded.

SOURCES OF THINK TANK FUNDING AND THE QUESTION OF RESEARCH BIAS Think tanks are seldom profit-making organizations. Instead, they must spend organizational capital raising most of the funds that support their efforts to in¬ fluence foreign and domestic policy. What are the major sources of think tank funding, and do funding sources bias the products that think tanks generate? Most of the Washington-based think tanks are confronted with a desperate need to maintain their existing budgets and ward off pending financial declines of significant proportions.11 This has led think tanks in recent years to build up their financial development offices, convert think tank scholars into fund-raisers, some insisting that think tank representatives raise their own salary, benefits, research funds, and other expenses. At present, think tanks acquire their funding from a variety of sources, but foundation grants, corporate contributions, and publication sales make up the bulk of operating budgets. By far the major sources of think tank funding are corporate or business foundation contributions. Upward of two-thirds of think tank support comes from big business. CEOs of major corporations dominate their boards of direc¬ tors, an appointment that is usually conditional on the CEO’s contributing $100,000 or more to the think tank treasury. Think tanks with Latin America programs have similar arrangements. AEI, Heritage, and CSIS have been the largest recipients of business largesse, although Brookings has increasingly re¬ lied on corporate giving. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) tends to be an¬ ticapitalist and therefore receives little corporate support, instead relying on the donations of some of the wealthy sons and daughters of the moguls of U.S. industry. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are usually thought to stand for a free market ideology that would make them attractive to corporate donors, but what applies in the realm of domestic politics is not always translatable to the foreign policy arena. For example, while AEI’s economic research program was free-market-oriented, its foreign policy program was for

Think Tanks

123

a long time more centrist and moderate. This means that the economic program often got funding from one set of sources while the foreign policy program got theirs from others. Patterns of foundation and corporate giving varied consid¬ erably with the program but many decided to give to all the major think tanks as a way of spreading their largesse and thereby ensuring themselves continued access and influence in all quarters. Foundations are often major sources of funding of think tank programs, ac¬ counting for about 20 percent of their budgets, but this varies significantly, depending on the aggressiveness of the Latin America program directors as well as the ideological orientation of the foundations. The more liberal Ford, Rock¬ efeller, and Mac Arthur foundations give mostly to Brookings, the InterAmerican Dialogue, and at times IPS and CSIS, while the conservative foundations such as Scaife, Pew, Olin, Bradley, and Smith Richardson donate mainly to AEI and Heritage, and less frequently to CSIS. The Tinker Founda¬ tion, which concentrates on Latin America, as well as the Mellon Foundation, have been instrumental in supporting research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (center), the Inter-American Dialogue (moderately liberal), and the American Enterprise Institute (moderately conservative). An excellent source for tracking foundation support of think tanks and interest groups con¬ cerned with Latin America policy is the Foundation Center, Who Gets Grants, Who Gives Grants (1993). Recent changes in the funding orientation of foun¬ dations suggest that liberal think tanks are being more handsomely funded than conservative ones and that major foundations are more interested in domestic issues than international issues, particularly those associated with Latin America. If a think tank’s influence can be measured by the size of its budget, then AEI, the Inter-American Dialogue, and CSIS are among the most visible and effective think tanks with Latin America programs. At its pinnacle of influence in the mid-1980s, AEI’s Latin America program was operating on a budget of about $1.2 million. Of that amount, about $200,000 came from AEI’s core budget, whereas the rest came from five or six large foundation grants and about the same number of sizeable grants from business corporations that had desig¬ nated their AEI gifts (or a portion thereof) specifically for the Latin America program. The Inter-American Dialogue had been similarly successful in raising a million dollar budget from a dozen foundations and business organizations. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which like AEI begins with a core budget for its Latin America program, has also been successful in raising outside funding that enables it to carry on a program several times what its core budget would support. The heavy dependence of think tanks on business financial support raises the question of possible bias toward the organizations that provide the funds. There is no question that this is a potential problem; however, think tank scholars at AEI were never once told what agenda they should follow, let alone what con¬ clusions they should reach. It was a situation of absolute academic freedom—

124

The U.S. Domestic Environment

although it was understood that as politically oriented scholars they should not as a matter of prudence attack the organization’s own financial sponsors. The problem in political Washington, however, is deeper and harder than the simplistic notion that funding by itself buys a certain research result would sug¬ gest. In this author’s personal experience in working for several Washingtonbased think tanks, it has never been the case that the source of funding determines the conclusion of the research product. The larger and more impor¬ tant issue is that the think tanks generally shy away from attacking all big institutions that might be in a position to do them damage or deny them assis¬ tance: big labor as well as big business, the Congress as well as the Executive branch. In this sense, the mainstream think tanks can be thought of as preemi¬ nently political as well as scholarly oriented institutions wedded to the political motto “To get along you go along.” With the exception of think tanks on the ideological extremes—IPS and Heritage, for example—the mainstream think tanks tend to be the most supportive of U.S. policy because they understand the cross-pressure involved in the policymaking process.

CONCLUSION The academic literature on think tanks is relatively new, but what has been published so far indicates that American foreign policy is often the product of the organization, funding, and tactics of the new idea brokers in Washington. One cannot understand either the process of policymaking or the outcome with¬ out considering the role of think tanks. The end of the Cold War and the election of Bill Clinton have not changed in any significant way what we can expect from both the multipurpose and Latin America-oriented think tanks now in operation. However, think tanks must be constantly aware of the shifting polit¬ ical winds in Washington since the value of their ideas can easily vanish over¬ night with an election or major crisis. With United States domestic and foreign policy now more centrist and prag¬ matic than they have been for the past fifteen years, we can no doubt expect the major think tanks to occupy positions closer to the middle of the ideological spectrum. In the making of Latin America policy, there are now fewer intense partisan or ideological differences among the major think tanks than in the conflictual Reagan years. But since the conditions and policy needs that gave rise to the think tanks over the past thirty years are still with us, we can expect the think tanks to play a continued important role in making foreign policy in general, and Latin America policy in particular. The relative balance between them will change over time, new ones will come and go, their influence will continue to vary, and we will no doubt see new hybrids (interest groups, political parties and PACs, and research agencies in other parts of the government such as the Congressional Research Service and the General Accounting Office) that provide ideas and research analysis for policymakers. It will be both fascinating and important to an understanding of American foreign policy, and the power

Think Tanks

125

of nongovernmental organizations, to see how these newly influential actors play the power game in Washington. The primary task for future research on think tanks will be to seek better information and explanations of the policy process, particularly the nexus of major foundations, think tanks, and the Latin American policy of the United States.

NOTES 1. During the time that the author was associated with AEI in the 1980s, a memo would be circulated prior to each presidential and congressional election admonishing the scholars to keep their think tank analysis separate from their partisan activities. 2. Wiarda’s major works, as editor or single author, during the first Reagan admin¬ istration that sought a middle ground in the policy debate include the following: Human Rights and U.S. Human Rights Policy (1982), Rift and Revolution (1984), The Crisis in Central America (1982), In Search of Policy (1984), Ethnocentrism and Foreign Policy (1985), and Finding Our Way? (1987). 3. Falcoffs conservative policy analysis provided Wiarda “cover” and protection from the extreme right as well as access to the more conservative groups, while Wiarda’s centrism and establishment connections afforded Falcoff important access to new reaches of influence. 4. This background information is derived from CSIS’s annual reports and Georges Fauriol, “Think Tanks and U.S.. Foreign Policy” (1984). 5. According to Soley, The News Shapers (1992), centrist and rightist think tank representatives from the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies accounted for over 90 percent of the quotation and opinion articles in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times from 1987 to 1990 while the left-leaning think tanks (Institute for Policy Studies, Economic Policy Institute, and the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies) accounted for only 8 percent of the appearances of the six think tanks that were studied. 6. The existing research on the Institute for Policy Studies tends to draw strong ideological viewpoints when examining the role of IPS as a foreign policy think tank. One of the more balanced interpretations is Smith (1991). The account given of IPS in Dickson’s Think Tanks (1971) is laudatory while S. Steven Powell, Covert Cadre (1988), is extremely critical of IPS. Powell is a research analyst at one of the smaller think tanks—Capital Research Center—that devotes most of its work to attacking interest groups and think tanks on the left involved in foreign policy advocacy and analysis. 7. Much of the information presented here, including the following two paragraphs, is based on interviews with Wilson Center directors and staff members of the InterAmerican Dialogue, as well as participant observation. 8. Shortly after creating the Inter-American Dialogue, Lowenthal left Washington for an academic position in international relations at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. But he continued as executive director of the Dialogue. 9. Richard E. Feinberg joined the Clinton administration in 1993 as the senior mem¬ ber of the National Security Council staff on Latin America. 10. The measure of think tank influence used at AEI was based on who was reading and using its publications. For example, if country desk officers, NSC staffers, World Bank officials, or congressional staffers had AEI books and papers open and in front of

126

The U.S. Domestic Environment

them as they were writing their own memo to a cabinet official, the president, or a member of Congress, it was safely assumed that AEI, and the author of the research, had influence. That was AEI’s goal, those were its targets, and that is how it measured success. 11. Some of the following factors serve to explain the financial crunch confronting think tanks in Washington: (1) the proliferation of specialized think tanks beyond the “Big Five” during the 1980s, which means that there is now more intense competition for funding dollars; (2) changes in the tax laws in 1986 that made it less attractive for donors to continue funding think tanks; (3) changes in the orientation of corporate giving to include more funds for visible projects such as local orchestras, parks, and art galleries; (4) the end of the Cold War, which brought about a significant reduction of international programs at all the major think tanks; (5) the widespread perception of the national need to focus more on domestic policy issues than on international ones; and (6) the dramatic reduction in conflicts in Central America, which quickly put an end to that area’s era as a growth industry for Latin American policy think tanks.

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Feulner, Edwin J. 1985. Ideas, Think Tanks and Governments. Washington, D.C.: Her¬ itage Foundation. Foundation Center. 1993. Who Gets Grants, Who Gives Grants: Nonprofit Organizations and the Foundation Grants They Received. Washington, D.C.: Foundation Center. Foundation for Public Affairs. 1992. Public Interest Profiles, 1992/93. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press. t George, Alexander L. 1980. Presidential Decision-Making in Foreign Policy: The Effec¬ tive Use of Information and Advice. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Guttman, Daniel, and Barry Wilner. 1976. The Shadow Government. New York: Pan¬ theon. Herspring, Dale. 1992. “Practioners and Political Scientists.” P.S. Political Science 25 (September): 554-558. Institute for Policy Studies. 1986. Outcast Among Allies: The International Costs of Reagan’s War Against Nicaragua. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies. -. 1985. In Contempt of Congress: The Reagan Record of Deceit and Illegality on Central America. Washington, D.C.: IPS. Inter-American Dialogue. 1992. Convergence and Community: The Americas in 1993. Washington, D.C.: The Inter-American Dialogue. -. 1990. The Americas in a New World. Washington, D.C.: The Inter-American Dialogue. Kondracke, Morton. 1989. “New Kids on the Block.” The Washingtonian (December): 186-198. Kombluh, Peter. 1987. Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention. Washington, D.C.: The Institute for Policy Studies. Langemann, Ellen Condliffe. 1989. The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corpora¬ tion, Philanthropy, and Public Policy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Linden, Patricia. 1987. “Powerhouse of Policy.” Town and Country (January). Making the World Safe for America: A U.S. Foreign Policy Blueprint. 1992. Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation. National Journal. 1990. (December 15): 3010. Oppenheimer, Andres. .1993. “Think Tank Can Shape Clinton’s Latin Policy.” Miami Herald (February 1): 3A. Peschek, Joseph G. 1987. Policy-Planning Organizations. Philadelphia: Temple Univer¬ sity Press. Powell, S. Steven. 1988. Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies. Ottawa, Ill.: Green Hill. Progressive Policy Institute. 1992. Changing America: Blueprint for a New Democracy. Washington, D.C.: Progressive Policy Institute. Reeves, Richard. 1985. The Reagan Detour. New York: Simon and Schuster. Saunders, Charles B., Jr. 1966. The Brookings Institution: A Fifty Year History. Wash¬ ington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Schulzinger, Robert D. 1984. The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Bruce L. R. 1966. The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Smith, James A. 1991. The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite. New York: The Free Press.

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Snow, Donald M., and Eugene Brown. 1994. Puzzle Palaces and Foggy Bottom: U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy Policy-Making in the 1990s. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Soley, Laurence C. 1992. The News Shapers: The Sources Who Explain the News. New York: Praeger. Stevenson-Yang, Anne. 1992. “Think Tanks at Work.” Foreign Service Journal 69, No. 12 (December): 10-17. Steward, Alva W. 1987. Think Tanks: Their Role in Our Society. Monticello, Ill.: Vance Bibliographies. Stone, Peter H. 1981. “Conservative Brain Trust.” The New York Times Magazine (May

10). Sundquist, James L. 1978. “Research Brokerage: The Weak Link.” In Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., ed. Knowledge and Policy: The Uncertain Connection. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences. Watson, Cynthia. 1990. U.S. National Security Policy Groups: Institutional Profiles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Weaver, R. Kent. 1989. “The Changing World of Think Tanks.” P.S. Political Science 22 (September): 563-578. Weiss, Carol H. 1992. Organizations for Policy Analysis: Helping Government Think. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Wiarda, Howard J. 1992. American Foreign Policy toward Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s: Issues and Controversies from Reagan to Bush. New York: New York University Press. -. 1990. Foreign Policy without Illusion: How Foreign Policy Works and Fails to Work in the United States. New York: HarperCollins. -. 1987. Finding Our Way?: Toward Maturity in U.S.-Latin American Relations. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute. -. 1985. Ethnocentrism in Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World? Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute. -. 1984. In Search of Policy: The United States and Latin America. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute. -. 1982. Human Rights and United States Human Rights Policy: Theoretical Ap¬ proaches and Some Perspectives on Latin America. Washington, D.C.: The Amer¬ ican Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Wiarda, Howard J., ed. 1984. Rift and Revolution: The Central American Imbroglio. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Analysis. -. 1982. The Crisis in Central America. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute. Williams, Roger. 1988. “Mobilizing Forces.” Foundation News (March/April): 231-237. Williams, Walter. 1990. Mismanaging America: The Rise of the Anti-Analytic Presidency. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

Interest Groups David W. Dent Interest groups are key players in the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America, serving as conduits for organized interests in both the United States and Latin America. Although interest groups have long been studied as major participants in the process of domestic policymaking, particularly in their inter¬ play with the U.S. Congress, only recently has the influence of nongovernmental organizations on the formation of U.S.-Latin American policy been studied. In his textbook on U.S.-Latin American relations, Kryzanek, U.S.-Latin American Relations (1990: 128), describes a “Latin American lobbying system” com¬ posed of a diversity of groups from trade associations to human rights groups and agents of Latin American and Caribbean governments, among others. In an early assessment of President Clinton’s Latin American policy, Hakim, “Clinton and Latin America” (1993), argues that the assorted interest groups that make up the Democratic party will have a lot to say in the selection of policy choices in the 1990s. The role of interest groups in the formulation of U.S.-Latin American policy resembles a policy bazaar in which a multitude of various nongovernmental organizations tries to “sell” their issue position to government policymakers and the public on behalf of their institutional or individual clients. However, the relationship between interest groups and the American government is not a one¬ way street leading from private interests to the corridors of legislative and Ex¬ ecutive power. Government policymakers—particularly in the Executive and legislative arenas—also need interest groups to further their own policy agenda or may determine policy outcomes by refusing to “buy” a group’s demands or information at the policy bazaar. The interest groups that compete in the political marketplace must also contend with a domestic environment where the prevail¬ ing view among the American public and government officials is that Latin America and the Caribbean are not very important to the United States. In an essay on developing a new approach to north-south economic relations

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in the 1990s, Feinberg and Boylan, Modular Multilateralism (1991), argue that modular groupings—trade, environmental, human rights—have come to the bar¬ gaining table, but these actors will shift over time as issues vary and reach different levels of policy saliency. With the declining importance of ideological and security issues in the decision-making process, there is now more room for an entire montage of nonstate actors that are prime potential participants in the new system of dealing with hemispheric issues. As Feinberg and Boylan (1991: 11) stress in their essay, “Not only corporations and banks but also citizen nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on such globally significant issues as human rights and the environment are demanding seats at the [poli¬ cymaking] table.” More important for the future of U.S.-Latin American rela¬ tions is that government institutions will need NGOs in order to build a consensus on a whole range of policy issues affecting the United States and Latin America. In a more recent work, Lowenthal, “U.S. Policy Toward Latin America” (1993: 371), argues, “As strategic and security interests diminish and economic and social questions take their place, policy will be increasingly made by the pull and haul of advocacy, negotiation, and compromise [among a wide diversity of competing groups].” What this means is that the policymaking environment will become increasingly fragmented and easier to penetrate to affect Latin American policy issues. One of the weaknesses in the current academic literature on U.S.-Latin Amer¬ ican relations is that interest groups are frequently left out of the analysis of the policymaking process. In Whirlpool, Pastor (1992) calls for a fresh approach to Latin America but tends to ignore the important domestic forces that have an impact on Congress and the presidency in the formulation of policy. Lowenthal, in Partners in Conflict (1990), also argues that the United States needs to move away from its preoccupation with national security and from policies driven by attitudes of intervention and dominance to a more cooperative relationship based on self-confidence and trust. However, the role of nongovernmental organiza¬ tions in defining this new relationship is neglected, despite the fact that each of the issues that Lowenthal examines—human rights, immigration, trade, invest¬ ment, democratization, environment, and development—carries an intrinsic in¬ terest for many organized groups in the United States. The same problem is evident in an edited work by Martz, United States Policy in Latin America (1988: xvii), who acknowledges the importance of think tanks and policy centers in the foreign policy process but fails to treat nongovern¬ mental organizations in the rest of the volume. In another edited volume, Hartlyn, Schoultz, and Varas, The United States and Latin America in the 1990s (1992: 7), argue that in the aftermath of the Cold War, key issues in U.S.-Latin American relations “are likely to involve both a bewildering array of official participants and a widespread number of nongovernmental interest groups and associations, each of which represents some interest in U.S. society.” Important shifts in the nature of debates over Latin American policy are discussed by many

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of the authors in this volume, but interest groups and associations are not in¬ cluded in the analysis of the policymaking process. It is also revealing that in an earlier study, Bloomfield, “Who Makes American Foreign Policy?” (1972), does not include domestic interest groups in his analysis of U.S.-Latin American policy with the exception of a few multinational corporations with investments in coffee and petroleum. Despite some of the severe gaps in the current literature' dealing with the question of who makes U.S.-Latin American policy, there is no doubt of the growing importance of interest groups in foreign policy decision making.

INTEREST GROUPS: WHAT ROLES DO THEY PLAY IN THE POLICY PROCESS? Interest groups are organizations that seek to influence policy in both domestic and foreign policy domains. There is no clear line of separation between interest groups and think tanks, but, in general, think tanks attempt to influence the policymaking process through their research, seminars, publications, and public fora; interest groups focus their energy on lobbying, grass-roots organizing, co¬ alition formation, informational packets, and liaison with nongovernmental or¬ ganizations in Latin America. The major think tanks that focus on Latin American policy are mostly on the right, or center-right, ideologically, in con¬ trast to interest groups—particularly those concerned with human rights, peace, and antiinterventionism—that are predominantly on the left. Finally, think tanks tend to have larger budgets than interest groups and hence have more resources to affect policy. There are generally two types of interest groups—institutional and member¬ ship—classified according to whether they represent other organizations or in¬ dividuals, either in the United States or in Latin America. For example, the Council of the Americas (COA) represents over 225 leading multinational busi¬ ness organizations with extensive investments in Latin America and the Carib¬ bean. Lawyers and PR firms often represent Latin American and Caribbean governments and private associations as well as numerous domestic groups with interests in Latin America. The Cuban American National Committee (CANF) has over 54,000 members and can effectively pressure legislators, bureaucrats, and public officials on behalf of their membership. Whether institutional or individual membership groups, interest groups serve various functions in the policy process: representative, informational, ideological, economic, coalition building, and program monitoring. We can now turn to an examination of these key functions.

Representation Latin American policy groups serve to link the concerns of public and private interests to the machinery of government. Representation is taking place when

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

a group official testifies before a congressional subcommittee, a group advertises in a major newspaper or on television, or a group sends out a newsletter or mailogram requesting a letter or call to a member of Congress, the White House, or some other government agency. According to Stone, in Republic at Risk (1990: 124), “Groups link the interests of ordinary citizens to government, and they help citizens understand how government activity affects their interests. They reduce information costs and they mobilize citizens for political action.” During the 1980s a broad range of religious interest groups lobbied against Reagan administration policies—contra aid, military aid to El Salvador and Gua¬ temala—on behalf of their church members. Hertzke, Representing God in Washington (1988: 132), points out that the more liberal church lobbies served both as a “voice for the voiceless” in Central America and as a conduit for the large segment of the American public who were “anxious about, or opposed to, Reagan administration policies in the region.” WOLA provided valuable information to congressional committees and its members during the 1980s to counter Reagan administration rhetoric and programs in Central America. Individuals concerned with U.S. policies that support Latin American dictators and governments that violate human rights have joined human rights organiza¬ tions to have their views and criticisms communicated to public officials. A growing industry of Washington representatives and public relations firms has sprouted up to disseminate information on behalf of foreign governments seek¬ ing to influence U.S. aid and trade policy and to counter human rights accusa¬ tions. Mexico has mounted a major campaign in Washington to “sell” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Congress and the American peo¬ ple. Davis, “Mexico Mounts a Massive Lobbying Campaign to Sell North American Trade Accord in U.S.” (1993: A18), shows the extent of the Mexican lobbying effort to counter critics of NAFTA. Mexico’s pro-NAFTA lobbying campaign on behalf of the Mexican government and industry is far larger than any foreign lobbying campaign carried out in Washington during the past twenty-five years.

Information

Interest groups with a stake in U.S. policy toward Latin America disseminate information on matters of interest to their members (individual or institutional) and to policymakers. The business/trade, human rights, and environmental lob¬ bies function to provide reliable information to their members and government policymakers by way of newsletters, investigative reports, and other kinds of specialized publications. In an empirical study of the perceptions, interests, and related strategies of U.S. business personnel in Central America, Purcell, “The Perceptions and Interests of U.S. Business in Relation to the Crisis in Central America” (1982: 119), contends, “Groups such as the Council of the Americas are mainly information sources rather than lobbyists per se.” During the Carter administration, the council drew up a position paper—“Toward Realism in

Interest Groups

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Western Hemisphere Relations: A U.S. Foreign Policy for Latin America and the Caribbean”—calling for expanded trade and investment and a sincere com¬ mitment to supporting democracies and then presented it to the State Department for consideration.

Ideology Many interest groups concerned with Latin America and the Caribbean pursue noneconomic or ideological policy goals. The heart of what is known as the Cuba lobby, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), pursues U.S. government policies designed to bring about the end to the dictatorship of Fidel Castro in Cuba. To that end, CANF played a key role in the creation of Radio and T.V. Marti and the development of the Cuban Democracy Act, signed into law in late 1992 and designed to tighten further the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. Forsythe and Welch, ‘‘Joining and Supporting Public Interest Groups” (1983), point out that those who join and support human rights groups do so, not in a rational pursuit of self-interest, but largely for political and ideological reasons. Many of the individuals who joined and supported pro-contra organi¬ zations during the Reagan years did so on the basis of an intense ideological commitment and feelings of responsibility and solidarity. Amson and Brenner, ‘‘The Limits of Lobbying” (1993), point out that the 76,000 members of Citi¬ zens for Reagan, a pro-contra grass-roots organization, paid twenty-five dollars each to the organization but received no premiums, newsletters, or other material incentives to become members, only an ideological sense of being able to sup¬ port the president’s Nicaragua policy. In a conceptually oriented monograph, Trice, Interest Groups and the Foreign Policy Process (1976), argues that ideological compatibility between an interest group and policymakers tends to enhance the group’s legitimacy and its ability to influence government actors. Fernandez, ‘‘From Little Havana to Washington, D.C.” (1987: 129), points that a large part of the ability of CANF to shape U.S.-Cuba policy is based on “ideological congruence” with the Executive branch of government. Moreover, ideological congruence had a lot to do with President Reagan’s “purge” of “liberals” from the Latin American bureau at State and in the appointment of numerous Cuban-Americans to key foreign policy positions during the 1980s.

Economic Economic or material goals naturally loom large in the aims of many business, trade association, and union groups concerned with U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. The express purpose of the Council of the Americas, Car¬ ibbean/Latin American Action, Association of American Chambers of Com¬ merce in Latin America, and trade unions affiliated with the AFL/CIO is to further the economic interests of their members. One of the early studies to

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

examine the influence of interest groups on foreign policymaking, Cohen, The Influence of Non-Governmental Groups on Foreign Policy-Making (1959), found that the most effective interest groups are economic—business, trade, and labor—largely because they have a lot to gain or lose financially when certain policies are implemented. Interest groups whose major purpose is economic will normally have considerably more money to spend to influence policy than peace and human rights groups, who often depend on small individual contributions. For example, the 1992 budget for the Council of the Americas was $2.75 mil¬ lion, in contrast to only $550,000 for WOLA for the same year. Coalition Building Interest groups can be distinguished from think tanks by the fact that they are much more likely to engage in coalition formation to fulfill their political goals. Schlozman and Tierney, Organized. Interests and American Democracy (1986: 48), point out that virtually all interest groups in Washington “enter into coalitions of varying degrees of formality, homogeneity, and durability when it is deemed necessary or politically expedient for them to concert their activities in joint pursuit of shared goals.” In his conceptual framework to explain the role of interest groups in the foreign policy process, Trice (1976) stresses the fact that enlisting the aid of other groups is important to broadening a group’s base of support among the general public and to increasing its numerical rep¬ resentation and legitimacy. It is more difficult for members of Congress to ignore the preferences of a coalition than of a single interest group. Interest groups that formed around the contra issue in the 1980s relied on coalitions to prevail in the battle over congressional aid. Citizens for Reagan played the central role of coordinating strategy for the informal pro-contra coalition of more than fifty independent groups. The Central American Lobby Group (later the Central American Working Group) formed the nerve center of the anti-contra aid coa¬ lition, a network of over one hundred organizations intent on influencing U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. The Clinton administration confronted a plethora of interest group coalitions aligned on either the pro-NAFTA or anti-NAFTA side of the free trade agree¬ ment with Mexico prior to its passage by Congress in late 1993. Stokes, “Mex¬ ican Roulette” (1993), discusses the complex process of policymaking on NAFTA, including the pro- and anti-NAFTA forces in the House and Senate and the role of interest groups in the treaty debate. The battle for NAFTA demonstrated both the difficulty of making the trade pact a salient issue for the American people and the expanding influence of interest groups on foreign pol¬ icy. Program Monitoring Interest groups not only seek to have a say in the creation of laws and reg¬ ulations, but often find it necessary to monitor a law or regulation after it has

Interest Groups

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been implemented. Human rights groups spend a lot of energy tracking the compliance of Latin American governments with the human rights provisions of U.S. aid policies. The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), after playing a pivotal role in the creation of the Torricelli Bill aimed at tightening the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, now spends a good deal of time monitoring the implementation of the Cuban Democracy Act. Major environmental groups ' monitor the lending policies of the multinational banks to ensure their commit¬ ment to a healthy environment south of the border. What this means in the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America is that interest groups often forge close alliances with key governmental policymakers.

THE RISE OF LATIN AMERICAN POLICY INTEREST GROUPS It is only within the last thirty years that organized private interests have come to play an important role in the process of making policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. With the exception of some interest in Latin Amer¬ ica by the business and labor lobbies and multinational corporations, before 1960 nongovernmental organizations played a very minor role in creating and imple¬ menting Latin American policy. It was largely the product of the Executive and congressional branches of government, particularly the Department of State and U.S. embassies in the region and the more powerful U.S. corporations with financial interests in the Western Hemisphere. According to Hartlyn, Schoultz, and Varas, eds. (1992: 6), “Until World War II, U.S. policy toward Latin Amer¬ ica was made by no more than two dozen men, and on most issues the number of policymakers was less than half that size.” The few cases where private interests became involved in the formulation of Latin American policy centered on powerful lawyers acting on behalf of wealthy foreign clients. Moreover, the pre-Vietnam War policymaking process was made considerably easier by the fact that a broad elite consensus existed on the principal goals and objectives of U.S. foreign policy. Today, the policymaking process involves a bazaarlike quality with more participants (governmental and nongovernmental), a diversity of wants and objectives, and greater opportunities for affecting policy outcomes. This “democratization” of policymaking has made the process more open, but policymakers are now complaining of input overload because of expanding in¬ terest group pressure and constraints. Several studies of interest groups and foreign policy have recognized the broad changes that have taken place in the nature of interest group politics. Uslaner, “A Tower of Babel on Foreign Policy?” (1991), explains the prolif¬ eration of interest groups on the basis of three factors: First, the growing inter¬ dependence of the world economy has increased the volume of domestic groups in foreign policymaking. Second, the civil rights movement, U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende, and the Vietnam War contributed to the formation of numerous ideological interest groups ready to challenge the ad-

136

The U.S. Domestic Environment

ministration and Congress. Many religious and secular organizations emerged to influence U.S. policy in Central America during the 1980s because of the killing of priests and nuns and the massive human rights violations. Third, for¬ eign governments have become increasingly active in lobbying the White House and Congress. Current ambassadors of Latin American and Caribbean countries based in Washington have had to spend more time expanding their expertise on trade, environment, immigration, and investment issues and improving their knowledge of the policy process than their predecessors. Three of the major human rights interest groups concerned with U.S.-Latin American policy—Washington Office on Latin America, Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights, and Americas Watch—were founded between 1974 and 1981 when military-authoritarian governments were engaged in massive human rights violations throughout the region. According to Joe Eldridge, director of the Washington office of the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights,

The church groups that took on the cause of human rights in the 1970s were aglow from the victories of the civil rights battles of the 1960s, anti-Vietnam War straggles, and the Watergate corruption scandals. Latin America was a graveyard of democracies, and hu¬ man rights violations were rampant throughout the hemisphere. The Washington Office on Latin America, for example, was a product of that period. Human rights interest groups were more galvanized then; today there is no consensus among the many groups concerned with Latin American policy. Nevertheless, non-governmental human rights groups that came of age in the decade of the 1970s are now a permanent part of the policymaking fabric like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). This means that human rights must be considered across a range of policy concerns in dealing with Latin America, not just the amount of economic and military aid during the 1960s and 1970s.1

In a brief descriptive treatment of six major nongovernmental human rights organizations, Ray and Taylor, “The Role of Nongovernmental Organizations in Implementing Human Rights in Latin America” (1977), describe their his¬ tory, organizational characteristics, and strategies for promoting human rights. They argue that “prior to 1973 NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] consid¬ ered the United States Congress to be apathetic toward international human rights” (497), but this changed during the Carter administration, which played a major role in the stimulation of human rights organizations. The literature devoted to an examination of Carter’s efforts in the area of human rights still elicits controversy over the consistency with which it was applied throughout the world. Muravchik’s The Uncertain Crusade (1986) not only attacks Carter’s foreign policy inconsistencies but claims his human rights policy produced fewer gains than losses for U.S. geopolitical interests. During the 1970s, the executive branch of government was joined by Con¬ gress in dealing with human rights. Crabb and Holt, Invitation to Struggle (1991: 232), examine the twin threads of human rights and democracy as they relate to Executive and congressional policymaking, pointing out that “Congress got

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into the human rights arena—or briar patch, as some would call it—because of its concern about U.S. identification with the excesses of Latin American dic¬ tators.” In the process of trying to globalize a foreign policy based on human rights considerations, Congress tried to reshape the foreign aid program to in¬ clude human rights sanctions and enacted a number of ad hoc provisions directed at specific countries such as El Salvador and South Africa. During the Reagan ' administration, human rights policy was expanded to include the promotion of democracy through an organization called the National Endowment for Democ¬ racy (NED) in 1983. (For the important connection between NED and interest groups, see Cohn and Nojeim’s Chapter 18, “Promoting Democracy,” in this volume). Congressional assertiveness over human rights, democratization, and intelli¬ gence oversight powers in the 1970s opened the door for interest groups in¬ volved with U.S.-Latin American policy. According to Amson, Crossroads (1989), two amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 served to link human rights issues to U.S. aid legislation. The first piece of legislation, spon¬ sored by Representative Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and passed into law in 1975, stated that countries engaged in “gross violations” of human rights would not receive economic aid unless it would directly benefit needy people. The second sought to prohibit military aid to human rights violators, unless the president could certify that such aid was somehow vital to U.S. national security interests. Congress’s efforts to reform the intelligence community led to the adoption of the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which prohibited the CIA from engaging in cov¬ ert activities without a presidential finding and “timely” notification of the appropriate committees in Congress of the executive order. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment was less important in explaining the rise of human rights groups interested in Latin America than the Harkin Amendment, but the principal force behind the legislation was the saliency of antiinterventionism in the United States during the 1970s.

TYPES OF INTEREST GROUPS AND U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICY A wide variety of interest groups now engage in efforts to influence U.S.Latin American policy. With over $77 billion in total U.S. private investment in Latin America and the Caribbean in 1991, some of the most powerful interest groups are economic in their organizational makeup and policy goals. According to O’Connor and Sabato, American Government (1993: 531), “Groups that mo¬ bilize to protect particular economic interests generally are the most fully and effectively organized of all the types of interest groups. They exist to make profits and to obtain economic benefits for their members.” The major nongov¬ ernmental organizations that have economic interests in Latin America and the Caribbean and seek to influence the U.S. government on behalf of their insti¬ tutional members include the Council of the Americas, the Association of Amer-

138

The U.S. Domestic Environment

ican Chambers of Commerce in Latin America (AACCLA), Caribbean/Latin American Action (C/LAA), AFL-CIO (Department of International Affairs), and the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Washington rep¬ resentatives who lobby on behalf of foreign clients would also fit into this cat¬ egory since Latin American governments that pay enormous sums of money for this service expect to “profit” by more U.S. aid or more open markets for Latin American commercial products. Political scientists categorize groups that are not particularly motiviated by selfish considerations as public-interest groups that focus on a single issue. They include human rights groups, church groups, peace groups, environmental groups, groups concerned with immigration from Latin America and the Car¬ ibbean, and a whole host of liberal and conservative groups that have mobilized around such major U.S. policies as the Panama Canal Treaties and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It is clear that the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America is no longer the sole domain of the president, Congress, and the State Department. The following categories of interest groups will be examined in this section: business/trade, labor, human rights, Hispanics, the Cuba lobby, Washington representatives and public relations (PR) firms, and the immigration/refugee lobby.

Business/Trade Lobby The relationship between corporate America and the formulation of U.S.Latin American policy has always carried significant weight, although U.S. in¬ vestment in the region has fluctuated over the years. The organizational scope and strength of the business/trade lobby mean that the opinions and policy po¬ sitions of corporate leaders cannot be easily ignored by members of the Exec¬ utive branch or Congress. One of the early studies to examine the role of private groups on the formulation of American foreign policy—Cohen (1959)—found that the most effective interest groups are economic because they are more closely connected with domestic political and economic reality and have a lot to gain or lose financially from certain kinds of policies. Furthermore, business/ trade interests carry more legitimacy than peace or human rights groups because they are considered less radical and more realistic. The impact of the Council of the Americas on U.S.-Latin American policy in the late 1970s is examined by Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1981: 69), who claims that the council is the only component of the Latin America-related lobby which ‘ ‘holds a completely unrivaled ability to represent its opinions to government decision makers.” The Council of the Americas derives its influence over policymaking from (1) the high-level political contacts it provides its corporate members, (2) its expertise in understanding the poli¬ cymaking process, (3) its sophisticated lobbying techniques, (4) its close con¬ tacts/briefings with congressional staff members, and (5) its care in picking Latin American policy issues. Nevertheless, Schoultz (1981: 70) argues that the coun-

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cil s major impact on U.S.—Latin American policy has been less in achieving specific policy ends than in ‘ ‘encouraging within the government an ideological bias in favor of a government policy supporting private investment in Latin America. The business lobby often worked to decrease the influence of human rights interest groups because they often feared a loss of markets and invest¬ ments. In a more recent analysis of the impact of U.S. business on Latin American democracy, Cobbs, “U.S. Business” (1991: 124), finds that throughout “the post-World War II period business has frequently evidenced a stronger com¬ mitment to consistent, constructive relations with Latin America than has the U.S. government.” In discussing the origins and purpose of the Council of the Americas, Cobbs (1991: 139) points out that it prefers to operate as a clearing¬ house for business perspectives than as a lobby per se. Although there are ex¬ ceptions to U.S. business neutrality and adaptability in Latin America—United Fruit (Guatemala), the International Petroleum Company (Peru), and ITT (Chile)—Cobbs (1991:142) argues that the protection of business is comple¬ mentary to policy and is a decidedly secondary goal of U.S. policy. In fact, both the Council of the Americas and the AACCLA were founded in the 1960s to counteract the excesses of United Fruit and International Petroleum Corporation (IPC) by establishing a code of conduct for American business in Latin America. The Council and AACCLA were strong supporters of the North American Free Trade Agreement but maintained a low profile during the congressional debates out of fear that NAFTA would be perceived as a boon to big business alone. AACCLA was usually considered a more active and liberal lobby group than the Council of the Americas during the late 1970s and early 1980s, often taking stands against the more conservative elements in the policymaking process. “Its favored strategy,” according to Schoultz (1981: 73), “was to bring members to Washington for private talks with executive branch officials.” According to Cobbs (1991: 139), under the directorship of Keith Miceli, “AACCLA was probably the most active business lobby intervening directly with Congress and the president with regard to U.S.-Latin American relations.” Another part of the business/trade lobby is the Caribbean/Latin American Action (C/LAA), founded in 1980 to promote private-sector-generated economic development in the Caribbean and Latin America. C/LAA helped to draft the Caribbean Basin Initiative during the first Reagan administration and has been a strong supporter of an expanded NAFTA, to include the Caribbean Basin, Venezuela, and Colombia, and of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and has lobbied to minimize the negative impact of the United States/OAS embargo on the Haitian private sector after the coup that toppled Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991. According to Matlack, “Lobbying, PR War over Policy on Haiti” (1992), C/LAA was instrumental in 1992 in persuading the State Department to ease up on the embargo because of its impact on U.S. companies operating in Haiti. Elliott Abrams, former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was a board member of C/LAA and formed part of the lobby team that pressured

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

the White House and the State Department to modify the embargo against Haiti. C/LAA’s method of operation is quite varied, but it frequently provides con¬ gressional testimony, lobbies Congress and the Executive, and works in coalition with the Americas Society, AACCLA, and the Council of the Americas. Its popular Miami Conference attracts over two thousand private sector and gov¬ ernment leaders from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean (with the exception of Cuba and Haiti).

Labor Lobby United States labor and labor unions have long taken an interest in govern¬ ment policies toward Latin America, particularly with regard to issues that have an impact on the job market in the United States. The AFL-CIO, the major labor confederation in the United States, lobbied for the Panama Canal Treaties during the Carter administration, legislation to halt illegal immigration into the United States, and protectionist trade legislation and helped to promote a union move¬ ment in Latin America that is anticommunist and pro-United States. But the AFL-CIO has consistently opposed maquiladora assembly plants in Mexico and elsewhere and employer-created “company” unions known as solidarismo as¬ sociations in Central America. Recently, the AFL-CIO has been a major part of the opposition coalition to the NAFTA with Mexico, made up of labor, envi¬ ronmental, and human rights groups. In Kryzanek’s (1990: 139) treatment of the labor lobby he points out that ‘ ‘the AFL-CIO has been a frequent critic of investment policies promoted by federal agencies such as the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Council, which encourage U.S. busi¬ nesses to shift their operations to Latin America where labor costs are cheap.” The literature on the role of the labor lobby in U.S.-Latin American policy¬ making has focused on the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), one of the four international affairs institutes of the AFL-CIO founded in 1962. AIFLD serves as an organizational vehicle for U.S. labor’s participation in U.S. foreign aid programs in Latin America, at the same time encouraging noncommunist trade unions throughout the hemisphere. Spalding, “Solidarity Forever?” (1989), is a critical review essay of six recent works on U.S. labor foreign policy focusing on Central America. Spalding’s (1989: 255) criticism of AIFLD is based on his assertion that it is nothing more than a “formal arm of U.S. foreign policy rather than a labor organization helping Central American workers organize to improve their lives or exercise basic rights.” Robinson, A Faustian Bargain (1992), provides a detailed account of AIFLD’s role in un¬ dermining Sandinista support among Nicaraguan workers, including its close working relationship with the State Department, the AFL-CIO, NED, and the Central Intelligence Agency. In a brief treatment of the history, objectives, and decision-making structure of the AFL-CIO’s “free labor” institutes, Sims, Workers of the World Undermined (1992: 56), notes that “AIFLD and its Latin American allies participated in CIA-backed destabilizations of democratically

Interest Groups

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elected governments in various countries, including the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Guyana.” A much more sympathetic view of AIFLD is offered in Taft, Defending Free¬ dom (1973: 219), in which the author claims that “no one has ever provided evidence that AIFLD has received CIA funds,” and the Dockerly report failed to find any undisclosed AIFLD funding or secret agreements. In a more recent ' and balanced treatment of the role of U.S. organized labor in U.S.-Latin Amer¬ ican policy, Buchanan, “The Impact of U.S. Labor” (1991: 166), argues, “After years of allowing myopic and reflexive antitotalitarianism to dictate its political approach toward labor developments in Latin America, U.S. labor has recently shifted toward a more neutral and flexible prodemocratic stance.” Buchanan claims that AIFLD did act as a CIA front during the height of the Cold War but that its more recent political shift means that it is only one of many vehicles and instruments of U.S. labor’s Latin American policy.

Human Rights Lobby The human rights lobby is made up of a number of nongovernmental organ¬ izations, headquartered in Washington and New York, that have played a key role in U.S.-Latin American policy since the Nixon-Kissinger era, opposing policies that supported military-authoritarian governments that engaged in mas¬ sive human rights violations. Once Central America became the focus of atten¬ tion during the Reagan era, the human rights lobby grew substantially, often monitoring human rights legislation, foreign assistance programs, and democ¬ ratization efforts in the region. Four human rights interest groups—Amnesty International, Americas Watch Committee, the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights, and the Washington Office on Latin America—dominated the congres¬ sional debate over U.S.-Central American policy during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Schoultz (1981) is one of the early efforts to examine the origin and ideology of Washington-based interest groups and U.S.-Latin American policy up through the Carter administration. Many of the leaders of the human rights lobby came from the religious groups in the United States with a commitment to what Schoultz calls liberal pluralism; they were not the radical Marxists their adver¬ saries believed them to be. Writing in the beginning of the 1980s, Shoultz finds the following characteristics of nongovernmental human rights organizations: (1) the business lobby, and Washington law and public relations firms, often worked to decrease the influence of human rights considerations in foreign pol¬ icymaking; (2) the human rights lobby devoted most of its time to Congress instead of the Executive by a ratio of four to one because Congress is more amenable to private group influence; (3) interest groups played a major role in creating legislation to monitor and enforce human rights considerations during the 1970s; (4) the human rights lobby possessed an “extremely sophisticated understanding” of the process of making U.S.-Latin American policy; and (5)

142

The U.S. Domestic Environment

the main source of human rights groups’ influence is the quality of their infor¬ mation about human rights violations in Latin America. The Cold War undermined the efforts of human rights interest groups to create a foreign policy based on moral principles and the rule of law, although several legislative and administrative victories were attained during the Carter and Rea¬ gan presidencies. According to Schoultz (1981: 108), “Whenever competing values—anticommunism, the balance of payments, corporate profits, national security—entered the dispute over United States policy toward human rights violators, the influence of human rights lobbyists decreased rapidly.” Although most of the human rights groups are seen as legitimate by U.S. government policymakers, they are frequently at a disadvantage in the policymaking process because they rarely make campaign contributions, are small in membership and lacking in regional scope, are mainly leftist in ideological orientation, and, unlike business and environmental groups, often promote unpopular foreign causes. Some of the more recent studies of the human rights lobby have had a com¬ parative perspective. Livezey, Nongovernmental Organizations and the Ideas of Human Rights (1988), investigates the international human rights programs of thirteen American nongovernmental organizations, with particular emphasis on the functions they perform, the types of rights they advocate, the victims they defend, the violators they confront, and the strategies they employ to achieve their objectives. In a study that emphasizes litigation as a strategy for enforcing human rights, Tolley, “Interest Group Litigation to Enforce Human Rights,” (1990), argues that human rights litigation can be successful when there are congressional authorization, Executive approval, vulnerable defendants, and re¬ sponsive judges, but litigation as a strategy is difficult because courts rarely want to challenge the president or to change U.S. policy toward another gov¬ ernment. Yale University now has a program in international human rights law where students litigate actual cases, for example, lawsuits seeking damages from the former leaders of Guatemala and Haiti for torturing opponents and blocking deportation of those who wanted to enter the United States.

Central American Lobby The political upheavals in El Salvador and Nicaragua at the end of the 1970s quickly brought Central America to the forefront of American foreign policy and spawned hundreds of nongovernmental organizations on the right and left of the ideological spectrum. In his personal account of his struggle with leftist guerrillas and rightist oligarchs, Jose Napoleon Duarte, Duarte: My Story (1986), claims that WOLA tried to set up a meeting with him and Washington policy¬ makers in 1977 but the only member on Capitol Hill willing to see him was Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and all he got from the White House was a quick hand¬ shake from Vice President Walter Mondale. According to Durate (1986: 96), ‘ ‘It was not until after the Sandinista guerrillas marched victoriously into Ma-

Interest Croups

143

nagua in July 1979 that any U.S. government official tried to reach me to discuss the problems of El Salvador.” Several efforts have been made to measure the size and strength of the interest groups that formed around U.S. policy in Central America during the 1980s. Cohen and Rogers, Rules of the Game (1986: 44), claim that the Central Amer¬ ican Movement (CAM) in opposition to Reagan administration policies “com- ' prised ... roughly 850 different support groups and organizations, operating in 50 states.” These included various solidarity organizations, more than three hundred churches and synagogues involved in the Sanctuary Movement, 80,000 members of the Pledge of Resistance opposed to military involvement in Central America, and several dozen peace and human rights organizations. The prolif¬ eration and influence of interest groups—both on the left and on the right— concerned with El Salvador in the early 1980s are examined in Keller, “Interest Groups Focus on El Salvador Policy” (1982), and Madison, “Rapidly Changing Times Keep Central American Lobbyists on Their Toes” (1984). The Methodist Building in Washington—located strategically across from the Capitol—was at the center of opposition to U.S. policy, housing an eclectic group of religious denominations concerned with human rights violations in the region. The interest groups and think tanks on the left that formed the majority of opposition to Reagan administration policy included Washington Office on Latin America, Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, Council on Hemispheric Af¬ fairs, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Americans for Democratic Ac¬ tion, Amnesty International, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. The business lobby split on the issue of U.S. policy toward El Salvador. The Council of the Americas and C/LAA either remained “neutral” or chose not to get involved in human rights and peace debates. AACCLA supported Reagan administration policy, often arranging for Salvadoran businessmen to meet with congressional and Executive branch policymakers and to testify at hearings on Capitol Hill. Other interest groups on the right such as the Institute for Religion and Democracy and AIFLD were generally supportive of administration policy. Keller (1982: 900) points out, “While groups on the right have personal pipe¬ lines into the administration, they have not been able to mobilize the sort of public outpouring they orchestrated in the Panama Canal and SALT debates.” The contra aid policies of the Reagan administration spawned hundreds of groups that participated in the debate over Nicaragua. Johnson, “Congress and Contra Aid, 1986-1987” (1989), examines the Executive-congressional struggle over contra aid, pointing out that what occurred was a strange debate in Con¬ gress that focused more on “political images” and domestic political advantage than any rational attempt to forge a coherent and legitimate policy toward Nic¬ aragua. In a study based on transactional analysis, Amson and Brenner, “The Limits of Lobbying” (1993), study the roots of anti-contra interest groups, the differences between the strategies of anti- and pro-contra groups, and the sig¬ nificance of nonethnic interest groups for understanding theories of group be-

144

The U.S. Domestic Environment

havior in general. Those interest groups in opposition to contra aid faced more obstacles in trying to influence the policymaking process than did the groups aligned with Reagan and his supporters. For example, the Reagan administration gave inordinate assistance to the pro-contra side, labeling Nicaragua a com¬ munist regime, and the domestic salience of anticommunism worked to the ad¬ vantage of those groups in favor of aid to the Nicaraguan contras. The struggle inside Congress to fashion an alternative policy toward Nica¬ ragua is examined in a case study of presidential-congressional relations in Bren¬ ner and LeoGrande, “Congress and Nicaragua” (1991), looking at periods of conflict and the factors that contributed to the emergence of an alternative policy in Congress. Pro- and anti-contra interest groups played a role in shifting votes and winning coalitions, but contra opponents inside and outside Congress were clearly limited in their ability to create an alternate policy. The divisive nature of the contra aid issue and the interest group strategies during crucial votes are examined in Felton, “Contra-Aid Denial Shifts Burden to Democrats” (1988a), and Felton, “Contra Vote May Not Be Clear Test After All” (1988b). The Central America lobby also involved efforts of various insurgent groups and governments to influence Central American policy, including aid to El Sal¬ vador and the contras. Cooper, “Third World Insurgent Groups Learning to Play the Washington Lobbying Game” (1986), discusses the contra represen¬ tation strategy, noting that Bosco Matamoros served as a full-time contra rep¬ resentative in Washington, having registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. In a small office on Connecticut Avenue, Matamoros lobbied for the contra cause by arranging meetings with policymakers on key committees on Capitol Hill and foreign policy strategists in the White House. With a $400,000 monthly stipend, contra leaders were able to lobby Congress for mil¬ itary aid and push the contra cause in the United States, Latin America, and Western Europe. Until the bipartisan accord to provide only humanitarian aid to the contras in early 1989, U.S. funding allowed the contra leaders to operate offices in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Venezuela; publish a costly magazine; broadcast Radio Liberation; and support close to two hundred em¬ ployees on the resistance payroll.

Hispanic Lobby The influence of Hispanics on U.S.-Latin American policy is limited by di¬ versity and fragmentation and the small number (twenty) of representatives in Congress of Hispanic heritage. Approximately 22 million people of Hispanic background reside in the United States. The Cubans are the most powerful po¬ litically but they make up only 5 percent of all Hispanics; are concentrated in Florida, New Jersey, and New York; and focus most of their attention on Cuba with little interest in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. MexicanAmericans make up the largest group of Hispanics in the United States with approximately 60 percent, but they tend to be less wealthy than other Hispanics,

Interest Croups

145

are much less politically active, and are more concerned with domestic than foreign policy issues. Until recently, Mexicans have stayed out of politics be¬ cause many are not citizens and fear that open political involvment will activate anti-Mexican feelings on immigration. Puerto Ricans make up 12 percent of the Hispanic population but are divided over the status of their homeland and have little interest in coordinating lobby strategies with other Hispanic groups, whom' they resent for their greater, on average, earning power. The rest of the hemi¬ sphere—Central and South Americans—make up about 11 percent of the His¬ panic population but have very little influence over U.S. domestic or foreign policy. The major issues relating to the homeland of most Hispanics—Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba—foster much less attention among the public and poli¬ cymakers than U.S. activity in the Middle East and Europe. Efforts to understand the role of ethnicity and U.S. foreign policy have found that organizational and political factors have a great deal to do with ethnic group success. In an edited volume on Ethnicity and U.S. Foreign Policy (1978) Said argues that five factors determine the political success of ethnic-based interest groups: (1) importance as a pivotal voting bloc, (2) campaign contributions, (3) control over labor or the media, (4) degree of group solidarity, and (5) support of foreign policies that are not discordant with American interests. Ahrari, ed., Ethnic Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987), feels that ethnic group success in the policymaking bazaar is the result of advocating a policy in line with American strategic interests, being assimilated into American society but with some identification with the “old country,” and homogeneity within the ethnic group. These characteristics fit Cuban-Americans better than others of Hispanic heritage in the United States. The early studies of Mexican-Americans during the Carter administration were not optimistic about Chicanos’ becoming a powerful lobby along with other ethnic groups. De la Garza, “Chicanos and U.S. Foreign Policy” (1980), provides a critical examination of the possibility of a Chicano lobby, arguing that Mexican-Americans are not likely to be in a position to have much impact on U.S. policy toward Mexico because they meet none of the criteria for ethnic influence over foreign policy set forth by Said (1978). Rendon, “Latinos” (1981), is more sanguine about the ability of Latinos to influence U.S.-Latin American policy, largely because of the increase in Hispanic influence that took place inside the Carter administration. This argument is countered by de la Garza, “U.S. Foreign Policy and the Mexican American Political Agenda” (1987: 107), who discusses the role that Mexican-Americans will have in the foreign policy process. The logical point for Mexican-Americans to influence American foreign policy is over the issue of immigration, but he argues that “Mexican-Americans voice little concern about it.” Although the Hispanic population is far larger than the Jewish population in the United States, its weakness as a foreign policy lobby (with the exception of Cubans) can be attributed to its low level of political participation, its conflicting views of Latin American policy issues, and its indifference to providing political

146

The U.S. Domestic Environment

action committee (PAC) funds to congressional candidates. The complexity and political ambiguity of Latinos in the United States are examined in a NACLA Report on the Americas, “Roots of Empowerment” (1992), in which the prob¬ lem for Latinos is that they are made up of large congeries of different, often divided interests rather than a small united faction with single issue policy goals. Latinos in general lack political clout, but their numbers are growing slowly in Congress and increased trade relations with Latin America may eventually spawn a more powerful Hispanic lobby in Washington.

Cuba Lobby The Cuban-American community warrants special attention because it is the most powerful of Latino groups with an interest in U.S. policy toward Latin America. The power of the Cuba lobby is a product of bipartisan opposition to Castro’s Cuba; the wealth of Cuban-Americans and their concentration in key electoral college states; the political entrepreneurship of Jorge Mas Canosa, leader of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF); and the relative ineffectiveness of an organized opposition to the anti-Castro Cubans, who have been able to dictate and guide U.S. policy. Robbins, “Dateline Washington” (1992), offers a good account of the locus of political power of the Cuban lobby in the aftermath of the success of the Cuban Democracy Act in 1992, arguing that before the early 1980s, Cuban-Americans simply had no organized voice in Washington and made little effort to influence U.S. policy by using conven¬ tional methods. The genesis of CANF within the inner circle of the first Reagan administration is detailed by Fonzi, “Who Is Jorge Mas Canosa?” (1993: 121), who points out that Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, ‘ ‘came up with the idea that the Cuban exiles could be organized as an effective tool to promote the President’s aggressive Latin American policy.” Allen’s aide, Mario Elgarresta, was chosen to put together a group of wealthy Miami Cubans to lobby Washington on behalf of exile causes. Jorge Mas Canosa was first picked as a funding organizer but within a few years became the unchallenged leader of the organization, pulling U.S. policy toward the overthrow of Fidel Castro. One of the few efforts to examine and explain the contrasting behavior of CANF and its opposite, the Cuban American Committee (CAC), is Fernandez (1987), who argues that four factors determine the interests of Cuban-Americans in shaping U.S. foreign policy: (1) the political nature of Cuban migration to the United States, (2) immigrant perceptions of the United States, (3) socioec¬ onomic backgrounds, and (4) the convergence of interests and worldview of U.S. policymakers with exile interests. Despite the recent positive assessments of the power of the Cuba lobby, Fernandez (1987: 132) states that CubanAmerican lobby groups have had only partial success with U.S. government policymakers. The recent judgments of the power of the CANF have focused on its leader.

Interest Groups

147

Jorge Mas Canosa. He is a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion who has spent his entire life in exile trying to convince Washington policymakers to maintain a hard-line policy against Castro’s Cuba. U.S. journalists have made numerous efforts to understand and explain the role of Mas Canosa and CANF. Jordan, “After Fidel, Mr. Mas?” (1992), provides a portrait of Mas’s life, motives, political thought, and lobbying for a tough U.S. policy toward Cuba. During the' Bush administration, Mr. Mas enjoyed ready access to the White House and Congress thanks to personal connections and campaign contributions through its Free Cuba Political Action Committee. According to Jordan (1992), When President Bush wants to make a policy speech about this country’s relations—or rather, lack of relations—with Cuba, he sends Bernard Aronson, his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, to Miami to deliver that message before Mds and the Cuban-American National Foundation, the powerful lobbying group Mis founded in 1981. Sometimes Bush comes to the CANF himself, or M£s goes to Washington and confers with the President.

Few Latin American policy interest groups or their leaders have this kind of clout. Rohter, “A Rising Cuban-American Leader” (1992: A18), calls Mas Can¬ osa one of the most effective power brokers in Washington but notes the dark side of Mas, “who uses his ever-increasing influence and wealth to persecute those who disagree with him.” Americas Watch/Fund for Free Expression, Dan¬ gerous Dialogue (1992), is a critical examination of CANF and the Cuban exile community for restricting freedom of expression in Miami, particularly with reference to Fidel Castro and U.S. policy toward the island. Didion, Miami (1987), also notes the pervasiveness of exile intolerance of divergent views in Miami, at the same time highlighting the close connection between the Cuban exile community and the Reagan administration. The power of the Cuba lobby over the Latin American bureau of the State Department was evident in the early months of the Clinton administration when CANF forced the new president to back off his first choice for assistant secre¬ tary—a New York lawyer, Mario Baeza—because conservative Cuban Ameri¬ cans considered him to be insufficiently anti-Castro in his political orientation. The involvement of CANF in the creation and passage of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 is mapped out by Gugliotta, “House Stiffens Trade Limits Against Cuba” (1992: A15), who argues, “The powerful Miami-based Cuban-American National Foundation lobbied for the bill, worked with Torricelli in drafting it and actively sought support for it from other lawmakers.” Franklin, “The Cuba Obsession” (1993), and Gedda, “The Cuba Lobby” (1993), examine the power of Mas Canosa and the exile lobby over U.S. policy, including government broadcasting programs and federal financial subsidies, political appointments, and major legislation aimed at ending the Castro dictatorship, beginning in the 1980s. Vilarchao, “Influence of the Exile Community on the Formation of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Cuba” (1991), asserts that the power of the exile com-

148

The U.S. Domestic Environment

munity is based on (1) ideological coincidence with Washington policymakers; (2) timing; (3) significant financial, organizational, and political resources compared to those of its interest group competition; and (4) the negative char¬ acteristics of Castro and his regime. A valuable Cuban perspective on the role of the Cuban American National Foundation as a key domestic interest group in the making of U.S. policy toward Cuba is Garcia Buchaca et al., ‘ ‘La Fundacion Nacional Cubano-Americana y la conexion anticubana en los Estados Unidos” (1984). The Cuban analysts argue that the power of CANF stems from its close links with the Washington power structure, including the White House, the CIA, Congress, conservative think tanks, international lending agencies (particularly the Inter-American De¬ velopment Bank), and right-wing academics at Georgetown University in Wash¬ ington, D.C., such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eusebio Mujal-Leon, and Luis E. Aguilar. During the Reagan years, CANF developed close connections with the National Endowment for Democracy, Oliver North and the National Security Council, and key members of the secret team supporting the contras. According to Fonzi (1993: 122), there are references to Mas Canosa’s secretary and to Jorge Mas next to a notation for $80,000 in the Oliver North diaries. The Cuba lobby continues to exercise power over Cuba policy in Washington, with PAC contributions to candidates (both Republicans and Democrats) sym¬ pathetic to CANF’s goals and objectives and personal links to the White House through Clinton’s relatives in Miami. In “Cuba: The Congress,” Nichols (1988) argues that the success of CANF is due to its lavish funding of anti-Castro political candidates, clever propaganda, willingness to discredit its opponents as communist sympathizers, and substantial federal grants that subsidize its antiCastro propaganda and lobbying. Landau, “Clinton’s Cuba Policy” (1993), dis¬ cusses the factors influencing President Clinton’s Cuba policy, arguing that there is little chance for an improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations as long as Fidel Castro remains in power.

Washington Representatives and Public Relations Firms Foreign agent representatives based in Washington and politically powerful public relations firms have been a growth industry in the process of making policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. A number of political scientists have made efforts to reconceptualize Washington political representation by fo¬ cusing on institutions. Salisbury, “Interest Representation” (1984), and “The Paradox of Interest Groups in Washington—More Groups, Less Clout” (1990), argues that one of the major changes in the composition of interest groups in Washington over the past twenty-five years is the growth of Washington rep¬ resentatives or agents. Thousands of Washington representatives now inhabit the Washington community, assisting in (1) presenting testimony before congres¬ sional committees, (2) arranging for a meeting between a client and a highranking member of the White House staff, (3) searching for wealthy contributors

Interest Group!

149

to help out with a congressional campaign, and (4) providing “political face¬ lifts” for governments and leaders that are often “picked on” by human rights groups. According to Salisbury (1990: 227), the proliferation of groups and their interests—institutions (corporations, universities, religious denominations), think tanks, and Washington representatives—does not mean that these private inter¬ ests have gained power over the shaping of policy so much as it indicates that' these groups, in their quest for timely and accurate information, are more de¬ pendent on government for the exchange of information. The changes that Sal¬ isbury examines have contributed to a fragmentation and destabilization of the policy making process, often upsetting the so-called cozy or iron triangles in past administrations. Much of the current literature on this type of representation is critical of lawyers and public relations firms because they often represent repressive re¬ gimes and human rights violators, charge exorbitant fees to very poor govern¬ ments such as Haiti and Guatemala, present a conflict-of-interest problem because of their former government positions, and do much of their lobby hand¬ iwork for sustaining arms sales and foreign aid. Cooney, “Public-Relations Firms Draw Fire for Aiding Repressive Countries” (1979: 30), discusses a num¬ ber of Washington PR firms that try to polish the images of repressive Latin American governments for fees of up to $1 million per year. According to Keller and Felton, “Life After Government” (1980: 2256), “One of the more dramatic successes of foreign agentry was the campaign by two lobbyists for the former Nicaraguan regime of Anastasio Somoza—former Florida Rep. William C. Cra¬ mer, R (1955-1971), and former Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth—to force Nicaragua military aid on a reluctant Carter administration.” Hedges, “Brown’s Haitian Connection” (1993), points out that Ron Brown, Clinton’s commerce secretary, had little difficulty being confirmed by the U.S. Senate despite the fact that he was paid $12,500 per month for lobbying for the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier between 1982 and 1986. Panama’s General Manuel A. Noriega hired several PR firms to improve his image in the 1980s, prior to his involvement in Iran-contra and his indictment for drug trafficking in 1988. A more balanced examination of foreign lobbying in Washington is Levy, “Advice for Sale” (1987), who looks at the advantages and disadvantages of lobbying for international trade and investment, foreign aid, and a positive do¬ mestic image in the United States. According to Levy (1987: 71), “Today’s foreign lobby is an American original; there is no mirror mechanism of Amer¬ ican-paid lobbyists operating on behalf of American interests in countries around the world.” United Nations, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Latin American and Caribbean Lobbying for International Trade in Washington, D.C. (1990), is a well-written and analyzed paper that looks at both the process of foreign agent lobbying and specific ways for Latin American and Caribbean governments to advance their foreign commercial in¬ terests in Washington policymaking. The ECLAC report highlights the fact that the Latin American and Caribbean governments need to look for ways of im-

150

The U.S. Domestic Environment

proving the way their diplomatic and private sector representatives operate in the policymaking bazaar in Washington. In The Trading Game (1993), the Cen¬ ter for Public Integrity carefully documents the pro-NAFTA efforts by Mexico from 1989 to 1993, demonstrating how lopsided the lobby war is against the anti-NAFTA forces in the domestic political environment. According to the Cen¬ ter for Public Integrity’s study (1993: 1), “In the context of lobbying by foreign interest on a specific issue, Mexico has mounted the most expensive, elaborate campaign ever conducted in the United States by a foreign government.” Despite the criticisms of the role of foreign agent representatives and public relations firms, they will no doubt remain key actors in the Latin American lobby game. Trento, The Power House (1992), covers the gamut of public re¬ lations tactics employed by Gray and Company for Latin American clients such as Baby Doc Duvalier (Haiti), various Guatemalan dictators, and domestic groups in the United States with interests in Latin American policy issues. In “Latin America Learns How to Play the PR Game,” (1992), Vannett discusses the shift from “political facelifts” for dictators, arms sales, and foreign aid to trade and investment as the primary focus of Washington representatives. The public relations game is now a permanent fixture of the process of making policy toward Latin America.

Immigration and Refugee Groups The flood of refugees and immigrants—legal and illegal—entering from Latin America and the Caribbean has affected the economy, domestic and foreign policy, and culture of the United States. During the 1980s, close to 7.5 million immigrants entered the United States legally (and up to half this number ille¬ gally) from the Americas, creating new demands for immigration reform and regulation. There are numerous causes of this northward flow of people from Latin America and the Caribbean, but political violence, severe economic de¬ terioration, and U.S. policies played a major role in feuling the exodus from south to north. As immigration and refugee issues have become more salient in the formulation of U.S. policies toward Latin America, nongovernmental organ¬ izations and think tanks have emerged to serve as conduits for the debate. The United States has frequently used immigration and refugee policy as a tool of foreign policy, designed to fulfill the wishes of powerful domestic lobbies or as a means to project power abroad. Teitelbaum’s Latin Migration North (1985) argues that the United States has made use of migrations from Cuba as a foreign policy tool by offering special admittance rules for Cubans fleeing Castroism. For example, the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 permits Cubans admitted to the United States to apply for permanent residency one year after their arrival—a protection granted to no other refugee group in the world. The training of “foreign policy entrepreneurs” such as the 2506 Brigade that invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and the Nicaraguan contras served to encourage northward migration and political obligations to provide special status for such

Interest Groups

151

groups. Using the Clinton administration’s difficulties with Haitian immigration policy and the setbacks from several undocumented-housekeeper controversies, Cecilia Munoz, “Immigration Policy” (1993), argues that current migration policy is still beset with strategic implications but will most likely be ignored by the Executive and congressional branches of government until the numbers reach “crisis” proportions. In discussing the immigration ramifications of NAFTA, Munoz (1993: 41) points out, “NAFTA marks the first time in decades that U.S. policy in the trade and foreign-policy arenas has been linked, if only rhetorically, to migration policy.” One of the interesting puzzles in the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean is the connection between subgroups of the Latino population and foreign policy. One of the early attempts to measure the influence of the Hispanic community on domestic and foreign policy is Peirce and Hagstrom, “The Hispanic Community—A Growing Force to Be Reckoned With” (1979), in which the authors examine several reasons why policymakers are beginning to pay more attention to Hispanics. Ayon and Anzaldua Montoya, “Latinos and U.S. Policy Toward Latin America” (1988), provide a valuable examination of subgroups within the Latino population and the relationship be¬ tween their political interests and U.S.-Latin American policy. The major interest groups concerned with immigration and refugee policy in¬ clude the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Refugee Policy Group, the Center for American Immigration Studies, and the National Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Forum, all headquartered in Washington, D.C. Interest groups associated with Latinos—the National Council for La Raza, League of United Latin American Citizens, and Mexican American Legal Defense Fund— have also become more concerned with immigration and refugee issues and U.S.-Latin American policy. The major political fault line in the immigrationrefugee debate centers on the level of restrictions on immigrants and the degree of support for refugees and those seeking asylum. How wide open should the policy “door” be for Latin American and Caribbean immigrants and refugees, and how much government support should be given? The most prominent of the restrictionist, antiimmigrant interest groups are the Federation for American Im¬ migration Reform (FAIR) and its companion think tank, the Center for Immigra¬ tion Studies. Groups more likely to include a proimmigrant, less restrictionist set of policies include the Refugee Policy Group (basically a think tank) and the Na¬ tional Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Forum.

INTEREST GROUPS STRATEGIES Interest groups use a variety of strategies to influence policymakers, from lob¬ bying of Congress and the Executive to protesting activity involving hundreds of thousands of citizen participants. Interest groups rely on two basic strategies for influencing the policymaking process: inside lobbying and outside lobbying. Insider strategies rely on having one-to-one meetings with members of Congress

152

The U.S. Domestic Environment

or their staffs, testifying at congressional hearings, providing technical or polit¬ ical information on key issues, managing campaign contributions and electoral activities, and providing assistance in drafting legislation. Outsider strategies involve such activities as grass-roots lobbying, coalition formation, protests, me¬ dia outreach, press briefings, letter-writing campaigns, boycotts, and conferences and seminars. Interest group strategies vary depending on the issue, the target of influence, and the type of group or coalition. What works for one group may not work for another. Most successful interest groups rely on both insider and outsider strategies in trying to influence U.S.-Latin American policy. Mundo, Interest Groups (1992), claims that direct lobbying or insider tactics remain the centerpiece of interest group strategies for influencing domestic policies.

Lobbying

Most of the interest groups interested in some facet of U.S.-Latin American policy understand the inner workings of Congress and focus most of their en¬ ergies on trying to influence the staff and the chairpersons of committees with authority over the process of making policy toward Latin America.2 The most important committees dealing with Latin American policy are the Western Hem¬ isphere Subcommittees of the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Sen¬ ate Foreign Relations Committee, both in the hands of Democrats as of 1994. The majority of interest groups concerned with U.S.-Latin American policy are classified as 501(c)(3) nonprofits for tax purposes. This means that they can devote up to 15 percent of their working time to lobbying but the enforcement mechanisms are rather weak. Washington representatives of foreign govern¬ ments must register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Reg¬ istration Act (FARA), but the registering and reporting requirements are not demanding. Howe and Trott, The Power Peddlers (1977), is a useful examina¬ tion of foreign policy lobbying, including the interesting chapter, “Lobbying with a Latin Accent.” Howe and Trott provide considerable detail on the groups that lobbied for and against the following U.S. policies toward Latin America: Panama and the Canal, the tuna fishing controversy with Ecuador in the 1970s, the sugar lobby, efforts to prevent Salvador Allende from coming to power in Chile, and efforts to restore U.S. relations with Cuba during the Carter admin¬ istration. For example, the Council of the Americas, WOLA, and AACCLA supported the new Panama Canal treaties while the American Legion, American Veterans of Foreign Wars, Daughters of the American Revolution, Liberty Lobby, American Council of World Freedom, Friends of the Earth, and some church groups opposed the treaties. After General Augusto Pinochet replaced Salvador Allende in Chile, a cottage industry of lobbyists worked the corridors of power in Washington to improve the image of the Chilean junta. Several books critical of human rights groups. Central American peace groups, and anticommunist groups aligned with the Reagan Doctrine of “roll¬ back” were written during the 1980s to discredit interest groups and think tanks

Interest Groups

153

on ideological grounds. Brownfield and Waller, The Revolution Lobby (1985), is a right-wing hatchet job on the lobbyists, academics, think tanks, and interest groups (and their friends in Congress) that make up what they call the “Rev¬ olution Lobby.” For example, according to Brownfield and Waller (1985: vi), “While the Revolution Lobby is not controlled by the KGB, it would be dis¬ honest to deny that parts of it are, and that at critical points the entire movement' is influenced by the Soviet secret service.” And because of the power of the Revolution Lobby on Capitol Hill, “naive” senators and members of Congress serve as saboteurs of U.S. policy in Latin America. Powell, Second Front (1986), offers a critical examination of the organization and influence of what he calls the “Latin Network.” According to Powell, the Latin Network is a wellorganized revolutionary lobby to undermine legitimate authority through clever leftist propaganda in the United States, overt support for communist interests in Latin America, and a campaign of ideological deception aimed at Congress and the American people. Bodenheimer and Gould, Rollback! Right-Wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (1989), discuss the funding, ideology, and public-private linkages of right-wing groups which advocate a foreign policy of prointerven¬ tionist “rollback” to further the interests of capitalist expansion in the Third World. Interest groups concerned with Latin American policy are less likely to lobby the Executive branch of government because there are fewer points of entry, a lower level of receptivity due to the White House penchant for secrecy, and a stronger commitment to ideological principles. Nevertheless, there is often an exchange or transactional relationship between interest groups and the presi¬ dency. Peterson, “The Presidency and Organized Interests” (1992), claims that Reagan's strategy of dealing with Central American policy issues prior to Irancontra involved the mobilization of ideologically compatible groups to support the president’s legislative program. The point of contact for some interest groups in the Executive branch is the White House Office of Public Liaison, formed in the early years of the Ford administration. According to Pika, “Opening Doors for Kindred Souls” (1991: 279), ‘ ‘The Office of Public Liaison provides interest group representatives with access to White House policy makers and organized briefings on relevant policy initiatives to generate outside support.” In the Bush administration, OPL staff were assigned to provide liaison for Hispanic-Americans, freedom fighters/re¬ gional conflicts, Latin America/Caribbean, and refugees/immigrants, all of con¬ cern to a multitude of Latin American policy interest groups. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the only two presidents to invite human rights groups to the White House, a recognition of the necessity of liaison with these domestic in¬ terest groups in the formulation of U.S.-Latin American policy. In Reagan’s second term Faith Ryan Whittlesey directed the White House Office of Public Liaison, where she spent most of her time organizing domestic support for the contras. According to Peterson (1992: 620), Faith Whittlesey and Linda Chavez (Whittlesey’s successor) both viewed the OPL “as the focal

154

The U.S. Domestic Environment

point for the advancement of right wing issues and the accommodation of con¬ servative organizations.” Bellant, The Coors Connection (1991), points out that Whittlesey established the White House Outreach Working Group on Central America to propagate the Reagan administration’s view that Nicaragua is a com¬ munist beachhead threatening the hemisphere and American security without the knowledge of the American public. The Working Group met once a week and included a large number of groups and individuals who were ardent supporters of the Reagan Doctrine and the contras.

Research Research and publications are key ingredients of interest group success in dealing with Latin American policy issues. WOLA, the Lawyer’s Committee on Human Rights, and Americas Watch Committee spend lots of organizational capital publishing documents on human rights abuse and protection, peaceful settlement of disputes, and general critiques of U.S.-Latin American policy. The Cuban American National Foundation publishes dozens of pamphlets attacking the Castro regime while supporting the concept of a free and democratic Cuba and distributes these free to government policymakers, think tanks, academics, and interest groups concerned with Latin America and the Caribbean. Both the Congress and the presidency need sound information to make and assess policy but time constraints often undermine the policymaking process. Policy complexity has also contributed to what Williams, Mismanaging America (1990), calls a lack of concern for expert policy information, analysis, and ad¬ vice. Members of Congress and their staffs rarely have time to research policy issues. According to a staff member of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, ‘ ‘Things are so busy here that we have no time to read lengthy documents or reports. In the two years since I have been here, I have not read anything over 20 pages. When we do need information on a particular issue, we rely on a special request to the CRS (Congressional Research Service), FIBIS, and a clipping file from the major newspapers in the United States.”3 Congress and many interest groups also rely on the General Account¬ ing Office (GAO) for information on how policies are being carried out. At times GAO reports serve members of Congress by allowing them to criticize the administration through the use of technical materials produced by an objec¬ tive, nonpartisan body.

Congressional Testimony Congressional hearings are another way that interest groups can have an im¬ pact on policy and where members of Congress can gamer more information on an issue or piece of legislation. A variety of interest groups regularly testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the House Foreign Affairs Committee (and subcommittees), particularly when legislation involves human

Interest Groups

155

rights, foreign aid, drug trafficking, and trade and investment. Human rights groups were the most active interest groups during the congressional hearings that focused on El Salvador and Nicaragua during the decade of the 1980s. The purpose of congressional hearings is to fulfill four basic political func¬ tions: (1) keep the chairperson of the subcommittee informed of what is going on legislatively; (2) gain the attention of the media; (3) make sure positions on' key issues are put in the Congressional Record; and (4) give interest groups and think tanks the opportunity to participate in the policymaking process. When the Central American crisis was a “hot” policy issue on Capitol Hill, Western Hemisphere Affairs Subcommittee chairperson Mike Barnes wanted various in¬ terest groups who opposed Reagan’s policies to testify at hearings in order to help elect more Democrats in key states and districts.

Congressional Delegations to Latin America Interest groups seek to influence U.S.-Latin American policy by conducting investigative missions to Latin America for members of Congress, their staffs, and major political contributors. Joe Eldridge, one of the founders of the Wash¬ ington Office on Latin America, took then-House Member Tom Harkin (DIowa) to Chile in 1976 to get a firsthand account of human rights violations by the government. On return to Washington, Harkin sponsored legislation that prevented the United States from selling weapons to Pinochet’s Chile. Con¬ gressional junkets to Central America—led by the Washington Office on Latin America and the Lawyer’s Committee on Human Rights—during the debates over contra aid and military assistance to El Salvador became a means for gath¬ ering information firsthand, getting votes back home, and challenging the rhe¬ torical assertions of the Reagan administration.

Campaign Contributions and Electoral Assistance Campaign contributions and electoral assistance are important strategies for determining who the key players will be in the Latin American policy game. The battles over the Panama Canal Treaties, aid to the Nicaraguan contras, and the NAFTA treaty inevitably focus on key elected policymakers who may de¬ termine the outcome of the policy. Most of the nongovernmental organizations concerned with U.S.-Latin American policy do not make campaign contribu¬ tions or provide electoral assistance, with the exception of the PACs associated with the Cuban American National Foundation, Neighbor to Neighbor, and a few of the members of the human rights lobby. Between 1987 and 1992, the Cuban American National Foundation divided its $432,000 in campaign contri¬ butions between Republicans and Democrats, but insisted that each candidate support the Foundation’s anti-Castro foreign policy position. During this same period, Neighbor to Neighbor contributed $70,000 to candidates who opposed

156

The U.S. Domestic Environment

contra aid, the overwhelming number of whom were Democrats who represented “swing votes” in key states.

Grass-Roots Mobilization and Boycotts The lack of knowledge and interest in Latin America and the Caribbean among the American people has made it difficult for interest groups to mobilize effectively at the grass-roots level. Nevertheless, during periods of intense debate over Latin American policy issues interest groups such as CISPES, Neighbor to Neighbor, and the Quixote Center seek to mobilize the grass roots through di¬ rect-mail fund-raising, letter-writing campaigns, and other strategies. Skidmore, “Foreign Policy Interest Groups and Presidential Power” (1993), points out that conservatives were much more successful in forging an interest group coalition in the battle over the Panama Canal Treaties than were their liberal opponents because their strategy focused on grass-roots mobilization. From 1988 to 1992, Neighbor to Neighbor—a 50,000 member national grass-roots organization working for peace and economic justice at home and in Central America— organized a boycott of large corporate buyers of Salvadoran coffee to help elim¬ inate U.S. military aid to El Salvador.

Coalition Formation Much of the success of interest groups concerned with U.S.-Latin American policy is due to the ability to form coalitions that either bring together organi¬ zations from the same issue area such as aid to the Nicaraguan contras and the debate over ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties, or cut across several issues (environment, human rights, investment, immigration) as in the case of NAFTA. WOLA works with a number of counterpart human rights groups and think tanks in Washington—the Lawyer’s Committee on Human Rights, Amnesty Interna¬ tional, Institute for Policy Studies, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Overseas Development Council, and Inter-American Di¬ alogue. The coalitions that formed around the passage of NAFTA mainly brought together labor and environmental interest groups.

CONCLUSION Washington-based interest groups concerned with U.S.-Latin American pol¬ icy have grown dramatically in number and reflect a broad range of policy concerns, from trade and investment to human rights and immigration. The genesis of the expanded number of nongovernmental organizations involved in the policymaking process can be attributed to the following: President Nixon’s role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile; President Carter’s battle against the New Right to get the U.S. Senate to ratify the Panama Canal Treaties;

Interest Groups

157

President Reagan’s aggressive anticommunist crusade in Central America and the Caribbean; dramatic increases in migration flows from Cuba, Central Amer¬ ica, and the Caribbean; and the persistent violation of human rights by govern¬ ments of the left and right. Many of the issues at the heart of inter-American relations are now clearly “intermestic,” involving both domestic and interna¬ tional actors in the policymaking process. The proliferation of interest groups concerned with some facet of U.S. policy toward Latin America does not mean either that policymakers have an easier task or that interest groups have more clout in the making and implementation of policy. Alliances and coalitions are in constant formation and flux as poli¬ cymakers and nongovernmental organizations shift from one set of issues or priorities to another. For example, security and strategic issues have declined in importance with the end of the Cold War, and economic and social questions have increased in magnitude for policymakers. Thus, policymaking in the 1990s is likely to be more competitive and fragmented as interest groups seek to in¬ fluence Latin America-Caribbean policy. Many of the major countries in Latin America are beginning to realize that it is both necessary and easier now to lobby Washington on behalf of issues that affect them. Mexico’s recognition of expanded opportunities for influencing the Clinton administration over the NAFTA treaty is a prime example. Perhaps the most critical change in the role of interest groups in the formulation of U.S.-Latin America policy is that pol¬ icymakers are beginning to realize that interest groups are often necessary to legitimize policies that affect Latin America. While it may be difficult for some interest groups to compete with the more powerful and well-established think tanks that now engage in efforts to sway U.S.-Latin American policy, there is no doubt that some interest groups have become major players in the policy game. The prevailing assumption that in¬ terest groups play a minor role in foreign policy formation needs to be revised to illustrate the major changes that have taken place in the making of Latin American policy. This will take revisions in both the conclusions derived from the study of both the role of private groups and domestic policy and the growing importance of nongovernmental organizations in U.S.-Latin American policy¬ making. Interest groups are no longer weak and ephemeral components of the foreign policy process; the nonstrategic issues that affect the hemisphere in the 1990s will increasingly reflect both domestic and international concerns funneled into the corridors of power by interest groups who are considerably more com¬ mitted and sophisticated participants in the power game. The metaphor of a policymaking bazaar may accurately reflect the expanded role of interest groups in the making of U.S. policy toward Latin America, but it also means that Executive and congressional policy actors are faced with a “tower of Babel” making it more difficult to recognize legitimate demands and to build the nec¬ essary linkages to domestic interests to promote successful policies in the future.

158

The U.S. Domestic Environment

NOTES 1. Interview with Joe Eldridge, director of the Washington Office of the Lawyer’s Committee on Human Rights, Washington, D.C., December 7, 1992. 2. General works that deal with interest group lobbying and Congress that are useful for understanding domestic policymaking include Carol Greenwald, Group Power: Lob¬ bying and Public Policy (1977); United States Senate, Subcommittee on Intergovern¬ mental Relations, Congress and Pressure Groups: Lobbying in a Modem Democracy (1986); Bruce C. Wolpe, Lobbying Congress: How the System Works (1990); and Jeffrey M. Berry, Lobbying for the People (1977) and The Interest Group Society (1989). 3. Interview with staff member of the House Committee on Western Hemispheric Affairs, Washington, D.C., November 1992.

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Gugliotta, Guy. 1992. “House Stiffens Trade Limits Against Cuba: New Sanctions Aim to Pressure Cuba.” The Washington Post (September 25): A15. Hakim, Peter. 1993. “Clinton and Latin America: Facing an Unfinished Agenda.” Cur¬ rent History 92, no. 572 (March): 97-101. Hartlyn, Jonathan, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds. 1992. The United States and Latin America in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hedges, Stephen J. 1993. “Brown’s Haitian Connection.” U.S. News & World Report 114 (January 18): 30. Hertzke, Allen D. 1988. Representing God in Washington: The Role of Religious Lobbies in the American Polity. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. Holcomb, John M. 1988. “Introduction.” In Foundation for Public Affairs, Public In¬ terest Profiles, 1988-1989. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly. Howe, Russell Warren, and Sarah Hays Trott. 1977. The Power Peddlers: How Lobbyists Mold America’s Foreign Policy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Johnson, Victor. 1989. “Congress and Contra Aid.” In Abraham F. Lowenthal, ed., Latin America and the Caribbean Contemporary Record, 1987-1988. New York: Holmes and Meier. Jordan, Pat. 1992. “After Fidel, Mr. Mas? From Exile, the Most Influential in America Plots His Archenemy’s Fall.” Los Angeles Times Magazine (May 3): 23. Keller, Bill. 1982. “Interest Groups Focus on El Salvador Policy.” Congressional Quar¬ terly Weekly Report 40, no. 17 (April 24): 895-900. Keller, Bill, and John Felton. 1980. “Life After Government: Ex-Members and Officials Find Lucrative Employment Representing Foreign Clients.” Congressional Quar¬ terly Weekly Report 38, no. 32 (August 9): 2253-2258. Kryzanek, Michael J. 1990. U.S.-Latin American Relations. Second Edition. New York: Praeger. Landau, Saul. 1993. “Clinton’s Cuba Policy: A Low-Priority Dilemma.” NACLA Report on the Americas 26, no. 5 (May): 35-37. Levy, Deborah M. 1987. “Advice for Sale.” Foreign Policy 67 (Summer): 64-86. Livezey, Lowell W. 1988. Nongovernmental Organizations and the Ideas of Human Rights. Princeton, N.J.: Center for International Studies, Princeton University. Lowenthal, Abraham F. 1993. “U.S. Policy Toward Latin America.” In Robert J. Art and Seyom Brown, eds. U.S. Foreign Policy: The Search for a New Role. New York: Macmillan: 358-382. -. 1990. Partners in Conflict: The United States and Latin America in the 1990s. Revised Edition. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Madison, Christopher. 1984. “Rapidly Changing Times Keep Central American Lob¬ byists on Their Toes.” National Journal 16, no. 32 (August 11). Martz, John D., ed. 1988. United States Policy in Latin America: A Quarter Century of Crisis and Challenge, 1961-1986. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Matlack, Carol. 1992. “Lobbying, PR War over Policy on Haiti.” National Journal (April 25): 1006-1007. Mundo, Philip A. 1992. Interest Groups: Cases and Characteristics. Chicago: NelsonHall. Munoz, Cecilia. 1993. “Immigration Policy: A Tricky Business.” NACLA Report on the Americas 26, no. 5 (May): 38^-1.

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Sims, Beth. 1992. Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor’s Role in U.S. Foreign Policy. Boston: South End Press. Skidmore, David. 1993. “Foreign Policy Interest Groups and Presidential Power: Jimmy Carter and the Battle Over the Ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties.” Pres¬ idential Studies Quarterly 23, no. 3 (Summer). Spalding, Hobart A., Jr. 1989. “Solidarity Forever? Latin American Unions and the International Labor Network.” Latin American Research Review 24, no. 2: 253265. Stokes, Bruce. 1993. “Mexican Roulette.” National Journal 25, no. 20 (May 15): 11601164. Stone, Walter J. 1990. Republic at Risk: Self-Interest in American Politics. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole. Taft, Philip. 1973. Defending Freedom: American Labor and Foreign Affairs. Los An¬ geles: Nash Publishing. Teitelbaum, Michael S. 1985. Latin Migration North: The Problem of U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Tolley, Howard. 1990. “Interest Group Litigation to Enforce Human Rights.” Political Science Quarterly 105 (Winter): 617-638. Trento, Susan B. 1992. The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Trice, Robert H. 1976. Interest Groups and the Foreign Policy Process: U.S. Policy in the Middle East. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage. United Nations, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). 1990. Latin American and Caribbean Lobbying for International Trade in Wash¬ ington, D.C. Washington, D.C.: ECLAC. United States Senate, Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations. 1986. Congress and Pressure Groups: Lobbying in a Modem Democracy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Uslaner, Eric M. 1991. “A Tower of Babel on Foreign Policy?” In Allan J. Cigler and Burdette A. Loomis, eds., Interest Group Politics. Third Edition. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly: 299-318. Vannett, Kasey. 1992. “Latin America Learns How to Play the PR Game,” Times of the Americas (January 22): 4. Vilarchao, Marta. 1991. “Influence of the Exile Community on the Formation of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Cuba.” Unpublished M.A. Thesis, Johns Hopkins Uni¬ versity, School of Advanced International Studies. Williams, Walter. 1990. Mismanaging America: The Rise of the Anti-Analytic Presidency. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Wolpe, Bruce C. 1990. Lobbying Congress: How the System Works. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.

8 The U.S. Media John Spicer Nichols with the collaboration of Michael J. Dillon and Krishna Kishore

Shortly after the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, dispatched two dozen of his best correspondents, including the famous artist Frederic Reming¬ ton, to Cuba with instructions to dramatize the Cuban independence movement. Hearst, who was motivated, in part, by his own political ambitions and, in part, by his newspaper’s fierce circulation battle with other New York tabloids, pres¬ sured his staff for a steady stream of inflammatory reports on real or manufac¬ tured Spanish atrocities and heroism of the Cuban rebels. But shortly after arriving on the island. Remington cabled back to Hearst: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war.” To which Hearst (quoted in Hohenberg [1964: 133]) gave his famous reply: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst later boasted that the Journal's pressure-cooker coverage of Cuba had forced the United States into what he called “our war.” The impact of the journalistic war-mongering by the Journal and other New York tabloids on the decision of President McKinley and Congress to enter the Spanish-American War is a matter of historical debate, but from the beginning of U.S. emergence as the regional superpower, the press was—or, at least, was believed to be—an important participant in foreign policy toward Latin America. In the century that has transpired since the Spanish-American War, the United States has become dominant in the politics, economics, and culture of the region, and there is no question that the U.S. media continue to play an integral role in U.S. relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. But exactly what is that role? Do the media dramatically alter U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, as Hearst claimed? Or are they merely part of the supporting cast in the foreign policy arena? Are their contributions to the policymaking process functional or dys¬ functional to the health of the U.S. body politic? And finally, how will the end of the Cold War and the explosive growth of new communications technologies

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

change the media’s ability to influence the Latin American policy of the United States? For the most part, the answers to these questions have not been fully an¬ swered. A major reason is that the literature on the influence of the media on U.S. foreign policy in general is limited in quantity and in its theoretical and methodological approaches to the subject matter. Most major works on foreign policymaking treat the media as an afterthought. Books such as Spanier and Uslaner, How American Foreign Policy Is Made (1978: 50), and Halperin, Bu¬ reaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (1974: 173-195), usually posit the media as having a peripheral or modifying influence on policy or merely acting as inert channels through which policymakers communicate among themselves and with the American public. Many do not directly consider the role of the media at all. The literature on current U.S.-Latin American relations is similarly limited. In an edited volume, The United States and Latin America in the 1990s (1992), Hartlyn, Schoultz, and Varas omit the U.S. media entirely from their efforts to look beyond the Cold War. Other studies of U.S. responses to revolutionary change in Latin America also do not discuss the impact of the media on U.S.Latin American policy. Welch, Response to Revolution (1985), devotes a chapter to press coverage of the Cuban revolution, but he makes no attempt to explain its potential effect on U.S. policy. Blasier’s The Hovering Giant (1976) is a pioneering work on patterns of U.S. response to revolutionary change in Latin America but offers no analysis of the media. Pastor’s Whirlpool (1992) examines how the United States has tried to stop revolutionaries, promote elections and manage succession crises, and encourage development in Latin America and the Caribbean, but the media are not part of his analysis. In a review of the literature, “The Press and U.S. Foreign Policy (1984),” Chang notes that a major shortcoming in understanding the relationship is a lack of convergence between political science and mass communications research. While there is considerable cross-fertilization in studying the media and do¬ mestic politics, neither discipline is well informed by the other on international issues. Chang further indicates that, when the role of the media in foreign policy is directly considered, most studies are impressionistic and anecdotal, and the media’s relationship with policymakers is rarely defined within a clear theoret¬ ical framework. Many such analyses of the media and foreign policy are based on case studies of specific countries or regions, such as Dorman and Farhang, The U.S. Press and Iran (1987), or the recollections and opinions of policy¬ makers and journalists, such as the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center’s The Media and Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World (1993); Serfaty, ed.. The Media and Foreign Policy (1991); and Reston’s classic, Artillery of the Press (1967). Other more systematic approaches use questionnaires and inter¬ views with midlevel decision makers in both the journalistic and foreign policy communities to explore the relationship between the media and foreign policy. This category would include Cohen’s classic, The Press and Foreign Policy (1963); Chittick, State Department, Press and Pressure Groups (1970); and

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165

more recently, O’Heffernan, Mass Media and American Foreign Policy (1991). However, interviews in such studies are rarely with top foreign policymakers and, to the extent they are, are prone to be self-serving. The other empirical approach often used is content analysis. For example, Hallin studied the question “Did the media ‘lose’ Vietnam?” in Uncensored War (1986) by tracking U.S. media coverage over the course of the war and concluded that press coverage was a—but not the—factor in the American de¬ feat. In The Kennedy Crises (1983), Kern, Levering, and Levering examined the relationship between the press and the presidency using content analyses of four foreign policy crises during the Kennedy administration, including the Cuban missile crisis. Scholars have found that it is relatively easy to measure the output of the media; however, it is much more difficult to document clearly the rela¬ tionship between that content and foreign policy decisions. As a result of this difficulty, very few of such studies exist in the literature. Chang, The Press and U.S. China Policy (1993), is one of the few exceptions. Other standard sources on media and foreign policy generally are Adams, Televsion Coverage of International Affairs (1982); Batscha, Foreign Affairs News and the Broadcast Journalist (1975); Davison, Mass Communication and Conflict Resolution (1974a); Desmond, The Press and World Affairs (1937); Gannett Center Journal, “International News and Foreign Policy” (1989); Hero, Mass Media and World Affairs (1959); Hopkinson, The Media and In¬ ternational Affairs After the Cold War (1993); “Global News After the Cold War” (1993); and Mowlana, Global Information and World Communication (1986). Virtually all the literature on the media and Latin American foreign policy¬ making is in article or chapter form, such as NACLA Report on the Americas, “The Media Goes to War” (1983) and Wiarda, “The Media and Latin Amer¬ ica” (1985). Only a few long texts—such as Atwood and McAnany, eds., Com¬ munication and Latin American Society (1986); Black, The Good Neighbor (1988); Bolling, ed., Reporters under Fire (1985); Cozean, “The U.S. Elite Press and Foreign Policy” (1979); Fejes, “Imperialism, Media, and the Good Neighbor” (1982); Pollock, The Politics of Crisis Reporting (1981); and Torres, “U.S. Network Evening News Coverage of Cuba” (1983)—deal extensively with media and U.S.-Latin American relations, and only Cozean’s unpublished doctoral dissertation attempts to answer directly the question of whether the media affect U.S. foreign policy, or vice versa.

HOW IS NEWS FROM LATIN AMERICA PRODUCED? In order to understand the role of the media in Latin American foreign pol¬ icymaking, one must first understand the process and product of U.S. media coverage of the region. A surprisingly small number of foreign correspondents for U.S. media cover the more than 400 million people in Latin America. Kliesch reports in “The U.S. Press Corps Abroad Rebounds” (1991) that ap-

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

proximately 241 full-time correspondents are primarily assigned to report on all the other countries in the Western Hemisphere, except Canada, for 225 million readers and listeners in the United States. On the basis of a 1990 survey, Kliesch found that 138 of the correspondents were concentrated in seven countries: Ar¬ gentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. Mexico alone accounted for forty of the correspondents assigned to the region. A large mi¬ nority of the correspondents for the U.S. media were local nationals, and several countries in the hemisphere did not have even one correspondent who was a U.S. citizen assigned to cover them full time. The number of U.S. correspon¬ dents reported by Kliesch (1991) to be assigned to the Western Hemisphere in 1990 was more than double the number counted during his previous survey in 1975. However, anecdotal evidence strongly indicates that, as U.S. attention to conflicts in Central America has dissipated, the number of U.S. correspondents in the region and the number of countries covered have dropped sharply. The primary implication of Kliesch’s statistics is that a small handful of peo¬ ple control most of what U.S. audiences know about Latin America. According to Nichols’ “Riding High” (1981), some of the most influential reporting on the early days of the Nicaraguan revolution was done by Alan Riding, a “stringer” (part-time correspondent) for several U.S. and foreign media, in¬ cluding The New York Times. Riding often teamed up with his wife and part¬ ner—Marlise Simons—in a “mom-and-pop” foreign correspondence shop in Mexico City where she also was a stringer for several more publications, in¬ cluding the Washington Post and Newsweek. As a result of one trip to Managua by Riding, articles on human right violations, corruption, and growing guerrilla activity in Nicaragua were reported in numerous influential U.S. media. The Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza once complained that he had been “sur¬ rounded” by Riding, and as more U.S. correspondents followed Riding’s path, Somoza grumbled about how such a small number of journalists could so se¬ verely damage his diplomatic standing among policymakers in Washington. Fur¬ ther, many other correspondents from competing U.S. media teamed up and shared the fruits of their combined reporting because it was virtually impossible for an individual journalist to cover such a complex issue or crisis adequately in a foreign land. This practice was common in the coverage of revolutionary wars in both Nicaragua and El Salvador, giving U.S. audiences the illusion of a greater number and diversity of perspectives than were actually presented to the American public. The high cost of stationing foreign correspondents abroad combined with improved airline service and communications technologies has led to another troubling trend. In order to economize, major U.S. media have increasingly centralized their foreign staff in much larger bureaus located in far fewer lo¬ cations. When a news event occurs, a correspondent flies to the location of the event, or the bureau communicates with one of its network of stringers, who are usually local nationals. Although most of the bureaus responsible for cov-

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erage of Latin America are actually located in the region, a growing number, according to Kliesch, are based in U.S. cities, especially Miami. This method of reporting Latin America and other developing regions is var¬ iously called “jet journalism,” “SWAT journalism,” “parachute journalism,” or safari journalism.” While it is cost efficient for U.S. media, the resulting coverage emphasizes what Rosenblum described as Coups and Earthquakes (1979). Most often when correspondents board a plane en route to a Latin Amer¬ ican capital, they are responding to events, frequently political crises. Far less often, they are on the scene beforehand to analyze impending crises or report the context within which the event occurs. Consequently, peaceful developments or processes that lead to major events rarely grasp the attention of the U.S. media. And, because they are not permanently assigned there, the correspondents frequently do not know the language, history, culture, or political-economic background of the country. The result, according to Davison, Shanor, and Yu, News from Abroad and the Foreign Policy Public (1980), is that the correspon¬ dents must rely heavily on U.S. diplomats on the scene or other sources who are not entirely objective in their interpretations of the issue or event. It is for these reasons, Diederich concluded in Somoza (1989), that U.S. correspondents had such difficulty understanding and reporting the fall of the Somoza regime. In the same way that Hearst’s coverage of the Spanish-American War was good business for his newspaper in the 1890s, competitive pressures on today’s media are a major factor in the way Latin America is reported to the U.S. public. Along with many others, Burt, “News Media and National Security” (1991: 142), argues that these competitive economic pressures result in “herd journal¬ ism: the tendency of the media to cover the same events in much the same way, ignoring other developments and other issues.” A classic example of “herd journalism” is the way El Salvador was covered in the 1980s. In 1982, hundreds of correspondents (most of whom were ill prepared for the assignment) suddenly descended on the country to report conditions that, for the most part, had existed for fifty years and, almost as suddenly, departed before the issues were resolved. Undoubtedly, Washington’s growing obsession with El Salvador partially ac¬ counted for the huge increase in coverage (see Maslow and Arana, ‘ ‘Operation Salvador” [1981]) during the early months of the Reagan administration. How¬ ever, in “The Press of War Zooms in on the Sorrows of El Salvador” (1981), Dickey points out that foreign correspondents for the Washington Post suggested that the “star wars”—vigorous competition among the television networks to determine who would replace Walter Cronkite as the TV news-ratings king— might also be a factor in the reporting. In sum, the timing, type, quantity, and quality of the early coverage of El Salvador—and, by extension, most of Latin American coverage in general—probably are explained less by the intrinsic value of the news and more by the economic goals of the news business. In addition to the economic pressures on news coverage, organizational and technological constraints also are at play in determining what is newsworthy in Latin America. Media sociologists, such as Gans, Deciding What’s News (1979),

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

have long recognized that media structure, bureaucratic routines, and journalistic conventions strongly affect the type of news that is produced. There also is a growing evidence that the visual nature of television, which has become the primary source of foreign affairs information for most of the U.S. population, has radically altered the kinds of stories reported from Latin America. In “Eu¬ rosclerosis and Other Ills” (1989: 87), Pfaff charged that television was largely responsible for the inadequate reporting of world affairs. “Television,” accord¬ ing to Pfaff (1989: 87), “dictates what gets covered because television is where people get the news they then expect to find amplified in the newspapers or magazines.” On the basis of data from their content analysis, Larson, McAnany, and Storey, “News of Latin America on Network Television, 1972-1981” (1986: 169), found that over half of the visual reporting from Latin America dealt with crisis news. The authors concluded, “Network orientation toward visually exciting crises, together with no permanent presence in the region, en¬ courages a lack of attention to social development, with adverse consequences for foreign policy.”

U.S. MEDIA COVERAGE OF LATIN AMERICA In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge observed that “readers of our newspapers might have imagined revolutions and volcanic disturbances were the chief prod¬ uct of Latin America” (quoted in Gans [1979: 32]). Despite the addition of television and satellite communications to the news environment, Coolidge’s conclusion remains valid many decades later. Gonzenbach, Arant, and Steven¬ son, “The World of U.S. Network Television News” (1992: 74), conducted an extensive content analysis of television coverage of foreign and international news and found that ‘ ‘Latin America received surprisingly little attention, even though it was the focus of American government attention and filled with the kind of disruption that attracts media attention.” An average of only 3 percent of U.S. network news was devoted to Latin America in 1989. Gonzenbach, Arant, and Stevenson (1992) further reported that, out of the total amount of air time that the networks devoted to Latin America, 22 percent dealt with disrup¬ tions, such as military takeovers and earthquakes; 41 percent covered U.S. re¬ lations with Latin American countries; 19 percent was “hard” news, such as political or economic news, from Latin American countries; and 19 percent was “soft” news, such as human interest stories, from the region. Larson, McAnany, and Storey (1986) also reported that eight countries received 88 percent of the total network news coverage of Latin America between 1972 and 1981: Cuba, 29 percent; Mexico, 15 percent; Panama (including the Canal Zone), 14 percent; Chile, 7 percent; Argentina, 7 percent; El Salvador, 6 percent; Nicaragua, 6 percent; Venezuela, 4 percent; and all others, 12 percent. Brazil, the largest and most economically powerful country in Latin America, is barely noticed by the U.S. media. According to Gans (1979: 32-37), most news from foreign countries falls into

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one of the following seven categories: (1) American activities in a foreign coun¬ try, (2) foreign activities that affect Americans and American policies, (3) com¬ munist-bloc country activities, (4) elections and other peaceful changes in government personnel, (5) political conflict and protest, (6) disasters, and (7) excesses of dictatorships. Other studies have concurred with Gans’s findings, but few are specific in their treatment of Latin America. The news coverage of Cuba exemplifies most of Gans’s categories. Conse¬ quently, not only is Cuba the Latin American country most frequently mentioned in the U.S. media, the U.S. coverage of Cuba is the most thoroughly studied in the academic literature. Knudson, Herbert L. Matthews and the Cuban Story (1978), studied and rejected the allegations that The New York Times editors’ coverage of Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolutionary war was politically biased and contributed to Castro’s success in overthrowing the Batista govern¬ ment. Taking the opposite point of view, various contributors to Ratliff, The Selling of Fidel Castro (1987), concluded that Castro effectively manipulates the U.S. media and, as a result, its coverage of the Cuban revolution is generally sympathetic. Several other studies have focused on the U.S. media’s potential nonfeasance or malfeasance in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Cozean (1979) con¬ cluded from a content analysis that the U.S. elite press gave unbalanced and unfavorable coverage of the Cuban revolution and also failed to prevent the “disaster” by agreeing to the Kennedy administration’s requests to suppress reports of the impending invasion. Francis, “The U.S. Press and Castro” (1967); Friendly and Elliot, The Constitution, That Delicate Balance (1984); and Hough¬ ton, “The Cuban Invasion of 1961 and the U.S. Press, in Retrospect” (1965) also studied the media’s role in the episode. Further, LeoGrande, Uneasy Allies (1987: 45), points out “how badly cold war fears about threats to national security had compromised the press’s independence from the state” during the Cuban missile crisis, and Backer, “The Prestige Press and News Management in Cuban Crisis” (1964), found that U.S. newspaper editors were not particularly concerned about government information control during the crisis. Finally, Kern, Levering, and Levering, The Kennedy Crises (1983: 99-140), argue that, as the Cuban situation evolved from a matter of political dispute after the Bay of Pigs to a real national emergency during the missile crisis, the significant political forces and public opinion in the United States closed ranks, making it relatively easy for a strong president to exploit the press in achieving his policy goals. Central America also falls into most of Gans’s categories of news from for¬ eign countries. Consequently, the region received extensive media attention dur¬ ing the period of increasing U.S. involvement, and similarly U.S. media performance has been widely analyzed. There is unanimous agreement that the media did not present to the people of the United States a fair and accurate reflection of the unfolding events and issues in Central America. In “Television and Crisis” (1983: 202, 208), McAnany reported from a content analysis that television network coverage of Central America from 1972 to 1981 was episodic and conflict oriented. Although the Central American conflict was “nei-

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

ther sudden or inexplicable,” television did not cover the build-up to the crisis and only gave it attention after “it had become a full-blown ‘event.’ ” The most frequent complaints about the coverage of Central America were those of political bias or advocacy by U.S. journalists. The debate was partic¬ ularly intense over the coverage of the Nicaraguan revolution to the point that it was popularized in the Hollywood movie Under Fire. Christian (Central American correspondent for the Miami Herald and The New York Times), ‘ ‘Cov¬ ering the Sandinistas” (1982), and Muravchik, News Coverage of the Sandinista Revolution (1988: 108), argued that the U.S. media, especially the Washington Post and The New York Times, failed to report fully or actually may have ‘ ‘ob¬ scured the fact that the Sandinistas were Communists.” Times correspondent Riding (1982) and Post correspondent Karen DeYoung (1982) took issue with these allegations in “Taking Exception to ‘Covering the Sandinistas.’ ” How¬ ever, the vast majority of the criticism of Central American coverage concerns the perception that the U.S. media supported the policies of conservative ad¬ ministrations in dealing with Nicaragua. For example, Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988), argue that their “propaganda model” explains much of the U.S. coverage of the Sandinistas and the tendency to accept blindly the “national religion” of anticommunism. According to the model, which pos¬ its that the media serve as a system-supportive institution by inculcating and reinforcing the agenda of the elite, U.S. media coverage of the world is deter¬ mined by economic, organizational, and ideological constraints on the news businesses. On the basis of a content analysis of The New York Times coverage of U.S. policymaking on Nicaragua, Bennett, “Toward a Theory of Press-State Rela¬ tions” (1990), concluded that the news is “indexed” to the range and dynamics of government debate but has little relation to the range of expressed public opinion. His data indicated that opinions voiced in news stories about U.S. fund¬ ing of the contras came overwhelmingly from “mainstream” government offi¬ cials and, therefore, did not adequately reflect the much wider range of alternative perspectives held by the “potential universe of news sources.” Therefore, according to Bennett’s theory, “indexing” by the media can “mar¬ ginalize” a stable majority of public opinion under exceptional circumstances, such as the congressional debate over Nicaragua. Similarly, Dickson, ‘ ‘Press and U.S. Policy Toward Nicaragua, 1983-1987” (1992: 562), analyzed the content of the Times and the Washington Post and concluded that, because the press was dependent on the official government “line” on important foreign crises, it tended to legitimize the administration’s policy toward Nicaragua: “[Cjriticism centered primarily on the means of achieving stated U.S. policy rather than on the appropriateness of the policy itself,” she reported. Spence, “The U.S. Me¬ dia” (1987: 182), reached a similar conclusion, namely that the coverage of Nic¬ aragua was “framed” by Washington, particularly the White House, and “slighted crucial political Central American dynamics.” There is unanimity in the academic literature that U.S. coverage of the civil

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war in El Salvador was also unsatisfactory. It is criticized for being superficial, vacillating, distorted, conflict-oriented, or biased toward some groups and nations over others. Massing, “About-Face on El Salvador” (1983); Herman and Chomsky (1988); Andersen, “Visions of Instability” (1988); Dorman, “Pe¬ ripheral Vision” (1986); and Maslow and Arana, “Operation Salvador” (1981), argued that reporting of the conflict was largely responsive or deferential to the ' U.S. administration. Massing, “When More Means Less” (1989); Massing, “Remember El Salvador?” (1987); Herman and Chomsky (1988); and Spence “Second Time Around” (1984) criticize the episodic coverage frequently rooted in a North American vision of “free and fair” elections. In summary, the foreign news content in the U.S. media, in the words of Graber, Mass Media and American Politics (1980: 261-262), is sparse and unbalanced, focusing on the wealthier and more powerful countries. It assesses foreign countries largely in terms of U.S. interests, with little attempt to explain their culture and their concerns from their own perspective. It does not sensitize Americans to the problems of foreigners, but reinforces existing American assumptions and stere¬ otypes instead. Major problems abroad such as hunger, disease, and poverty are ignored except when unusual disasters dramatize them temporarily. Much of the news totally lacks a sense of history and a sense of the meaning of successive events.... The news does not even provide sufficient information to permit most Americans to understand the rationale for major foreign policies like the renego¬ tiation of the Panama Canal treaties or the necessity for international economic cooper¬ ation. ... If one assumes that better information leads to better policies, then deficiencies in news coverage are grave.

RELATIONSHIPS AMONG THE MEDIA, PUBLIC, AND FOREIGN POLICYMAKERS The relationship between the U.S. media and government on international issues is very different from what it is on domestic issues. First, the relevant actors start from different assumptions when dealing with global matters. Rec¬ ognizing the dangers and complexities of international affairs, the public and, to some extent, the media accept the need for some government secrecy to protect the national security and for a greater reliance on the expertise of gov¬ ernment officials than is common in domestic affairs. Second, the source of most information about U.S. foreign policy is the Executive branch, with other agencies and institutions (governmental and nongovernmental) playing minor roles. In contrast to domestic issues in which Congress and the courts are usually major actors, the conduct of foreign policy is highly centralized under the pres¬ idency. The presidential advisory system—State, Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and National Security Council—is almost exclusively responsible for foreign policy and, therefore, have a stranglehold on relevant information. The courts have opted out of foreign policy matters on constitutional grounds, and

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

Congress is often a marginal player. Consequently, secret information regarding international matters tends to be released more as a conscious decision of the administration than as a product of conflicts among the various branches of the government as was the case, for example, in the Watergate affair. Third, whereas the public would have a reasonable basis for forming opinions on controversial domestic policy issue, such as abortion or gun control, international issues tend to be removed from the public’s realm of knowledge and experience. Conse¬ quently, U,S. media audiences tend to have less interest in and exercise less critical evaluation of foreign news. While this would seem to indicate that the presidency has near-unilateral power in the release of information on foreign affairs, the media also have substantial powers. First and most obvious, the media are essential channels of communication with the public. Second, the media are a potential adversary to administration policies or response to foreign crises. Accounts by government officials in the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center’s The Media and Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World (1993) and Serfaty, ed. (1991) indicate that a huge percentage—perhaps the majority—of time spent by U.S. government foreign affairs staff is devoted to neutralizing the potentially disruptive influence of the media on the policy process. Third, the media are a valuable source of information for policymakers in Washington. The news media’s sophisticated global communications network allows them to collect and disseminate more information more quickly from a wider variety of sources than any government agency, probably including the Central Intelligence Agency. U.S. correspondents in Latin America frequently have access to the political opposition, guerrillas, and terrorists; U.S. diplomats rarely have this kind of access and information. Consequently, President Kennedy was a voracious consumer of newspapers and often sought the confidential opinion of the nation’s premier journalists. Presi¬ dent Bush watched the Persian Gulf War on the Cable News Network and frequently inquired of his staff about specific stories he saw on TV. The powers and needs of both the media and the foreign policy community tend to force them into a symbiotic relationship. Davison reported in the classic article “Diplomatic Reporting” (1975) that important news of foreign affairs emerges as the result of complex and subtle transactions between diplomats and diplomatic correspondents. A very small number of both groups join forces in what Davison describes as a “diplomatic reporting network.” A requirement for admission to the network is observance of unwritten rules that protect the interest of both diplomats and diplomatic correspondents. In contrast to the ad¬ versarial relationship that exists between journalists and government officials in other venues, relative harmony characterizes the relationship of diplomats and diplomatic correspondents. Both parties derive considerable benefit—especially access to important foreign policy information—from being members of this select group. But, in order to gain inside information from the diplomats, these correspondents withhold some of the information they receive and/or disguise their sources. Although withholding information is, of course, antithetical to the

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standards of U.S. journalism, diplomatic correspondents rationalize these unof¬ ficial arrangements on the grounds that they have more context and better un¬ derstanding of complex international issues that they can use in their reporting to the public even if they do not disclose everything they know. “The public would be much more dependent on one-dimensional official statements and re¬ leases,’’ Davison (1975: 146) concluded in his study of diplomatic reporting. ' “The price of gaining more information is withholding some.” The Cuban missile crisis provides two examples of how this mediagovernment alliance in reporting U.S.-Latin American relations can be—de¬ pending on one’s perspective—either functional or dysfunctional. The first case involves Harold V. Hendrix, a Miami-based reporter with close links to the CIA. Using documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Allen, “The Pen and the Secret Sword” (1986), concluded that Hendrix, who won the Pu¬ litzer Prize for his reporting of the Cuban missile crisis, had exchanged infor¬ mation with the CIA. Hendrix, the Latin American editor of the Miami News, had reported the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba two weeks before President Kennedy’s disclosure on national radio and television in October 1962. A senior CIA official told Crewdson and Treaster of The New York Times, “C.I.A. Es¬ tablished Many Links to Journalists in U.S. and Abroad” (1977), that Hendrix was an agency “asset.” Hendrix said that he simply had a “normal journalistic relationship’ ’ with the CIA. Several years later, after leaving journalism, Hen¬ drix became a public relations executive for ITT in Latin America and, in 1976, pleaded guilty to withholding information from a Senate committee investigating ITT’s involvement in attempts to block the 1970 election of Salvador Allende in Chile. If Hendrix won journalism’s most prestigious prize using information leaked from CIA officials, what did the agency get in return? Brown, ‘ ‘United States Propaganda Performance in Crisis, 1960-1965” (1970: 26), claims that Hendrix won “the disinformation derby” in anti-Castro reporting designed to set the stage for the Bay of Pigs invasion the previous year. Therefore, if Soviet missiles were introduced into Cuba in response to the U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs, Hendrix ironically won the Pulitzer Prize for writing about events that his previous writings might have helped to create. However, in both cases, his source of information probably was the CIA. The second case involves another journalist, who, also ironically, helped in the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. John Scab, the diplomatic correspon¬ dent for ABC News, was contacted by the KGB station chief in Washington at the height of the crisis and enlisted to serve as an unofficial communications link between the two opposing sides. With official communications links be¬ tween the White House and the Kremlin in a primitive, pre-“hot line” stage, Scali was undoubtedly selected because of his status as a diplomatic correspon¬ dent and close working relationship with then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Although the importance of Scali as a channel of communications has recently been called into question by documents released in Moscow, at the time of the crisis, Washington officials believed that the proposals Scali relayed between

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

the KGB and the Kennedy administration eventually formed the basis of the settlement between the United States and the Soviet Union (see Davison, “News Media and International Negotiations” [1974b]). In any case, the journalist was clearly an active participant in, rather than a dispassionate observer of, the events. Scab had inside knowledge of one of the biggest news stories in a generation, but if he published the story, he might have jeopardized the delicate negotiations and changed the course of history. In any case, he chose to withhold the information from his editors and audience. The most widely debated issue in the popular and academic literature is, Who dominates this relationship—the president and his foreign policymakers or the media? Are the media primarily agents of presidential power or an independent power base which substantially limits the president’s ability to formulate and conduct foreign policy on behalf of the people? Do the media undercut the ability of the president and presidential advisers to conduct an enlightened for¬ eign policy, or do the media serve as the people’s watchdog of government, protecting them from the centralized power of the presidency, which, if left unchecked, could become self-serving, antidemocratic, or corrupt? Most recountings by government officials (e.g.. Ford, “Making Foreign Pol¬ icy” [1981]; Beschloss, Presidents, Television and Foreign Crises [1993]) as¬ cribe considerable—usually negative—influence on foreign policymaking to the media. In contrast, journalists such as Isaacson, “The Senior Official” (1992), and Armstrong, “Iran-Contra” (1990), tend to see the president’s powers to manipulate the media as substantial and the media’s power to alter policy as very limited. The academic literature on foreign policy generally attributes far less power to the media than do works which focus specifically on their role in foreign policymaking. For example, Kryzanek, U.S.-Latin American Relations (1985: 126), treats the media as a relatively neutral forum through which pow¬ erful political actors communicate: “Public policy is certainly not a captive of the press,” he writes, “but many of the policy debates are fought out on the pages of major newspapers and these reports become the backdrop against which public opinion is formed.” On the other hand, Braestrup, The Big Story (1977), characterizes the media as “a political actor of tremendous consequence” in forcing the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. However, according to Berry, Foreign Policy and the Press (1990: 144), neither of these traditional views of the relative power of the media and government “holds up.” “Both schools are ready to do battle with each other fully confident that each is right. There is, however, another explanation. Both schools are partially right, though wrong overall.” Kern, Levering, and Levering (1983: 195) view the press as a “reflective institution,” which pressures the president on issues of importance to other powerful forces in society. Therefore, to the authors, the question is not so much whether the president or the media dominate in foreign policy but rather what political forces are competing with the president and one another through the media under what conditions. For example, their content analysis of U.S. press

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coverage indicates that President Kennedy was unable to stem broad criticism of his policies toward Cuba after the Bay of Pigs invasion, but his handling of the press during the missile crisis is considered a classic case of presidential dominance. They conclude that

the press is like a prism. It will reflect, focus, and magnify their (competing political forces’) views. Like sunlight focused through a magnifying glass, political forces re¬ flected in the press lens may be powerful enough to start a fire, to put constraints on a president, or, conversely, to assist him in the elimination of his opposition and the ac¬ quisition of power.

There also is wide debate on the validity of the “democratic assumption” that U.S. foreign policy is based on the opinions of the majority of U.S. citizens as articulated to policymakers, in large part, by the media. According to Goren, “The News and Foreign Policy” (1980), the democratic assumption is errone¬ ously predicated on the belief that the media are independent actors who transmit “politically significant information” between the people and the government, that the public becomes well informed in the process, and that the decision makers respond to public opinion in the formulation and implementation of the policy. The democratic assumption is questionable on several grounds. First, most analysts, such as Norris, “Like It or Not, the Sword Is Mightier Than the Pen” (1982), and Hallin, “The Myth of the Adversary Press” (1983), reject the notion of an “independent” press in the foreign policy debates. Second, most coverage of foreign policy matters focuses on what the former diplomatic cor¬ respondent Marvin Kalb called “sizzle”—partisan politics, personalities, con¬ troversy, or violence—rather than the substance of the issue. This emphasis is particularly pronounced on television, the primary source of foreign affairs in¬ formation for the public. According to Burt (1991: 137), the media’s dismal performance in this regard is “one reason why the national security debate has become increasingly chaotic, simplistic and ill-formed.” Third, there are doubts as to how attentive the public is to foreign policy issues. According to 1990 data reported in The Media and Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World (1993), 36 percent of Americans said they were “very interested” in news about other countries and 53 percent in news about U.S. relations with other countries, and this was a significant increase over their reported interest in foreign news in 1982. However, Sparkes and Winter, “Public Interest in Foreign News” (1980), Davison, Shanaor, and Yu (1980), and others believe that the actual percentage of U.S. audiences who are attentive (as opposed to saying they are) to international news and become knowledgeable on foreign affairs is probably quite small—perhaps between 1 and 10 percent of the U.S. population. And last, there is no agreement that foreign policymakers consider opinions expressed in the media in their decisions. According to former Secretary of State Dean Rusk (quoted in “Global News after the Cold War” [1993: 336]):

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

I cannot think of a policy decision or initiative that was taken from editorials in the press—even the major national newspapers or television broadcasters. The reason is very simple. Foreign policy questions have locked up within them dozens and dozens of secondary and tertiary questions which are not taken into account by the news media. Further, we must bear in mind that the news media speak to the American people and not for them. The myth of the fourth estate remains a myth in my experience.

In debating this issue, Arnson, Crossroads (1989), argued that the media’s role in shaping public opinion has been overemphasized and their role in shifting opinion within legitimated institutions has been underemphasized. In contrast, Smith, “Media and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy” (1984: 136), believes that when the media have a large impact on foreign policy, “they are more likely to act through pressure via popular attitudes and the political process than through direct influence on the views of top decision-makers.” Sobel, ed., Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy (1993: 276), similarly concludes that, in the Executive-legislative debate over contra aid, public opposition was a salient factor: “The policymakers may have tried to ignore it, they may have tried to change it, they may have tried to direct it, but public opinion was a consistent factor influencing their decision making.” In summary, despite many opinions to the contrary, media coverage of the U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America is probably far more the product of the relationship between the media and government than of either of their re¬ lationships with the public.

INFLUENCE OF THE MEDIA ON U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICYMAKING What effects, if any, do the media have on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America? Wiarda, a leading scholar of Latin America, concludes in Foreign Policy without Illusion (1990:85) “the media help set the agenda and paramenters of foreign policy discussion, they shape and mold public opin¬ ion as well as report on it, they often interject their own views and biases into the reporting of the news, and they themselves have sometimes become signif¬ icant players in the policy-making process.” Wiarda’s conclusion implies that the media affect both the process and the substance of foreign policymaking. While there are considerable popular speculation and academic analysis about the nature of media effects on foreign policy, empirical evidence from theoret¬ ically well-developed research is scant, and, therefore, to a significant degree, answers to most questions about the media’s role are not fully known. However, some tentative conclusion can be drawn. For example, there is considerable agreement in both the popular and the academic literature that the media affect the foreign policy process. There is considerably less agreement that the media affect the substance of U.S.-Latin American policy. Most policymakers, according to O’Heffernan (1991), believe that the media

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profoundly affect the policy process in a number of important ways. One of them is agenda setting, a concept brought to the foreign policy literature by Cohen (1963: 13): The press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion. It may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly ' successful in telling its readers what to think about. And it follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their personal interests, but also on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors and publishers of the papers they read. ... The editor may believe he is only printing the things that people want to read, but he is thereby putting a claim on their attention, powerfully determining what they will be thinking about, and talking about, until the next wave laps the shore.

The policymakers on Middle East issues interviewed by O’Heffeman (1991) believed that, if outside groups gain media coverage on international issues, those issues receive higher level attention within the foreign policy community and other important issues can suffer from a lower ranking on the foreign policy agenda. According to Smith (1984), “Presidential politics includes attention to the American press.” “Their selection and description of particular events—far more than their editorials—help create or promote national issues ..., and to influence the President’s agenda.” While Kern, Levering, and Levering (1983: 196) agree that the “press plays a major role in defining public issues,” they also argue that presidential interest in an issue is the key factor in attracting media and, in turn, public attention. As the White House focused on the Panama Canal treaties, conflict in Nicaragua, the drug war in Latin America, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, those issues quickly moved to the top of the media agenda—only to drop off as quickly as presidential attention turned else¬ where. The Freedom Forum Media Studies Center (1993: 27) summarized the agenda setting question as follows: “Television news can force the government to address an issue by putting it on the screen, but it cannot wrest the agenda¬ setting power from the executive. If the president chooses to focus on one con¬ flict, the media must focus on it. If the Secretary of State travels somewhere, the media must cover it.” Considerable criticism has been directed at Ted Koppel-style ‘ ‘television di¬ plomacy,” in which representatives of contending parties in international dis¬ putes are interviewed on the air and, in very few cases, pushed by the television personality for a specific commitment to a resolution. President Reagan, for example, argued that such “meddling” by the media undercuts the efforts of trained and knowledgeable U.S. diplomats operating with more complete infor¬ mation to secure the release of American hostages in the Middle East. More than three-quarters of the policymakers interviewed by Linsky, Impact (1986), felt that journalistic involvement in diplomacy had an unqualified “bad” effect on the foreign policy process. However, the problem appears to be mostly hy¬ pothetical. There have been very few actual instances of significant media in-

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tervention in international negotiations and even fewer, if any, cases in which media involvement seriously altered the outcome. A similar question of the effects of “leaks” on national security, especially military security, has been widely debated without resolution in the literature, including in McCloskey, “Care and Handling of Leaks” (1991); Leeden, “Se¬ crets” (1991); DeYoung, “Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy” (1985); and Marro, “When the Government Tells Lies” (1985). Newsom, “Scoops and Secrets” (1989: 175), who described the relationship between diplomats and the media as “diplomats attempt to keep secrets and journalists try to reveal them,” concluded that the outcome of this built-in institutional conflict is that Americans have greater information about the actions of their government but pay the price by constraining their government’s ability to act abroad in their national interest. The cases of U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama serve as important ex¬ amples. According to Hannan, “Censorship During the Invasion of Grenada” (1988), the Reagan administration’s official rationale for preventing media cov¬ erage of the 1983 invasion was to protect the secrecy of the operation and ensure the safety of U.S. troops. However, Secretary of State George Shultz added (quoted in Smith, The Power Game [1989: 430]) that the press had been kept off the island because “reporters are always against us, and so they’re always seeking to report something that’s going to screw things up.” The Bush admin¬ istration also severely restricted media coverage of its 1989 invasion of Panama to arrest General Manuel Antonio Noriega. Gergen, “Diplomacy in a Television Age” (1991: 61), concluded that “given the initial success of the invasion and the inability of the press to cover some of its more gruesome sides, it is perhaps not surprising that the general coverage in the early days was overwhelmingly favorable for the administration.” Gergen added that in the face of broad con¬ gressional and public support for the president’s actions, “the press seemed reluctant to raise vital, but troubling, issues.” Presidential counsel Cutler, “Foreign Policy on Deadline” (1984: 113, 121), has concluded that media coverage forces faster and usually less deliberate and enlightened foreign policy decision making: It came as a distinct surprise to me how much television news had intruded into both the timing and substance of the policy decisions that an American president is required to make.... An appraisal of television’s impact on public policy must distinguish be¬ tween its damaging effect on the time available for crisis decisions and its sometimes harmful, sometimes helpful, effect on the substance of broad policy.

However, the process and substance of foreign policymaking cannot always be easily separated. Beschloss (1993: 10) reported that, when President Kennedy and his advisers first met to plan their response to the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the initial consensus was to carry out immediate air strikes. But, because the White House had the luxury of time and secrecy in their de¬ liberations, the majority opinion among the crisis team began to shift toward

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more restrained measures, leading Kennedy “to make a thoughtful decision that most historians would now find to be wise.” Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara (quoted in Beschloss [1993: 10-11]), said: Would the actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis have been different had there not been time to consider this thoughtfully in secret? Well, I think probably they would have been different-1 fear that some of our initial judgments (in favor of air strikes), later changed, would have greater influence.... Do you think that thirty-second sound bites put the public in the position of thoughtfully considering and participating in a debate on issues as complex as those we’re talking about? I don’t think so.... What I’m arguing is that at times, even today, I think we benefit from the ability to consider these complex questions before we are deluged with half-informed public opinion.... I would still insist on time to decide before we put this nation at risk of nuclear war. In considering other potential media effects on policymaking, Linsky (1986) concluded that media have much less influence at the formulation and imple¬ mentation stage and greater influence at the evaluation stage. Reston (1967: 63) concurred: ‘ ‘No doubt, the press has great influence on American foreign policy when things are obviously going badly.” Linsky (1986) also found that media attention moves foreign policy decision making to higher levels in the bureaucra¬ cy. However, the literature is surprisingly limited on the important questions of whether or not media coverage tends to politicize foreign policy issues, make public debates more conflictual, and therefore make them more difficult to re¬ solve. In sum, media influence on Latin American foreign policy is complex, is not fully understood, and undoubtedly varies widely depending on a host of factors. Some of the other variables that should be considered in analyzing any particular case would include (1) type of issue, (2) level of political or military conflict, (3) importance of country to the United States, (4) type of policy decision (crisis management or longer-term), (5) political ideology of key decision makers, (6) presidential level of popularity and corresponding popularity of his policy, and (7) the nature of interbranch relations. We now turn to an examination of the role of the U.S. media in covering one of the major atrocities of the war in El Salvador in the 1980s.

Covering El Salvador: The Case of El Mozote and The New York Times In 1981, a Salvadoran army unit trained and funded by the U.S. government massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians, including many children, in the small village of El Mozote. Although important in and of itself, the atrocity raised unsettling questions about the U.S. policy of support for the right-wing govern¬ ment of El Salvador in its civil war with leftist guerrillas and about media malfeasance or nonfeasance in U.S. involvement in the Central America conflicts

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of the 1980s. Danner, “The Truth of El Mozote” (1993), described the U.S. government cover-up of the massacre as “a central parable of the Cold War,” and Massing, “About-Face in El Salvador” (1983) charged that, after The New York Times backed off in its coverage of this and other human right violations by the Salvadoran military, the “once-tough press went soft” in its coverage of Washington’s Central American policy. Hoyt, “The Mozote Massacre” (1993), recounts how the Times correspondent Raymond Bonner, the Washington Post’s Alma Guillermoprieto, and the photojoumalist Susan Meiselas traveled to El Mozote shortly after the killings and observed or photographed bodies and interviewed survivors. The resulting sto¬ ries appearing with photos on the front pages of the Times and Post were met with vigorous denials by the Reagan administration, which, at that very time, was in the process of certifying to Congress that the Salvadoran government was making “a concerted and significant effort” to comply with international human rights standards. Bonner, who was among the most aggressive and re¬ spected correspondents in Central America, quickly became the subject of vir¬ ulent attacks by the administration and supporters of its policy in Central America. Despite their knowledge that the killings had taken place, top adminstration officials testified to Congress and told Times editors privately that Bon¬ ner’s account was incorrect, and some proponents of the administration’s policy compared him with Herbert Matthews, the Times editor who clandestinely in¬ terviewed Castro during the Cuban revolutionary war, suggesting that Bonner had been duped by guerrilla propaganda and that his reporting was responsible for “losing” El Salvador to communists. Six months after his report of El Mozote, Bonner was withdrawn from Central America and assigned to the Times metro desk. According to a Times insider (quoted by Massing [1983: 45]), the paper’s editors waited a “decent interval” before reassigning Bonner so as “to give the impression they weren’t caving in” to the administration’s pressure. A. M. Rosenthal, then the Times executive editor, denied that political pressure had anything to do with pulling Bonner off the Salvador beat, but Danner (1993: 123) concluded that Rosenthal’s own an¬ ticommunist ideology had much to do with the decision. Whatever the real reasons for Bonner’s recall, Danner (1993), Hoyt (1993), and Massing (1993) concluded that the unmistakable appearance was that he had been sent to jour¬ nalistic Siberia for giving credence to the guerrillas’ side of the story. According to Massing (1993), the Times’ coverage of the Salvadoran civil war turned docile after the Bonner affair and focused—not on the merits of the administration’s policy—on whether or not it could successfully carry out the policy. And when the Times—the agenda setter for agenda setters—changed course, other major media followed suit. In 1992, after the end of the twelve-year civil war, a United Nations com¬ mission documented that the El Mozote massacre had indeed taken taken place, opening up a flood dike of graphic media coverage about the killings and coverup. In a rare moment of self-criticism, The New York Times (1993), in an edi-

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torial, Exposing the Lies About El Salvador,” conceded (without mentioning itself in specific) that in general news coverage of human rights violations in El Salvador was “intermittent and at times timid.” The Post's Guillermoprieto also told Hoyt (1993: 34): “It was very, very hard to fight the Reagan administration; it’s hard to fight any administration.... I’m not terribly optimistic. What we see is that administrations are increasingly able to dictate the terms of coverage— ' in Panama, for example....” Danner (1993) and others contend that the media’s inability to cover El Mozote and other human rights violations effectively was an important lesson to both the Salvadoran military and the Reagan administration and became a turn¬ ing point in the civil war and U.S. policy toward the region. Salvadoran officers knew that they had gotten away with the massacre, and U.S. officials knew they had succeeded in covering up the actions of their Salvadoran allies, although much of the information was made available to major U.S. media. Therefore, both knew that they probably would not be held accountable for any human rights violations and, consequently, had a freer hand in the prosecution of the war by whatever means.

MEDIA TECHNOLOGY AND FOREIGN POLICY There is a consensus in the literature that the growing dominance of the visual medium of television in coverage of international issues and events has altered foreign policymaking. ‘ ‘The print media have almost no impact at all (on foreign policy),” said former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (quoted in The Media and Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World [1993: 27]). He added: “The Los Angeles Times could do a great expose, but it would stir only a few people up. A few big columnists may have influence in Washington, because everybody reads them and they’re a common point of reference. But the big power is TV reporting.” Compact video recorders and portable uplinks to a global satellite network allow for instantaneous broadcasting of powerful video images of bloodshed and conflict from almost any location on earth. According to Sharkey, “When Pictures Drive Foreign Policy” (1993), this dramatic, real-time coverage generally lacks the necessary historical and cultural context and tends to over¬ simplify complex issues. Do these TV images overpower reasoned foreign pol¬ icymaking and encourage emotional, knee-jerk responses to complex situations? Carter administration officials acknowledged that the replay after replay of the on-camera execution of the ABC correspondent Bill Stewart by Nicaraguan national guard in 1979 forced the White House to change its strategy for dealing with the escalating Nicaraguan crisis and ultimately to withhold support from the Somoza regime, paving the way for the Sandinistas to take power. Furthermore, Manuel, Advancing Media Technologies and Their Impact on War Reporting and Government Censorship on the Battlefield (1992), argued that the explosive growth of new communications technologies will make it increasingly difficult for military commanders to control media coverage of

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events such as the Panama invasion. Until recently, all the media could do was complain about battlefield restriction, but new technologies, such as high-power satellites which can photograph military operations in great detail from thousands of miles above the earth, are tipping the balance in favor of the media, Manuel wrote, and will require the military in particular to rethink its relation¬ ship with the media.

IN SEARCH OF EXTERNAL ENEMIES: SYSTEMS THEORY AND MEDIA COVERAGE OF LATIN AMERICA This section presents an integrated theory that attempts to reconcile the con¬ flicting evidence and conclusions previously reported and to explain the role of the U.S. media on Latin American foreign policymaking. All national media systems, including that of the United States, report more external conflict than domestic conflict, according to Stevenson and Shaw, eds. (1984). It is, therefore, impossible that the global media are reporting external conflict in proportion to its actual occurrence. What accounts for this unbalanced emphasis on external conflict, and how does the answer help explain the role of the U.S. media in Latin American foreign policymaking? In his seminal work on the functions of social conflict, Coser (1956: 106) hypothesized that “searching for the outside enemy” (or exaggeration of the danger which an actual enemy represents) serves not only to maintain the struc¬ ture of the group, but also to strengthen its cohesion when threatened by a relaxation of energies or by internal dissension.” In their landmark work Community Conflict and the Press (1980), Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien extended Coser’s perspective by viewing the mass media as integral parts of a complex social system. The media are interwoven with the political, economic, and cultural subsystems in the larger society. In much the same way that the nervous system is both cause and effect in the process of transmitting messages throughout the human body, the media affect and are affected by society and its component parts. Consequently, media behavior can¬ not be understood apart from the structure and conditions of the social system within which they operate. According to Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien (1980) and Coser (1956), one of the most important of those conditions is the level of conflict. All social systems have some degree of conflict, and the mass media exist, in part, to manage that conflict. Depending on a nexus of conditions within and surrounding the system, conflict can be either functional or dysfunctional. Conflict could be a sign of vitality or of turmoil in the system. In either case, the mass media are an im¬ portant, probably essential, mechanism through which the social system controls conflict. Under certain circumstances, the mass media could initiate or accelerate conflict to help revitalize a stagnating system. Under other conditions, they could

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reduce conflict that is threatening society. In all cases, the media operate in support of the most basic goal in all societies: survival. Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien (1980) wrote that the role of the media in managing conflict is analogous to the function of a thermostat, which senses a change in temperature in a room and triggers a heating or air-conditioning unit to restore the appropriate temperature. Therefore, the media are not independent organizations acting autonomously. Rather, they are affected by changing con¬ ditions in society and, reciprocally, affect changes in that society. Those who view journalism as a rational process of collecting facts and reporting objective truth find it difficult to accept the notion that the media are captives of society. Systems theory does not imply that all reporting, all of the time, supports specific societal goals, in the same way that it would be absurdly reductionist to say that all economic transactions are conscious exercise of the laws of supply and de¬ mand. But in the aggregate, according to this system theory of the media, jour¬ nalistic decisions serve the society in which the media are imbedded. Therefore, how the media report conflict—national or international—depends to a large extent on the conditions within the social system that the media serve. If the social system is threatened from within by disruption, conflict, or decay, the media tend to report more external conflict, create a nonexistent threat, or exaggerate a minor one. However, the media also would tend to report more undistorted information about external conflict when outside threats are indeed real and/or the level of domestic conflict is low. In both cases, the media are responding in the interest of system maintenance. In other words, under some circumstances, the media protect the U.S, national system from disruptive in¬ ternal conflict, giving their audiences inaccurate or distorted information about external conflicts or threats. Most correspondents interviewed by the author believed that revolution and counterrevolution in Central America during the 1980s were essentially a “Washington story.” As the Bonner case demonstrated, those who wandered from the range and terms of the U.S. policy debate—regardless of the realities in Central America—did so at substantial risk to their journalistic careers. Their belief that U.S. coverage of the conflicts was explained mostly by what was happening inside the “beltway” is consistent with a general systems theory of media behavior. While the blood was being spilled in Central America, the engine that drove the coverage of the blood-letting was inside the United States. Stories of increasing revolutionary threat to U.S. interests were rooted more in the inability of the U.S. political system to resolve the intense internal conflict of the times than in any significant changes in Central America. In effect, a systems perspective supports the hypothesis that the U.S. press helped to reduce a dangerously high level of domestic conflict by redirecting some attention from the fratricidal political struggles of the 1980s to external conflicts, such as in Central America. If the hypothesis is supported in empirical tests, the media’s role in U.S.-Latin American policymaking will be greatly clarified.

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

CONCLUSION Although the literature on the influence of the media on U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America is quantitatively and qualitatively limited, there is no doubt, according to Hallin (1986: 214), “that the control of images and infor¬ mation is central to the exercise of political power.” Those who control the flow of information about Latin America are surprisingly few in number and respond to a variety of political, economic, and other influences. As a result, most U.S. media audiences and policymakers have a distorted view of Latin America. In addition, what tentative conclusions have been drawn about the media’s role in foreign policymaking are now in question because of breathtak¬ ing advances in communications technologies and the end of the Cold War. In sum, there is great need for theoretically well-developed, empirically supported research on this important question. Most research on U.S. coverage of Latin America treats the media as manip¬ ulators or objects of manipulation. In the systems theory proposed here, the media are both. The media respond to changing conditions in the U.S. national system and, in turn, affect those conditions. In the case of Central American coverage of the 1980s, the U.S. media appear to have exaggerated a foreign threat as a systemic response to destructive tension within the U.S. national system. The battle for coverage of the Central American conflict was fought and decided in newsrooms of major media in New York and Washington—not in Central America—and, therefore, reflected a U.S. power struggle more than observable reality in the region. Or, as was said in the old Pogo comic strips, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

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Hannan, Elizabeth. 1986. “Censorship During the Invasion of Grenada: The Press, the Public and the Pentagon.” International Communication Bulletin 23 (Fall): 1525. Hartlyn, Jonathan, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds. 1992. The United States and Latin America in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. >. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Hero, Alfred O. 1959. Mass Media and World Affairs. Boston: World Peace Foundation. Hohenberg, John. 1964. Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times. New York and London: Columbia University Press. Hopkinson, Nicholas. 1993. The Media and International Affairs After the Cold War. London: Wilton Park Paper 74. Houghton, Neal D. 1965. “The Cuban Invasion of 1961 and the U.S. Press, in Retro¬ spect,” Journalism Quarterly 42 (Summer): 422^132. Hoyt, Mike. 1993. “The Mozote Massacre.” Columbia Journalism Review (January/ February): 31-34. “International News and Foreign Policy.” 1989. Gannett Center Journal 3 (Fall). Isaacson, Walter. 1992. “The Senior Official: Forget James Baker: Henry Kissinger Wrote the Book on How to Manage the Press.” Washington Journalism Review (November): 30-43. Kern, Montague, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering. 1983. The Kennedy Cri¬ ses: The Press, the Presidency and Foreign Policy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kliesch, Ralph E. 1991. “The U.S. Press Corps Abroad Rebounds: A 7th World Survey of Foreign Correspondents.” Newspaper Research Journal 12 (Winter): 24-33. Knudson, Jerry W. 1978. Herbert L Matthews and the Cuban Story. Lexington, Ky.: Journalism Monographs, No. 54 (February). -. 1974. “Whatever Became of “The Pursuit of Happiness”? The U.S. Press and Social Revolution in Latin America,” Gazette 20, no. 2: 201-214. Kryzanek, Michael J. 1985. U.S.-Latin American Relations. New York: Praeger. Larson, James F., Emile G. McAnany, and J. Douglas Storey. 1986. “News of Latin America on Network Television, 1972-1981: A Northern Perspective on the Southern Hemisphere.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3: 169-183. Leeden, Michael A. 1991. “Secrets.” In Simon Serfaty, ed. The Media and Foreign Policy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. LeoGrande, William. 1987. Uneasy Allies: The Press and the Government During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Occasional Paper No. 3. New York: Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, New York University. Linsky, Martin. 1986. Impact: How the Press Affects Federal Policymaking. New York: W. W. Norton. McAnany, Emile G. 1983. “Television and Crisis: Ten Years of Network News Coverage of Central America, 1972-1981.” Media, Culture and Society, 5: 199-212. McCloskey, Robert J. 1991. “Care and Handling of Leaks.” In Simon Serfaty, ed., The Media and Foreign Policy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Manuel, Steve G. 1992. “Advancing Media Technologies and Their Impact on War Reporting and Government Censorship on the Battlefield: A Changing Balance

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in Favor of the Media.” Unpublished M.A. Thesis, The Pennsylvania State Uni¬ versity. Marro, Anthony. 1985. ‘‘When the Government Tells Lies.” Columbia Journalism Re¬ view (March/April): 29-41. Maslow, Jonathan Evan, and Ana Arana. 1981. ‘‘Operation El Salvador.” Columbia Journalism Review (May/June): 5-8. Massing, Michael. 1989. ‘‘When More Means Less.” Columbia Journalism Review (July/August): 42-44. -. 1987. ‘‘Remember El Salvador?” Columbia Journalism Review (May/June): 21-

22. -. 1983. ‘‘About-Face on El Salvador.” Columbia Journalism Review (November/ December): 42—49. ‘‘The Media Go to War: From Vietnam to Central America.” 1983. NACLA Report on the Americas (July/August). Mowlana, Hamid. 1986. Global Information and World Communication: New Frontiers in International Relations. New York: Longman. Muravchik, Joshua. 1988. News Coverage of the Sandinista Revolution. Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Newsom, David D. 1989. “Scoops and Secrets: Diplomacy and the Press.” Gannett Center Journal (Fall): 175-187. Nichols, John Spicer. 1981. “Riding High.” The Quill (May): 25-26. Norris, Vincent P. 1982. “Like It or Not, the Sword is Mightier than the Pen.” Public Communication Review, 1 (Winter): 13-16. O’Heffeman, Patrick. 1991. Mass Media and American Foreign Policy: Insider Per¬ spectives on Global Journalism and the Foreign Policy Process. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Pfaff, William. 1989. “Eurosclerosis and Other Ills.” Gannett Center Journal (Fall): 8590. Pastor, Robert A. 1992. Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pollock, John Crothers. 1981. The Politics of Crisis Reporting: Learning to Be a Foreign Correspondent. New York: Praeger. Ratliff, William E., ed. 1987. The Selling of Fidel Castro: The Media and the Cuban Revolution. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Books. Riding, Alan. 1982. “Taking Exception to ‘Covering the Sandinistas.’ ” Washington Journalism Review (May): 6, 7, 56-58. Reston, James B. 1967. The Artillery of the Press: Its Influence on American Foreign Policy. New York: Harper & Row. Rosenblum, Mort. 1979. Coups and Earthquakes: Reporting the World for America. New York: Harper & Row. Serfaty, Simon, ed. 1991. The Media and Foreign Policy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sharkey, Jacqueline. 1993. “When Pictures Drive Foreign Policy.” American Journalism Review (December): 14-19. Smith, Hedrick. 1989. The Power Game: How Washington Works. New York: Ballantine Books. Smith, Paul A., Jr. 1984. “Media and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy.” The Wash¬ ington Quarterly 1 (Spring): 135-145.

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Sobel, Richard, ed. 1993. Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Controversy over Contra Aid. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Spanier, John, and Eric M. Uslaner. 1978. How American Foreign Policy Is Made. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston/Praeger. Sparkes, Vemone M., and James P. Winter. 1980. “Public Interest in Foreign News.” Gazette 26: 149-170. Spence, Jack. 1987. “The U.S. Media: Covering (over) Nicaragua.” In Thomas W. Walker, ed., Reagan Versus the Sandinistas: The Undeclared War on Nicaragua. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. -. 1984. “Second Time Around: How to Cover an Election.” Columbia Journalism Review (March/April): 41-43. Stevenson, Robert L., and Donald Lewis Shaw, eds. 1984. Foreign News and the New World Information Order. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Tichenor, Phillip J., George A. Donohue, and Clarice N. Olien. 1980. Community Conflict and the Press. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications. Torres, Alicia. 1983. “U.S. Network Evening News Coverage of Cuba, 1972-1981.” Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Texas, Austin. Welch, Richard E., Jr. 1985. Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wiarda, Howard J. 1990. Foreign Policy without Illusion: How Foreign Policy Works and Fails to Work in the United States. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman. -. 1985. “The Media and Latin America: Why Coverage Goes Astray.” The Jour¬ nalist (Fall): 18-19.

Public Opinion Frederick C. Turner

In the domestic politics of the United States and nations around the world, the findings of public opinion polls have come to exercise very considerable weight in political decisions during the last two-thirds of the twentieth century. Elected and appointed officials can gauge what voters feel, not only through periodic elections, but far more regularly, and at times even daily, through opinion poll¬ ing. They respond to public demands, as, for example, in 1994, when, with polls in the United States showing the public to be more concerned about domestic crime than any other issue, Democratic leaders like President Bill Clinton and Governor Mario Cuomo of New York stole the message of their Republican opponents and asked for legislation to incarcerate felons for life after a third violent crime. Politicians also shape public opinion, of course, as spin doctors and media consultants advise incumbents and would-be incumbents on how to present their policies and their preferences. But, ultimately, politicians cannot stray too far from the orientations of the voting public and still court reelection, and the polls allow them to judge this distance on a continuing basis. But what of polling in the area of foreign policy? How much do elected officials and public administrators in the United States care about United States opinions about government policies overseas as opposed to the ‘ ‘bread and but¬ ter” issues at home over which most elections have historically been won or lost? In the area of defense spending, important conclusions have come from careful quantitative analysis, particularly by Hartley and Russett in “Public Opinion and the Common Defense” (1992) and Hartley in “Public Opinion, Mass Media and Changes in U.S. Defense Spending, 1968-1992” (1994). They found a clear influence for public opinion on the level of United States spending, along with the influences of Soviet spending levels and the United States deficit. Using Granger causality, they also concluded that the level of public support for military spending did not result simply from pressure on public opinion by government leaders. It would be useful to carry out this sort of research for

Public Opinion

191

policies toward Latin America, but unfortunately we lack the essential statistical building blocks: consistent survey questions, asked over decades, and reliable measures (such as defense spending) to serve as the dependent variable. Nev¬ ertheless, it remains useful to investigate issues of the interrelationship of public opinion and policies toward Latin America, in terms of both opinion in the United States and opinion in Latin America. That is, to what extent do the makers of United States foreign policy have access to, consider, and take into account opinion either in the United States or in those Latin American countries where their policies will actually take effect? These issues can be, and should be, systematically studied in each major region of the world, but, in terms of United States foreign policy, Latin America stands out in many ways as a region where their investigation is especially apt. The other American republics have remained an area of special United States influence historically and a region of uniquely defined concerns since the dec¬ laration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Moreover, after polling became com¬ mon and politically influential in North America and Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, soon afterward Latin America was the area of the Third World where widespread polling came next, and it was to be the region where public opinion exercised most influence in the transition to democracy of the 1980s and the 1990s.1 For all of these reasons, opinion in Latin America toward United States policies can be studied to particular effect, just as United States policymakers can use polls to understand the views of their fellow citizens to¬ ward Latin America and toward United States initiatives in the region. In order to do this, the public opinion referents available to United States policymakers can be measured through the number of questions on Latin Amer¬ ica in surveys commissioned and archived in the United States. These indicate wide shifts in the degrees of interest in Latin America year by year, as well as a high point of interest in the early 1980s, as was to a considerable extent true of Washington decision makers as well. Turning to interpretations of the influ¬ ence of opinion on policymaking, a significant debate is evident between those on one hand who feel that opinion on foreign policy issues shapes policy far less than do opinions in the domestic policy arena and those who, with more quixotic hope, feel that opinion should, can, and at times does reign in policy options as perceived in Washington. Throughout the debate on the influence of opinion in any part of the world, where the relationship of opinion and policy is difficult to quantify, issues of the quality of the research, of which poll and which polling question to believe on each issue, surface repeatedly, adding to the intrigue of the analysis.

MEASURING UNITED STATES PUBLIC OPINION ON LATIN AMERICA In looking at the data on United States public opinion toward Latin America, it would be ideal to measure every question asked in all major surveys since

192

The U.S. Domestic Environment

the 1930s. This is impossible, but a very good approximation can be achieved through canvassing the holdings of the Roper Center, the survey archive with the largest amount of data for the United States and for other nations. Although a few polls, such as the California Poll, are archived exclusively in other, smaller data banks, the Roper Center contains more than 90 percent of the major surveys done in the United States, including all of the Gallup Poll; the polls of the Roper, Harris, and Yankelovich organizations; and the polls done for the major networks and news media, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN. Furthermore, through the Public Opinion Location Library (POLL) system, the entire archive of United States data at the Roper Center can be accessed by computer at the word level, so that it is quite easy, going back to 1939, to pull out which questions were asked, in which year, on which topic, and for which countries. The results of such an investigation appear initially in Figure 9.1. This reveals, overall, some heightened interest in Latin America at the end of World War II and between 1960 and 1965, but, far more dramatically, a great pickup in in¬ terest for the 1972-1991 period, with the largest numbers of questions being asked in the early 1980s. During the 1980s, of course, polling proliferated in the United States, so that the data in Figure 9.1 in part reflect the general increase in surveys rather than simply expanded concern for Latin America.2 Neverthe¬ less, the Figure 9.1 data reflect quite accurately the total amounts of public opinion information that United States policymakers had available in regard to the opinions of United States citizens toward the various countries of Latin America for this period of fifty-four years. As might be expected, individual country profiles vary enormously over this period. For example, in Figure 9.2, there turns out to have been great interest in Argentina in 1946, the year of the first election of President Juan Domingo Peron, and in 1982, the year of the Malvinas/Falklands war.3 For many other years, however, the Roper archive contains no questions on Argentina at all, pointing to a fairly low level of public salience for the country as compared to that of nations geographically closer to the United States. On the other hand, as Figure 9.3 makes clear, interest has been substantially greater and more sus¬ tained in Cuba since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, with strong interest in the early 1960s and the greatest number of survey questions asked between 1977 and 1984, a period when Cuban involvement in Central America led to a flood of questions on this topic. Similarly, as appears in Figure 9.4, interest in Mexico has increased sharply since 1970. Table 9.1 and Figure 9.1 allow us to go beyond country comparisons and to draw conclusions as to those regions of Latin America that figured most prom¬ inently in United States public opinion polls. Quite understandably in terms of both the historic and the recent United States concerns with Mexico and Central America, this region stands out as the most salient area in United States public opinion (1,750 questions archived), in contrast to the Andean countries (only 100 questions archived, 60 of them in 1989 and 1990 alone). The total questions

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Number of Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Cuba, by Year, 1939-1992

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Figure 9.4 Number of Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Mexico, by Year, 1939-1992

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Table 9.1 Questions in the Roper Archive Asked in the United States Regarding Latin America, by Region, 1939-1992 Year

Southern Cone

1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974

4 1 3

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

1 1 3 19 5 6 2

Andean

Caribbean

Mexico & Central America

Total

1

5 5 5

10 6 8

3 1 1 1 1

1 1 6

4 4 2 1 12 1 2

2 2

2 2

1

3 16 11 16 11 16 20 3 3 2 4 2 1 11 5 16 2 7 21 45 32 40 18 43 97 29 20

129 273 99 114

2 1

7 10 24 12 8 16 8

216 196 113 131 91 61 17

100.

586

1750

1

2

1 22 9 9 5 3 15 3 6 1 4 66 17 2 8

1988 1989 1990 1991 1992

3 9 4 3 12 6

Total

264

6 6 1 1 1 2

3 2 2 1 6 27 33

1

1 1 1

2 9 1 6 7 15 8 51 75 28 5 54

1 5 7 21 9 19 1 4 3 1 5 10 1

3 18 11 16 11 19 21 4 3 2 4 4 11 40 26 32 23 18 88 123 67 48 76 238 390 132 144 224 209 152 174 135 91 32 2700

The Southern Cone refers to: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay, the Andean Region refers to: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, the Caribbean Region refers to: Island Republics, including Cuba, the Mexico & Central America Region refers to: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama.

197

The U.S. Domestic Environment

198

Table 9.2 Number of Questions Asked in the United States Regarding Latin America in the Roper Archive, by Country and Issue, 1939-1992 Country

Diplomacy

Defense

Ratings

Information

54

5

25

20

6

2

-

4

Brazil

36

6

39

10

Chile

14

1

13

9

Colombia

37

15

1

7

Cuba

155

74

23

20

Dominican Republic

7

7

-

2

Ecuador

-

7

-

2

El Salvador

175

123

15

31

Guatemala

10

2

3

1

1

-

-

2

Honduras

23

12

2

2

Mexico

61

20

66

3 57

Argentina Bolivia

Haiti

Nicaragua

447

89

19

Panama

282

114

6

44

Paraguay

8

3

-

2

Peru

10

1

7

10

Uruguay

1

-

-

-

Venezuela

3

-

3

1

Totals

1330

474

222

227

Note: The question classification system of the Roper Center defines "diplomacy" as U.S. foreign policy; "defense" as U.S. defense policy/spending, civil defense, draft, or a use of military force; "ratings" as ratings of foreign countries, leaders, and people; and "information" as awareness of issues and candidates, historical and general knowledge.

asked in the Caribbean, another area of foreign policy salience for the United States, were double the number in Brazil and the Southern Cone and six times greater than in the Andean nations. U.S. newspapers and magazines had an insatiable appetite for stories con¬ cerning the dangers of communism and the mistreatment of multinationals in Central America in the 1950s. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (1982: lllll 8), examines the efforts of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and representatives of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala to influence U.S. public opinion as to the dangers of the communism in the early years of the Cold War. According to Immerman (1982: 111), Edward Bemays, United Fruit’s public relations counsel, began a campaign to “publicize the Communist menace in Guatemala. He was extremely successful and, in reality, accomplished for the

Public Opinion

199

State Department the propaganda component of its own Guatemala strategy.” The findings in Table 9.2, emphasizing the Cold War content of questions asked in U.S. opinion polls from 1948 to 1955 in Mexico and Central America, tend to support the linkage between polling questions and the nature of U.S.-Latin American policy. Analyzing the questions in the Roper archive by subject allows a deeper' investigation of the public opinion issues in relation to which United States leaders could—at least hypothetically—base their foreign policy decisions. As Table 9.2 makes clear, diplomacy and defense dominated the questions asked of the United States public, just as they have dominated the concerns of the foreign policy elite. Next to these in terms of the most questions asked are ratings of foreign countries, leaders, and people, and questions on the awareness of North Americans of issues, candidates, and the history of nations overseas. Contrasting these areas of strategic and political concern, other issues are treated scantily indeed. For example, the Roper archive contains only seven questions on the environment, six for Brazil and one for Mexico, before 1993. In regard to trade, there were sixty-one questions for Mexico, fourteen for Brazil, and six for Argentina, but three or fewer for the other nations.

LIMITATIONS ON THE ROLE OF U.S. PUBLIC OPINION IN INFLUENCING POLICIES TOWARD LATIN AMERICA In addition to exploring the actual context of United States public opinion outlined, it is necessary to turn to the professional literature to see what scholars and practitioners have found the role of public opinion in American foreign policy to be. What, indeed, is the role of opinion in the formulation of United States foreign policy, toward Latin America or toward other parts of the world, and what are the limitations on this role? Here, the literature is more consistent than it would at first appear to be. For example, although Almond’s classic work set the general understanding of the topic for a generation, Ladd in “Foreword” (1993: x) has recently accused Almond of being “flat-out wrong” in his as¬ sumption of wide swings in American attitudes on foreign policy issues. But, more fundamentally, Almond’s basic position on the role of public opinion has in fact paralleled that of his critics and other scholars, such as Free and Cantril in The Political Beliefs of Americans (1967). In The American People and For¬ eign Policy (1950: 5-6), Almond wrote, “The function of the public in a dem¬ ocratic policy-making process is to set certain policy criteria in the form of widely held values and expectations,” while “the policies themselves, however, are the products of leadership groups (‘elites’).” In this sense detailed attention to the region matters less for the general public, and public officials feel less direct electoral and public opinion pressure in regard to it. This fact has led some researchers to conclude that public opinion polls in fact do not affect foreign policy decisions in any major way, but that instead policymakers merely seek legitimacy for their actions by reference to public

200

The U.S. Domestic Environment

opinion. This is especially true for the nebulous and ephemeral concept of “world public opinion,” which contains so many unmeasured components as to be, in itself, a nonentity. As Claude noted in The Impact of Public Opinion upon Foreign Policy and Diplomacy (1965: 21): Public exposure has not, despite the impressive mythology that has grown up around the concept of world public opinion, effected a general transformation of diplomacy. The effective role of public opinion in the diplomatic process has not yet proved substantial enough either to confer the benefits promised by the Wilsonians or to produce the dis¬ asters feared by their critics. This is true for U.S. policymaking in regard to Latin America, as it is for the policies of the United States and other nations in regard to the major areas of the world. Given the fact that public opinion in the United States has not been able to set Latin American policy in any specific or immediate sense, then why has this been true? What are the practical constraints upon the influence of public opin¬ ion? Here too the professional literature points to a number of answers. The constraints include the following nine elements: (1) leaders say that they pay little attention to opinion; (2) leaders manipulate opinion; (3) no one expects opinion to shape policy; (4) people are uninformed on the grounds for policy decisions; (5) opinion is often contradictory or mixed; (6) poll results are some¬ times unreliable; (7) the media constrain rational choice; (8) Latin America has little salience for North Americans; and (9) other dimensions of the policymak¬ ing process actually determine it. Each of these interpretations deserves to be evaluated, not only in terms of how it is alleged to have limited the influence of opinion on policy formulation in the past, but also in terms of how it may itself change in the future.

The Salience of Public Opinion to U.S. Policymakers

Some scholars have argued that public opinion does not directly affect policy formation, because leaders say that they pay little attention to public opinion when it comes to foreign policy, and because they have comparatively little time to appreciate the intricacies of opinion and what it means. United States presi¬ dents seldom admit that they pay no attention to opinion, but sometimes, in fact, they have made this admission. In pardoning former president Richard Nixon after the Watergate affair, for example, President Gerald Ford did so in the face of very strong opposition from public opinion in the United States. As Sussman recalls in What Americans Really Think (1988: 16), President Ford declared simply, “I do believe that the buck stops here, that I cannot rely upon public opinion polls to tell me what is right.” The pardon was profoundly unpopular in the United States, and it was one of those elements that, in and by themselves, cost President Ford the chance to be elected in his own right. If he did not take

Public Opinion

201

opinion into account in this decision, could he be expected to weigh it heavily in the far less electorally damaging issues of Latin American policy? A fundamental reason why presidents can afford to take this position is that, in regard to foreign policy, the conventional wisdom states that the American people have very short memories. They hold elected leaders responsible for pocketbook issues at home, such as the inflationary pressures that helped to' drive President Jimmy Carter from office after only one term. But leaders believe that Americans know less and care less about foreign policy issues, at least historically. Thus President Lyndon Johnson, after being elected in 1964, during the Vietnam War, partly by saying that his opponent would dangerously escalate United States participation in the war, decided to escalate that war seriously himself, even though popular dissatisfaction over this decision led him to decline to run again in 1968. In the 1993 debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), President Bill Clinton could push hard to secure con¬ gressional approval of NAFTA, because he knew that, by the time that he was up for reelection in 1996, the foreign policy debates of 1993 would have little weight in the presidential race. Furthermore, presidents, secretaries of state, and those at the top level of government who make the ultimate decisions on Latin American policies have little time to understand the intricacies of public opinion on those issues. As Sigelman points out in analyzing “The Presidency” (1982), attitudes that are made to seem “surprising” in newspaper headlines appear to be far less so when one understands the continuity of United States opinion on foreign policy over time. Furthermore, the nature of foreign policy attitudes and attitude change differs from those in other areas. Mayer found in The Changing American Mind (1992) that, while the entrance of new cohorts and the passing through death of older cohorts explains from one-third to half the shift in attitudes toward race or the role of women in the United States during the three decades after 1960, no such causation appeared in regard to foreign policy attitudes. Political leaders simply lack the time to become expert in interpreting these patterns of opinion and opinion change. Of course, presidents and presidential candidates can learn a great deal by listening to advisers who are expert in the art of understanding public opinion research. Thus, in the late 1970s, Wirthlin’s polling in Florida helped to con¬ vince Ronald Reagan to emphasize foreign policy in his run for the presidency. As Moore points out in The Superpollsters (1992: 202), even though only 12 percent of Republicans said that they cared about foreign policy, the Florida surveys uncovered fear of the Panama Canal Treaty, fear of communism, and fear of a “collapse of American will” and an “American retreat from power,” themes that candidate Reagan would go on to exploit successfully. While leaders can thus come to understand vitally important political strategies through so¬ phisticated survey research and interpretation, they also learn in this process that they are under no immediate constraints to shape policy according to majority opinions.

202

The U.S. Domestic Environment

The context of these decisions helps to explain the continuity of policies in Central America during the 1980s, where critical elements in public opinion failed to brake those policies that determined leaders in the Executive branch wanted to pursue. For example, LeoGrande noted in Central America and the Polls (1987) that Americans rejected United States aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua by a three-to-one margin, and that the best informed respondents were the most critical of United States policies in Central America. Nevertheless, President Reagan and President George Bush were able to continue their policies until the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the military neu¬ tralization of the guerrilla threat in El Salvador. How could this occur? In Central America more broadly, attitudes toward the proper role of United States policy were, as Ladd pointed out as early as 1983, not only consistent in themselves but also consistent with the lines of the foreign policy orientations of the American people since 1939. While woefully ignorant of the specific details of United States involvement in Central America, the public wanted to contain threats there from communist influence, just as it had once wanted to contain fascist threats in Europe on the eve of United States entry into the war. But, in both situations, the public wanted to do so if at all possible without the commitment of United States troops. Turning to elite opin¬ ion in “The Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes Among American Leaders” (1990), Holsti and Rosenau demonstrate that this was also true for all groups of opinion leaders in the 1970s and 1980s as well. As Ladd stressed in “Public Opinion on Central America” (1983), Americans decisively rejected the possible sending of more military aid to the government of El Salvador, with 70 percent opposing and only 19 percent approving such an increase in 1983, but by a margin of 49 to 33 percent, Americans also said that they would back a tripling of military aid to El Salvador if in fact it were necessary to prevent a communist takeover in the country. The apparent contradiction here is resolved if we factor in fears of communist expansion, and the explanation reveals how misleading it can be to look only at answers to one or two survey questions taken out of context.

Presidential Manipulation of Public Opinion

In addition to the fact that United States presidents often make Latin American policies that clash with majority opinions in the United States on a particular issue, presidents can limit the role of public opinion through the skillful manip¬ ulation of political symbols and persuasion. Since the president of the United States must share powers with other institutions, unlike prime ministers who automatically command a supportive legislative majority, he must often use the “bully pulpit” as chief of state to rally public opinion behind his foreign pol¬ icies. As Kegley and Wittkopf argue in American Foreign Policy (1979: 214), “Policymakers [frequently] see public opinion as something to be shaped, not followed.” For example, after the United States invasion of Grenada on October

Public Opinion

203

25, 1983, President Reagan’s television speech on October 27 dramatically in¬ creased both the proportion of Americans supporting the invasion and the level of general approval for the way that President Reagan was handling his job. Understanding the basic parameters of United States opinion on foreign policy issues aids presidents in the process of manipulation, as they can use what they know about public opinion toward Latin America to shape that opinion in the' directions that they desire. One of the most powerful, and durable, symbols of U.S.-Latin American policy is the Monroe Doctrine, what Humes, My Fellow Americans (1992: 37), calls the “historic manifesto of the Americas.” Both Republican and Democratic presidents have used the doctrine to mold public opinion in favor, and dilute currents of public opposition, of Latin American policies. According to Humes (1992: 37), “Liberals cited it to advance Ken¬ nedy’s Alliance for Progress in the 1960s, and conservatives cited it to propound Reagan’s policy in Central America in the 1980s.”

Public Opinion Is Not Expected to Determine Foreign Policy

Several studies have found that the public at large does not expect its opinions to determine U.S. foreign policy. When the Chicago Council on Foreign Rela¬ tions sponsored nationwide studies of the attitudes of both the general public and national leaders in regard to foreign policy in 1974, 1978, 1982, and 1986, public opinion did not seem particularly important in the survey results. As Rielly reported for these years in his three volumes on American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy (1975, 1979, 1983) and in “America’s State of Mind” (1988), only between 15 and 26 percent of the respondents among either the leaders or the general public found public opinion to be a very important de¬ terminant of United States foreign policies, although from 54 to 62 percent of the public said that the role of public opinion should be more important than it actually was. Therefore, it is quite natural that Moreno should emphasize in U.S. Policy in Central America (1990) that it was the worldviews of decision makers, far more than public opinion more generally in the United States, that deter¬ mined the nature and the failures of United States policies in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s.

Public Ignorance of International Events

Policymakers feel that they can ignore public opinion on international issues, because the mass public knows so little about the content and context of conflicts around the globe. Insulza, in “The United States and Central America” (1986), makes this point effectively. For example, as Sobel points out in “Public Opin¬ ion Toward U.S. Involvement in Central America” (1987), in April 1981 nearly half (47 percent) of the American public did not know where El Salvador was, and another 28 percent thought that it was in South America. In June 1983, Clymer noted in “Poll Finds Americans Don’t Know U.S. Positions on Central

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

America” (1983) that only 13 percent of Americans correctly understood that the Reagan administration was supporting the contras in Nicaragua. When the public does not understand the dimensions of the specific decisions to be made, policymakers cannot look to it for immediate guidance, and this is a fundamental reason why, as Almond, Claude, and others have pointed out, the influence of public opinion upon policy must be in terms of general orientations rather than specific guidelines.

The Contradictory Patterns of Foreign Policy Beliefs Since the views of the American public are frequently contradictory in regard to Latin America, this provides a handy excuse to disregard them. Wiarda points out in Finding Our Way? (1987: 213) that, during the years of the Cold War, more than six out of ten United States citizens wanted the United States to prevent the rise of more Caribbean states that, like Cuba, were Marxist in ori¬ entation and allied to the Soviet Union, but, by roughly the same proportions, North Americans also rejected foreign aid, military intervention, and covert op¬ erations. When means and ends thus contradict one another, the makers of for¬ eign policy can gain only general orientations from public opinion. Furthermore, one of the major contributions of the professional literature has been to demonstrate that, just as the mass public is split over specific issues of United States foreign policy, so the opinions of the foreign policy elite fall into various categories as well. In Faces of Internationalism (1990), Wittkopf com¬ pares the results of the elite and mass surveys conducted for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, demonstrating how the Vietnam War led to a bifurcation of opinion within the elite in regard to the containment of communism, the use of force, and a series of other foreign policy issues. Within the elite, accommodationists and hard-liners differed sharply over issues in policies toward Cen¬ tral America during the 1980s, such as whether or not military aid to United States allies in the region would ultimately require the intervention of United States troops. In such debates, with mass public opinion in the nation both divided and ill informed on specifics, members of the elite could uncover in the national opinion polls some support—but very seldom overwhelming support— for their own points of view. Politicians may find references to public opinion to be rhetorically useful, but it does not drive or even very substantially inform the public policy decisions and preferences of politicians, business executives, or members of the Council on Foreign Relations. The most important issue is which elites control the Executive branch and the Congress and how harmoni¬ ously they can work together on foreign policy, rather than to what extent they look to public opinion polls before formulating their stances.

The Validity of the Polls Even more controversially, critics point out that it is difficult to trust the results of public opinion polls, especially under some circumstances. One of the

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most familiar dimensions of this problem is the partisan nature of some polls, where surveys demonstrate support for policies advocated by the agencies that sponsor the surveys. In New Directions in Development (1972) Bradford et al. note that, as when a survey by the Overseas Development Council found the American people willing to underwrite significantly greater development assis¬ tance overseas, opponents of the policies implied by the survey naturally doubt its source. On another level, the particular questions that are asked in surveys are vitally important, and sometimes they are incomplete or poorly phrased. Wiarda, American Foreign Policy Toward Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s (1992), points out that surveys in Latin America regularly find eight or nine out of ten respondents favoring “democracy” in the abstract, but he notes as well that the USIA surveys regularly fail to ask respondents what they mean by democracy and that other survey data demonstrate considerable support for “strong” governments and far less backing for democratic institutions, such as political parties, than for “democracy” itself. Polls may, of course, miss the mark entirely. Before the elections that defeated the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in February 1990, a flood of more than two dozen election polls were made in the country, as Bollinger describes in Central Amer¬ ican and Mexican Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy (1990). Yet only three polls—those directed by Costa Ricans, Venezuelans, and Argentines—correctly predicted the victory of Violeta Chamorro. Sandinista rule certainly created a climate of intimidation in which many voters did not want to declare their support for Chamorro, but many polling organizations also made the mistake of selecting members of the Sandinista Youth as their interviewers. Within the United States, the Republican and Democratic parties relied for information on different polling organizations, with the Republicans correctly anticipating the results and the Democrats getting them wrong. On the Democratic side, despite the fact that the firm of Stanley Greenberg predicted a Sandinista victory by 44 to 27 percent, which ranks as one of the most egregious failures of electoral polling in history, Greenberg was to go on to hold major polling responsibilities in the government of President Bill Clinton. More subtly, even public opinion surveys conducted with far more care may be subject to error. As argued in detail in Noelle-Neumann’s important volume The Spiral of Silence (1985), people do not express their opinion candidly to pollsters when they feel strong social pressure against the views that they happen to hold. The pervasive influence of the media works to establish norms and opinions that seem acceptable in a particular country, and, as people fail to express opinions that differ from these, the unacceptable views slip further into obscurity and are effectively “silenced.” In this process, policymakers cannot base their decisions on an accurate reading of public opinion, because our meas¬ ures of opinion omit or underestimate views that appear unpopular. Salmon and Moh stress in their critique of “The Spiral of Silence” (1992) that the inter¬ pretation has not been verified outside Germany, but the thesis remains espe¬ cially important in nations—such as Germany or the states of Latin America—

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The U.S. Domestic Environment

where the weight of the authoritarian attitudes and behavior patterns of the past remains politically influential.

Influence of the Media Following one of the dimensions of Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence thesis, the media also play a significant role in shaping what “public opinion’’ is. Members of the attentive public must formulate policy judgments in terms of the information and the interpretations available to them, and a great amount of that information comes to them through the media. Specific elements of the media certainly maintain their own biases, as Friedman claims in “Selling Israel to America” (1987), that it was pro-Israeli sentiments that led the New Republic to support President Reagan’s policies toward Nicaragua. In “A New Look in Public Opinion Research” (1993), Sniderman emphasizes that the tendency to “rally round the flag,” as in the upsurge in support for President John Kennedy at the time of the failure at the Bay of Pigs, may well come, not from irrationality or patriotism in public opinion, but rather from the public’s reaction to how elites and the media treat the issue. Moreover, as Chomsky claims in his ironically titled “All the News That Fits” (1986), press accounts in prestigious and influential newspapers like the New York Times may not only support the assumptions and objectives of United States foreign policy in Latin America but also report news events in such a way as to reinforce these objectives as well. Opponents of government policies and Times support for them complain that the newspaper has fired or eased out such critics of Latin American policies as John Gerassi in the 1960s or Raymond Bonner in the 1980s, replacing them with writers like Shirley Christian who backed United States aid to the contras. If the attentive public only obtains “news” from such sources, the argument goes, how can people make truly informed judgments, and hov/ can public opinion hold the government in check? This approach leaves out many dimensions of the situation. On one hand, the proportion of North Americans who obtain their news primarily from the print media has dwindled steadily, and—even as newspapers come to appear on our home computer screens—this trend may well continue with the access to vastly more television stations on the “communications superhighway” of the years ahead. On the other hand, the New York Times does, in fact, contain a range of opinion and reporting, particularly on its op-ed pages and in its letters to the editors, and even more consistently conservative newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal, make a point of giving space to liberal critics as well. The United States contains widely available periodicals that range across the ideological spectrum, so that, with public and university libraries open to all, and with more and more government debates appearing on CNN, on C-SPAN, and on National Public Radio, it is unrealistic to see public debate or information accessibility as limited by the editorial opinion or the news coverage of the New York Times.

Public Opinion

207

Latin America Has Little Salience for the North American Public In The Public and American Foreign Policy (1978), Levering contends that the interplay of public opinion and foreign policymaking has been most effective in regard to Western Europe, because most Americans have European ancestors and, with Western European history and culture emphasized in United States public education, the public has shared with the foreign-policy elite a greater understanding of this area. Certainly, there is evidence of low salience for Latin America. In American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1975 (1975) Rielly found that, when asked about the importance to the United States of maintaining good relations with the different world regions, respondents placed Latin America next to the bottom, just above Africa. Drawing out the implica¬ tions of this situation for Central American policies in the 1980s, LeoGrande argues in “Did the Public Matter?” (1993: 185), “Both Congress and the ex¬ ecutive could afford to be unresponsive to public opinion because the issue never achieved a high enough level of salience for the mass public to focus on it.” In a recent (National Journal, January 1, 1994: 42) NBC News-77ie Wall Street Journal poll asking Americans which of five world regions and a few countries, such as Jap l and China, will be most important to the United States in the next five years, only 8 percent mentioned Latin America. Nevertheless, the relative salience of Latin America is changing over time, as immigration from the region has been altering the demographic balance in the United States, especially in California, Florida, and Texas, so that more and more North Americans feel ethnic ties to other American nations. In 1982 and 1986, the surveys for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that 74 percent of the public and 96 to 98 percent of the leaders said that the United States had a vital interest in Mexico. As Peter Smith suggests in “U.S.-Mexican Relations” (1985), Chicano mobilization can alter the United States agenda in regard to Mexico, which gained even greater salience in 1993 and 1994 with the passage and the implementation of NAFTA. Over time, especially if the public schools and universities offer more courses on the culture and history of Latin America, members of the attentive public should better understand the context out of which foreign-policy decisions for the region must be made. If so, there may indeed come to be a level of understanding within which more effective decisions can be made, and this understanding may be shared by those—both inside and outside government—who remain most concerned with Latin America.

Other Constraints upon United States Foreign Policy Among the many further constraints on U.S. foreign policy are funds, insight, and the nature of the issues addressed. Regarding the former, Stimson demon¬ strates in Public Opinion in America (1991) that the ability of United States

208

The U.S. Domestic Environment

leaders to respond to demands from public opinion has been seriously curtailed, because the deficit imposed by the tax reductions of the Reagan era has become structural, allowing very little leeway for increased federal spending for policy innovations. The foresight of statespeople remains as important as it has ever been. As Pastor reminds us in Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Eco¬ nomic Policy, 1929-1976 (1980: 352), “The fundamental problem in making foreign policy is that one’s judgment is necessarily based on a guess about the future.’’ Some issues also remain more intractable than others, and even the supporters of particular leaders must recognize them as such. Thus, in 1986, while 79 percent of those whom Wittkopf in Faces of Internationalism (1990: 55) defined as “hard-liners” rated Ronald Reagan’s overall foreign policy either good or excellent, only 29 percent of them said the same for his policies toward illegal immigration. The nine elements cited here will not change dramatically in the years ahead, but gradual shifts in the society of the United States should make public opinion at least potentially more relevant to the policymaking process. In “Rethinking Political Culture” (1994), Turner demonstrates that political cultures in other parts of the world are gradually becoming more participant, and in “The Polit¬ ical Cultures of the American States” (1968), Patterson shows that there is notable variation in political culture among the geographic regions of the United States. Nevertheless, Americans do, in comparison with people in other nations, take considerable pride in their political institutions and the opportunities for participation that they provide, as Almond and Verba pointed out so forcefully in The Civic Culture (1963). Furthermore, changing values and increasing levels of education in the United States have significantly increased the ability of many United States citizens to participate in politics, because, as Inglehart writes in Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (1990: 339), under the changes that have occurred in United States society in the four decades since Almond and Verba wrote The Civic Culture, ‘ ‘not only formal education but job experience as well develop politically relevant skills.” If the general level of education and politically relevant skills continues to rise in the society in the future, a higher proportion of the citizenry will become members of the attentive public, more knowledgeable and more interested in foreign-policy issues.

LATIN AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION AND U.S.-LATIN AMERICAN POLICY In addition to considering public opinion in the United States while formu¬ lating United States policies in Latin America, government officials have been able to consider opinion in Latin America as well. Latin Americans have con¬ ducted an impressive amount of research on public opinion in their own nations over the past six decades. Now collected in public opinion archives such as the Roper Center and its sister archives in Campinas, Brazil; Caracas, Venezuela; and Mexico City, these works go back to extensive studies in Brazil in the 1940s

Public Opinion

209

and to the work of such pioneers as Jose Miguens in Argentina and Eduardo Hamuy in Chile during the 1950s. Smith and Turner demonstrate in “The Mean¬ ing of Survey Research in Authoritarian Regimes” (1984) that extensive re¬ search was done by authoritarian governments in the 1960s and the 1970s, although its results were not made available to the general public. During the 1980s, especially with the transition to democracy and the decline of the restrictions earlier placed on public polling by the military regimes, opinion studies flourished throughout the region, with the majority of polling still done for commercial marketing, but with more and more polls done for political parties and candidates or for political elites and the interested public. Sometimes tied to international research projects such as the World Values Study, this work led to important background books in a number of nations, such as those by Marita Carballo de Cilley in i Que pensamos los argentinos? (1987), Edgardo Catterberg in Argentina Confronts Politics (1991), Ignacio Martm-Baro in Asi piensan los salvadorenos urbanos (1986-1987) (1987) and La opinion publica salvadorena (1987-1988) (1989), Enrique Alduncm in Los valores de los mexicanos (1986), and Alberto Hernandez Medina et al. in Como somos los mexicanos (1987). This recent work raises issues that policymakers in the United States need to consider. For example, in “Understanding Support for Free-Market Policies in Argentina” (1993), Echegaray demonstrates that the hyperinflation of the late 1980s was a fundamental cause for Argentines to reject the statism of earlier decades and to accept privatization and increased foreign investment, thus en¬ tering into a new pattern of relationships with the United States and the multi¬ lateral development banks. Alternatively, in her Estudio de percepciones sobre drogas de la poblacion urbana del Peru (1989), Ferrando notes that, even though many North Americans perceived the greatest “Peruvian” problem to be the drugs shipped from Peru into the United States, it is also necessary to understand from Peruvian surveys that for people in Peru itself drugs were significantly less a danger in the late 1980s than were economic deterioration and terrorism. This confirms the difference in fundamental orientations to the “drug problem” in the United States, where, as Smith, ed., points out in Drug Policy in the Americas (1992), issues of production are stressed, and in Latin America, where it seems equally important for the United States to lower the demand for drugs within its own borders. By understanding both popular and elite attitudes in areas of contention between the United States and the nations of Latin America, it may be possible to uncover more effective solutions to shared problems, so that these findings on opinion in Latin America should in fact be seen as a significant dimension of policy formulation. Parallel to the work of Latin American survey researchers, and dependent upon it for support in carrying out surveys in each country, the United States Information Agency (USIA) has sponsored whole surveys and also added ques¬ tions to omnibus surveys throughout Latin America. Done at the request of policymakers, this research has certainly had the potential to influence the for-

210

The U.S. Domestic Environment

mulation of policy, but it is difficult to prove just how much those making the foreign policies of the United States have actually considered the opinions of elites and the rank and file in Latin America when deciding what actions the United States would take in the region. It is safe to say, however, that while public opinion in the United States only influences United States foreign policy in Latin America to a limited degree, the influence of opinion in Latin America remains even more remote. Critics from outside and from inside USLA indicate many ways in which polling results are used for purposes other than orientation of policy. During the 1980s, for example, critics of the Reagan policies in Nicaragua sharply attacked the USIA polling in Central America. In “Mixing Polls and Propaganda” (1988) Bollinger and Lund complained that President Reagan used references to these polls to claim Central American backing for his support of the contras, and they went on to show that the USIA selectively leaked to allies in the press only those results of the surveys that would cast a favorable light on United States policies. The USIA is prohibited by law from trying to influence opinion within the United States, but no such restrictions exist in Latin America. Indeed, influ¬ encing public opinion overseas is part of the USIA mission of “cultural diplo¬ macy,” and this certainly has involved giving supportive public opinion data— as well as mountains of other information—to sympathetic journalists in Latin America, especially during the long decades of the Cold War, when United States press attaches saw themselves in battles for press coverage against their Cuban and Soviet counterparts, as Falcoff notes in Small Countries, Large Issues (1984: 100-101). In broader perspective, trying to reshape the attitudes of for¬ eign elites and even mass publics overseas has been a traditional objective of foreign policy for many nations, chronicled by Rosenberg in “Attitude Change and Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era” (1967) and advocated by Foster in “Public Opinion” (1988). What USIA research in Latin America has done for United States policy there is to allow both the more accurate measurement of these changes and some new ways to influence them by the selective publication of opinion data. Other criticisms have arisen from within USIA about how and how effectively the results of its polling in Latin America have been used. A core of first rate professionals, people who understand the intricacies of posing and interpreting survey questions, people who have frequently been active in the American As¬ sociation for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), has historically carried out this effort. But these professionals have had to report to Foreign Service officers (FSOs), who have usually had no training whatsoever in survey research, so that it has some¬ times seemed that policymakers in Washington heard more of what the FSOs wanted to report than what the data analysts actually interpreted. The USIA reports, which may be consulted in the National Archives and at the Roper Center, are long and detailed, even though they only begin to outline the richness of the data collected. From these reports, policymakers, or those filtering sum-

Public Opinion

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maries of the reports to the policymakers, can certainly choose to emphasize results favoring the policies that they support, and to omit or to downplay con¬ trary opinion from Latin America. Other criticisms of the USIA effort suggest that the wrong questions have been posed or that the answers to them have failed to affect United States foreign policy. Some USIA officers have complained in private that Washington officials have asked for “feel good” questions, that is, questions designed to elicit from Latin American publics only the opinions that would support the policies that those in Washington wanted to follow in the first place. For example, in The Im¬ pact of President Kennedy’s Visit to Mexico (1962) and The Economic and Po¬ litical Climate of Opinion in Latin America and Attitudes Toward the Alliance for Progress (1963), USIA surveys dutifully demonstrated the popularity of President John Kennedy in Latin America and the appeal of many of the objec¬ tives of his Alliance for Progress, but did understanding these attitudes in Latin America actually make the Alliance for Progress any more effective? The 1963 study found, in the seven countries where it was undertaken, that Latin Ameri¬ cans predominantly felt that the United States in the past had sided too often with dictatorial regimes in Latin America, but this opinion did not prevent the United States from doing so once again throughout the region in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. Similarly, as Turner and Carballo point out in “Argentine Attitudes Toward the United States” (1989), it has been standard in a number of countries for USIA questions to measure the level of anti-Americanism over time, but de¬ cisions that increased anti-Americanism, such as United States support for Great Britain in the Malvinas/Falklands war of 1982, were taken despite their negative impact on Latin Americans opinion toward the United States. Still another problem with the assumption that Latin American opinion can shape United States policy is that the results of the opinion polls can be inter¬ preted in contradictory ways. For example, the polls of Martln-Baro in El Sal¬ vador were much admired, so much so that after his murder the presidents of AAPOR and WAPOR signed a joint certificate in support of the work and the scholar. In As!piensan los salvadorehos urbanos (1986-1987) (1987: 122-123), he found a profound pessimism among the people of El Salvador, one under¬ standable in terms of the suffering caused by their civil war, but he also found that, in estimating the qualities needed by the president of El Salvador to be elected in 1989, 44.6 percent said that he should be effective (capaz), while only 12.3 percent said that he should be democratic. Superficially, such a finding can be used to support the view that Latin Americans care little for democracy, even though there is considerable evidence to the contrary, and even though United States foreign policies have tried to promote democracy within the re¬ gion. The opinion must be taken in the context of the time and the circumstances in which the opinion was elicited, and it must be interpreted in the overall context of an understanding of opinion in Latin America, where people value significant increases in their standard of living even more than they do particular political processes.

212

The U.S. Domestic Environment

Similarly, when North American policymakers have looked to studies of pub¬ lic opinion done by Latin Americans, they have regularly found opinion to be mixed, just as it was in the United States. To take the case of El Salvador as reported by Martm-Bar6 once again, his data demonstrated mixed reactions to President Reagan’s Central American policy, even though he personally opposed it. Bollinger and his colleagues, in Central American and Mexican Public Opin¬ ion on U.S. Foreign Policy (1988), stressed that United States funding for the contras was supported by only two people out of ten in El Salvador. But MartinBaro demonstrated in La opinion publica salvadoreha (1987-1988) (1989: 120121) that, while 34.9 percent of Salvadorans said that Reagan’s policies were bad or very bad, some 27.6 percent of the Salvadorans defined them as good or excellent. Although Martm-Baro pointed out that the most educated were the most critical of United States policies, his data nevertheless showed that, among the university-educated, while 11.2 percent said that Reagan’s policies were very bad, 6.4 still found them to be excellent. Using data from the World Values project in Mexico in 1982, Zavala makes a similar point in “Valores politicos” (1987). He shows that, while less than half of the Mexican sample approved of the current state of Mexican-United States relations, nearly three-quarters of the Mexicans looked favorably on the United States, and, overwhelmingly in com¬ parison to other nations, they found that the United States was the nation with which Mexico must maintain economic ties. Data like these from Mexico and Central America gave policymakers in Washington the option of seeing that at least a significant portion of the people in the area approved of what they were doing, and this, given the human tendency to believe what one wants to believe, was enough to let them see their policies as justified. If the survey research conducted for USIA was not able to change the orien¬ tations of United States policies, it has nevertheless proved to be especially help¬ ful in some areas, such as in appreciating the limitations of anti-Americanism. Thoughtful writers on this topic, including Grayson in “Anti-Americanism in Mexico” (1985) and Horowitz in “Latin America, Anti-Americanism, and In¬ tellectual Hubris” (1985), have seen it partially as a way that members of Latin American elites shift blame from themselves to the United States, an orienta¬ tion far more common in university and middle-class circles than among busi¬ nesspeople, professionals, or the population as a whole. Data from one of the first large USIA surveys conducted in Latin America, Chilean Attitudes Toward the United States and U.S. Economic Policies (1955), confirm that antiAmericanism was historically low in Latin America when general, urban popu¬ lations in a variety of countries were questioned. For example, 12 percent of the Chileans interviewed said that they were “unfavorable” toward the United States and only 1 percent said that they were “very unfavorable,” whereas 62 percent of the Chileans reported themselves as “favorable” or “very unfavora¬ ble,” and this proportion of favorable respondents increased to 79 percent for Cuba and 82 percent for Venezuela. Other USIA surveys after 1955 also tended to reassure Washington policymakers, reflecting the fact that, even though Latin

Public Opinion

213

Americans sometimes criticized particular policies of the United States govern¬ ment in the region, they admired the culture, the political freedoms, and the ed¬ ucational opportunities of the United States. These surveys continued to indicate that the level of anti-Americanism in Latin America remained vastly lower than one might surmise from anti-American statements in the press, from some intel¬ lectuals, and from actions directed or staged by government officials. Such find ings must have been gratifying to many of the officials who saw them, but they also allowed policies to be made in the context of a broader understanding of what Latin Americans valued and admired.

CONCLUSION Careful evaluation of the literature on public opinion and policymaking to¬ ward Latin America indicates that the polls have less influence than the most ardent celebrators of “American democracy” envision. This is true for a number of reasons. Both elite and mass opinion have themselves been split in regard to nearly all major issues in Latin America, so that there is no overwhelming popular mandate for one policy over another. Members of the elite can pick and choose, select policies on other criteria, and then justify their choices by refer¬ ence to the preferences within the mass public with which they agree. Also, members of the political elite clearly manipulate mass opinion, by the way that they portray events, the timing and orientations of news releases, and the seeking of endorsements within the business, labor, and academic sectors of the society. Moreover, foreign-policy issues generally lack the salience of domestic issues for voters in the United States, and, although issues like the rise of antiAmerican regimes in Cuba or Nicaragua concerned many Americans from 1960 to 1990, the issues never played so prominently to the fears of the citizenry as did the Vietnam War or dangers in Europe or the Middle East. In the 1990s, as the “threats” from Latin America have appeared to recede even further, one may expect the general public to pay even less attention to the area, although immigration from Latin America and new opportunities for investment there work in the opposite direction. Other constraints that analysts have noted on the degree to which public opinion can shape Latin American policies include the low level of specific information that the mass public has, the influence of the media in shaping opinion, and criticisms of the polling art itself. Given these limitations on the impact of opinion within the United States, the influence of public opinion from Latin America remains even more tangential. Public officials in the United States are electorally responsible to citizens in their country, but not to those in Latin America. Nevertheless, through the United States Information Agency and other sources, those officials do in fact monitor opinion in Latin America, so that the opinions of Latin Americans have become one more part of the policy-formation process. The constraints on the influence of United States opinion also work for that in Latin America: it is divided, ill informed on specifics, and influenced by the media and the actions of political

214

The U.S. Domestic Environment

elites. Yet, for North American policies to be successful, they must take Latin American opinion into account, and this is both more necessary and more pos¬ sible in the 1990s than before, because of the widespread transition to democracy and the rise of effective public opinion polling organizations in the region. Reviewing the role of opinion in policy formation is thus useful in a dual sense, in terms of clarifying political processes both in the United States and in Latin America. At home, such a review makes the essential character of de¬ mocracy in the United States stand out more clearly. While it would be mistaken to expect specific policy decisions to turn upon public opinion polls, it is also necessary to appreciate that those policies must be formulated in conformity with the basic values, concerns, and orientations of the American people. That is not the direct democracy of the New England town meeting, but it is respon¬ sive government for a large and powerful nation. Within Latin America, as polling has come to be done more widely and more effectively, political leaders of the 1990s must also take the orientations of their citizenries more into account than in the past. Perhaps, as the nations of the Western Hemisphere achieve greater levels of economic cooperation in the years ahead, and as rising levels of prosperity and education give more and more citizens the time and the in¬ formation necessary for more informed policy judgments, the influence of public opinion will increase somewhat.

NOTES In the writing of this chapter, Fabidn and Massumi Echegaray helped me very consid¬ erably with the collection and interpretation of the data. 1. The rapid extension of political polling in Latin America has helped to consolidate democratic regimes in a number of ways: by providing a check on electoral results and thereby lessening incumbents’ inclinations to fraud, by demonstrating to would-be plot¬ ters that most citizens reject military coups (except in Venezuela), by pointing up in detail the issues around which coalitions had to form, and by indicating the contrasting value patterns in each nation that influenced economic growth domestically and free trade initiatives internationally. 2. A somewhat more sophisticated way to approach the data would be to determine the proportion of all questions asked each year that touched upon foreign affairs, upon Latin America, and upon the individual nations of Latin America. 3. The Roper Center archive contains eighteen questions on Argentina in 1946 and sixty-two questions in 1982.

REFERENCES Alduncm, Enrique. 1986. Los valores de los mexicanos. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex. Almond, Gabriel A. 1950. The American People and Foreign Policy. New York: Praeger. Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Bennett, W. Lance. 1989. “Marginalizing the Majority: Conditioning Public Opinion to Accept Managerial Democracy.” In Michael Margolis and Gary A. Mauser, eds., Manipulating Public Opinion: Essays on Public Opinion as a Dependent Vari¬ able. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole. Bollinger, William. 1990. “Pollsters Invade Nicaragua: Pre-Election Survey Flood.” Interamerican Public Opinion Report. (January): 1, 4-5, 14. ' Bollinger, William, and Daniel M. Lund. 1988. “Mixing Polls and Propaganda: Gallup in Central America.” The Nation (May 7): 635-638. Bollinger, William, et al. 1988. Central American and Mexican Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy. Los Angeles, Calif.: Interamerican Research Center. Bradford, Colin I., Jr., et al. 1972. New Directions in Development: Latin America, Export Credit, Population Growth, and U.S. Attitudes. New York: Praeger. Carballo de Cilley, Marita. 1987. Que pensamos los argentinos? Los valores de los argentinos en nuestro tiempo. Buenos Aires: El Cronista Comercial. Catterberg, Edgardo. 1991. Argentina Confronts Politics: Political Culture and Public Opinion in the Argentine Transition to Democracy. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Chomsky, Noam. 1986. “All the News That Fits.” Utne Reader (February-March): 5665. Claude, Inis L., Jr. 1965. The Impact of Public Opinion upon Foreign Policy and Di¬ plomacy: Open Diplomacy Revisited. The Hague: Mouton. Clymer, Adam. 1983. “Poll Finds Americans Don’t Know U.S. Positions on Central America,” The New York Times (July 1). Dent, David W. 1993. “Public Opinion and Latin American Policy.” Unpublished paper. Echegaray, Fabian. 1993. “Understanding Support for Free-Market Policies in Argen¬ tina.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 5, no. 4 (Winter): 369375. Falcoff, Mark. 1984. Small Countries, Large Issues: Studies in U.S.-Latin American Asymmetries. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Ferrando R., Delicia. 1989. Estudio de percepciones sobre drogas de la poblacion urbana del Peru: Una investigacion de opinion publica. Lima: Centro de Informacidn y Educacidn para la Prevenci6n del Abuso de Drogas. Foster, Gregory D. 1988. “Public Opinion: The Fulcrum of Alliance Cohesion.” In Alan Ned Sabrosky, ed. Alliances in U.S. Foreign Policy: Issues in the Quest for Col¬ lective Defense. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Free, Lloyd A., and Hadley Cantril. 1967. The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Friedman, Robert I. 1987. “Selling Israel to America: The Hasbara Project Targets the U.S. Media.” Mother Jones. (February-March): 21-26, 52. Grayson, George W. 1985. “Anti-Americanism in Mexico.” In Alvin Z. Rubinstein and Donald E. Smith, eds. Anti-Americanism in the Third World: Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Praeger. Hartley, Thomas Howard. 1994. “Public Opinion, Mass Media and Changes in U.S. Defense Spending, 1968-1992.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Political Sci¬ ence, Yale University. Hartley, Thomas, and Bruce Russett. 1992. “Public Opinion and the Common Defense:

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Who Governs Military Spending in the United States?” American Political Sci¬ ence Review 86, no. 4 (December): 905-915. Hernandez Medina, Alberto, et al. 1987. Como somos los mexicanos. Mexico City: Cen¬ tro de Estudios Educativos. Holsti, Ole R., and James N. Rosenau. 1990. ‘‘The Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes Among American Leaders.” Journal of Politics 52, no. 1 (February): 94-125. Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1985. ‘‘Latin America, Anti-Americanism, and Intellectual Hu¬ bris.” In Alvin Z. Rubinstein and Donald E. Smith, eds. Anti-Americanism in the Third World: Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Praeger. Humes, James C. 1992. My Fellow Americans: Presidential Addresses That Shaped His¬ tory. New York: Praeger. Immerman, Richard H. 1982. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Inglehart, Ronald. 1990. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Insulza, Jos6 Miguel. 1986. ‘‘The United States and Central America.” In Robert Wesson and Heraldo Munoz, eds. Latin American Views of U.S. Policy. New York: Prae¬ ger. Kegley, Charles W., Jr., and Eugene R. Wittkopf. 1979. American Foreign Policy: Pat¬ tern and Process. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ladd, Everett Carll. 1993. ‘‘Foreword.” In Richard Sobel, ed. Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Controversy over Contra Aid. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. -. 1983. ‘‘Public Opinion on Central America,” Public Opinion 6, no. 4 (AugustSeptember): 21, 41. LeoGrande, William M. 1993. “Did the Public Matter? The Impact of Opinion on Con¬ gressional Support for Ronald Reagan’s Nicaragua Policy.” In Richard Sobel, ed. Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Controversy over Contra Aid. Lan¬ ham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. -. 1987. Central America and the Polls: A Study of U.S. Foreign Policy toward El Salvador and Nicaragua under the Reagan Administration. Washington, D.C.: Washington Office on Latin America. Levering, Ralph B. 1978. The Public and American Foreign Policy, 1918-1978. New York: William Morrow. Martfn-Bar6, Ignacio. 1989. La opinion publica salvadoreha (1987-1988). San Salvador: UCA Editores. -. 1987. As! piensan los salvadorehos urbanos (1986-1987). San Salvador: UCA Editores. Mayer, William G. 1992. The Changing American Mind: How and Why American Public Opinion Changed between 1960 and 1988. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Moore, David W. 1992. The Superpollsters: How They Measure and Manipulate Public Opinion in America. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Moreno, Dario. 1990. U.S. Policy in Central America: The Endless Debate. Miami: Florida International University Press. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. 1985. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion—Our Social Skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “Opinion Outlook.” 1994. National Journal 26, no. 2 (January 1): 42.

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Page, Benjamin I., and Robert Y. Shapiro. 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pastor, Robert A. 1980. Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Economic Policy, 1929-1976. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Patterson, Samuel C. 1968. “The Political Cultures of the American States.” In Norman R. Luttbeg, ed. Public Opinion and Public Policy: Models of Political Linkage., Homewood, Ill.: The Dorsey Press. Rielly, John E. 1988. “America’s State of Mind: Trends in Public Attitudes toward Foreign Policy.” In Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, eds. The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy: Insights and Evidence. New York: St. Martin’s Press. -. 1983. American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1983. Chicago: Chi¬ cago Council on Foreign Relations. -. 1979. American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1979. Chicago: Chi¬ cago Council on Foreign Relations. -. 1975. American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1975. Chicago: Chi¬ cago Council on Foreign Relations. Rosenberg, Milton J. 1967. “Attitude Change and Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era.” In James N. Rosenau, ed. Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy. New York: The Free Press. Salmon, Charles T., and Chi-Yung Moh. 1992. “The Spiral of Silence: Linking Individ¬ ual and Society Through Communication.” In J. David Kennamer, ed. Public Opinion, The Press, and Public Policy. New York: Praeger. Sigelman, Lee. 1982. “The Presidency: What Crisis of Confidence?” In Doris A. Graber, ed. The President and the Public. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Smith, Brian H., and Frederick C. Turner. 1984. “The Meaning of Survey Research in Authoritarian Regimes: Brazil and the Southern Cone of Latin America Since 1970.” In James W. Wilkie and Adam Perkal, eds. Statistical Abstract of Latin America, Vol. 23. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin America Center Publications. Smith, Peter H. 1985. “U.S.-Mexican Relations: The 1980s and Beyond.” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 27, no. 1 (February): 91-101. Smith, Peter H., ed. 1992. Drug Policy in the Americas. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Sniderman, Paul M. 1993. “A New Look in Public Opinion Research.” In Ada W. Finifter, ed. Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Vol. II. Washington, D.C.: The American Political Science Association. Sobel, Richard. 1987. “Public Opinion Toward U.S. Involvement in Central America.” Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Political Science As¬ sociation, Chicago, Illinois, September. Sobel, Richard, ed. 1993. Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Controversy over Contra Aid. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Stimson, James A. 1991. Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings. Boul¬ der, Colo.: Westview Press. Sussman, Barry. 1988. What Americans Really Think: And Why Our Politicians Pay No Attention. New York: Pantheon Books. Turner, Frederick C. 1994. “Rethinking Political Culture.” In Peter H. Smith, ed., De¬ mocracy and Social Science in Latin America: Issues, Methods, and Comparative Perspectives. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

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Turner, Frederick C., and Marita Carballo de Cilley. 1989. “Argentine Attitudes Toward the United States.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 1, no. 4 (December): 279-293. United States Information Agency. 1963. The Economic and Political Climate of Opinion in Latin America and Attitudes Toward the Alliance for Progress: Results of a Public Opinion Survey in Seven Countries. R-l 10-63 (R) (June). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. -. 1962. The Impact of President Kennedy’s Visit to Mexico. R-l20-62 (R). (Oc¬ tober). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. -. 1955. Chilean Attitudes toward the United States and U.S. Economic Policies. Report #3 (October 31). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Wiarda, Howard J. 1992. American Foreign Policy toward Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s: Issues and Controversies from Reagan to Bush. New York: New York University Press. -. 1987. Finding Our Way? Toward Maturity in U.S.-Latin American Relations. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Wittkopf, Eugene R. 1990. Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Zavala, Ivdn. 1987. “Valores politicos.” In Alberto Hernandez Medina, et al., eds. Como somos los mexicanos. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Educativos.

III_ WHO MAKES LATIN AMERICAN POLICY?

10 Making Policy for Latin America: Process and Explanation Harold Molineu

When Lyndon Johnson decided to send U.S. forces into the Dominican Republic in 1965, what factors shaped that decision? If we try to understand John Ken¬ nedy’s authorization of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, do we have a theoretical framework that will offer proper guidance? What analytical framework might we use to explain the outcome of the struggle for control over U.S. policy in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration? How do we explain President Clin¬ ton’s policy toward Haiti and the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Ar¬ istide? These questions are indicative of the difficult job of bringing order to the study of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Very few scholars, however, have directly tackled this problem. Thus, the task for this chapter is, first, to consider the different approaches one might take in explaining U.S. foreign policy in general; second, to look at the attempts that have been made to apply these “models” or approaches specifically to U.S. relations with Latin America; and third, to offer some brief case studies to illustrate how these approaches might be utilized in explaining the making of U.S. policy involving Latin Amer¬ ica. Foreign policy scholars continue to search for an appropriate model or ap¬ proach that can identify accurately the important determinants of state action. In one of the few attempts at systematically reviewing the methods used to explain, specifically, U.S.-Latin American relations, Dominguez, “Consensus and Divergence” (1978), identifies ten different approaches, focusing primarily on the emerging role of nonstate and economic actors, such as multinational corporations. There has been only sporadic attention to this problem since the Dominguez article. Not surprisingly, there is no consensus that any one approach is necessarily better than another. However, it is clear that some approaches seem to work better than others in explaining certain cases. And it is important to remind

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Who Makes Latin American Policy?

ourselves that the explanations of policy in a particular case may differ, de¬ pending on the approach chosen. In any event, there is an essential link between “theory” and “reality”; on the one hand, models must be tested against realworld cases, and, on the other, for cases to have any general significance, they need to be considered within a self-conscious framework of a model of the policy process.1 At best, one of these approaches might provide a set of explanations that will enable us to arrive at a general conclusion about the determinants of U.S. policy in Latin America across time. More realistically, the value of discussing these approaches is to make us more aware of the key assumptions underlying our analyses of the various cases and to demonstrate that there is likely to be more than one meaningful explanation of U.S. behavior in Latin America.

FOREIGN POLICY APPROACHES This chapter will look at six major perspectives on the determinants of foreign policy: (1) the rational actor and realism, (2) structural theories, (3) dependency and the world system, (4) pluralism and domestic politics, (5) psychological approaches, and (6) bureaucratic politics. Of necessity, descriptions of these approaches will be brief. Nonetheless, they should help point out where one might begin to look for explanations of U.S.-Latin American policymaking and illustrate how case studies might be utilized. A more detailed discussion of one approach—bureaucratic politics—will be used in connection with President Re¬ agan’s policy toward Nicaragua during the 1980s.

The Rational Actor and Realism The rational actor-realism approach to the study of foreign policy assumes that nations make their foreign policies in a “rational” manner; that the policy is formulated to pursue objective national interests. It assumes that there is a discemable congruence between ends and means, between national goals and the strategy to achieve them. Nations are seen as single unitary actors in a nation-state system attempting to protect and promote a set of agreed-upon in¬ terests that concern the power and well-being of the nation. This is the model used implicitly by American diplomats and journalists—and most textbook au¬ thors—and it reflects a belief that policy must result from a rational process since the alternative would be an unthinkable “nonrational” process. Graham Allison’s pioneering work on foreign policy models, The Essence of Decision (1971), illustrates the use of the rational actor model in explaining why the United States reacted the way it did in response to the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba. This model asserts that U.S. policymakers were primarily reacting to the threat of Soviet missiles to American security and the global balance of power. It assumes that those making the decisions in both the Soviet Union and the United States were pursuing their nation’s interest in enhancing

Process and Explanation

223

their power relative to that of their competition. Thus, the actions of both nations were driven primarily by external factors—strategic advantage, the arms race, and the protection of spheres of influence—and not by “internal” variables such as domestic politics. Explaining traditional U.S. policy toward the Caribbean, for example, as a case of protecting a “sphere of influence” reflects the orientation of the rational actor. In this instance, it is taken for granted that a major power will inevitably seek to dominate areas near its borders occupied by weaker states. Since any rational attention to the national interest would require prevention of encroach¬ ment by other major powers in that region, we can easily explain U.S. inter¬ vention in the Caribbean as the logical consequence of this geopolitical dynamic. In fact, the Monroe Doctrine, by declaring the Western Hemisphere off-limits to further European colonization in 1823, stands as an early manifestation of the U.S. perception of Latin America as part of its sphere of influence. Among those works which look at the general concept of the sphere of influence as it applies to Latin America are Goochman and Ray, “Structural Disparities in Latin America and Eastern Europe, 1950-1970” (1979); Kaufman, The Super¬ powers and Their Spheres of Influence (1976); and Triska, Dominant Powers and Subordinate States (1986). Evidence of the continuing importance of this concept in U.S. policy was Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s declaration in his memoirs Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy (1984: 118-129) that Soviet involvement in Central America was an intrusion into “the heart of our sphere of influence.” This “strategic chokepoint,” he said, cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy. The rational actor assumptions apply, therefore, to those who posit the various “realist” approaches to justify U.S. action in Latin America. Two other ex¬ amples of the impact of realist assumptions are Hayes, Latin America and the U.S. National Interest (1984), and Payne, Opportunities and Dangers of SovietCuban Expansion (1988). Because the United States is just as selfish and powerseeking as other states, its foreign policy can be explained by those interests common to all states, primarily security and economic well-being. Essentially then, it is the external dynamics of the international system, a game where power is the only important currency, that determines U.S. policy decisions. Typical of the traditional realist view is one of the early pillars of the study of U.S.-Latin American relations, Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States (1943), who argued that the geopolitics of the Caribbean and most especially the location of the Panama Canal easily justified U.S. intervention in the region. Mecham echoes this sphere of influence perspective by discussing the “Caribbean consciousness” of the United States in his A Survey of U.S.Latin American Relations (1965). Critics of realism point out that the overall thrust of the theory has been more normative than empirical. That is, realists have written about the pursuit of national power as though it reflected what actually happens, when, in fact, it

224

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

more closely reveals what they think the United States ought to be pursuing. Two of the most useful critiques of this approach are Vasquez, The Power of Power Politics (1983), and Keohane, Neorealism and Its Critics (1986). Moreover, the fundamental assumption that the state itself is a unitary, rational actor seems to defy what policymakers and scholars know about the policy process. Determining policy is often a messy affair, fraught with compromises and concerns for a variety of interests that may or may not be related to some¬ thing termed the “national” interest. Realism simply does not fully take into account the impact of either policymakers’ beliefs and loyalties or the influence of domestic politics. In fact, it tends to insist that there is a clear border between domestic and foreign policies, and when domestic values intrude on foreign policy, it usually spells doom for the policy. In addition, such concepts as “national interest” and “power” are susceptible to very subjective definitions. One person’s definition of national interest might be different from another’s, and how they could be related to such an intangible goal as “power” leaves the theory so vague and general it provides little help in explaining the actual foreign policy process. Nonetheless, the realists do re¬ mind us of some broad principles about conducting foreign policy in a nation¬ state system, and one of these is that policymakers frequently talk and act as though the national interest were power. It is still reasonable to accept the idea that the international system remains state-centric, and that the declared selfish commitment of policymakers to their states remains an important component of the foreign policy process.

The Rational Actor Approach: Cases Human Rights. An instrucive illustration of the realist perception at work is in the debate over implementing a human rights policy. For Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the intrusion of human rights onto the international agenda was a case of domestic politics interfering with foreign policy. For Kissinger, the purpose of U.S. policy is to deal with how other governments treat the United States, not how they treat their own people. To inplude such a domestic issue as human rights in foreign policy would lead to intractable and costly interven¬ tion in the internal affairs of other states, and the United States would be foolish to follow such a policy. Thus, during Kissinger’s time in Washington, human rights did not receive the attention Congress and others were insisting they should. Nixon and Chile. The rational actor model provides a strong explanation for the response of the Nixon administration to Chile in the 1970s. The campaign conducted by Nixon and Kissinger (then the national security adviser) reflected a determination to demonstrate U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. In Kissinger’s memoirs, The White House Years (1979), he asserts that a suc¬ cessful Marxist regime in Chile would have been a direct challenge to U.S. strategic and economic national interests. The Nixon administration’s definition

Process and Explanation

225

of national security required a policy that would demonstrate the high cost of deviating from the accepted order and thereby discourage others in Latin Amer¬ ica from imitating Chile’s economic nationalism. To accomplish this, Washing¬ ton set out to isolate and destabilize the Allende regime. This realist strategy is obvious in the testimony and documents contained in the U.S. Senate hearings. Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (1975). The means were consistent with the policy goals. No inordinate risks were taken, and while Allende’s removal may not have been a specific requirement, his downfall emphasized the consequences for any regime thinking of adopting a defiant position. The goals of resisting the spread of Marxism, protecting U.S. influence, and demonstrating a will to control events in Latin America were in accord with prevailing U.S. national interests and clearly conformed to the gen¬ eral model of the rational actor. And further, Kissinger’s open concern with American power in the region corresponded with the “realist” perception of the world. Reagan and Central America. Although a more useful approach for explain¬ ing the Reagan policies in Latin America may be bureaucratic politics, his ad¬ ministration frequently spoke in rational actor terms and articulated a policy vulnerable to such an analysis. Publicly, Reagan interpreted the problems in Central America within the con¬ text of a global strategic battle in the Cold War. If any situation in the 1970s and early 1980s was described in such terms there was a tendency—regardless of the administration—immediately to see broad national interests as at stake. According to the rational actor model, there is an assumption that any team of policymakers would be required to calculate the national interests involved along with the costs and risks of various responses. Not all might have responded the way Reagan did, but the process of defining the situation and the variables considered important to the outcome would have been similar. Therefore, we can understand the response without having to probe into the minds of the policymakers or the maneuvers of the bureaucracy. For example, the Reagan administration declared its intention of restoring the credibility of American power and reversing the trends that were undermining U.S. relations with friends and allies. In the face of revolution in Central Amer¬ ica, the United States was put in a position of reaffirming its long-standing commitments to security in the Caribbean Basin. Reagan’s rationale, in “Central America: Defending Our Vital Interests” (1983), reflects a classic and familiar refrain of the “rational actor”: “If the U.S. cannot respond to a threat near our own borders, why should Europeans or Asians believe that we are seriously concerned about threats to them? If the Soviets can assume that nothing short of an actual attack on the United States will provoke an American response, which ally, which friend will trust us?” It became important, therefore, to send a “message” to Moscow in the form of military and economic aid to El Salvador, the militarization of Honduras and creation of the contras, and later the military invasion of Grenada. The United

226

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

States was drawing the line on revolutionary threats to its allies. In the language of the realists, El Salvador and Grenada were not particularly important in and of themselves, but they could be used to signal Moscow that a new team was in charge and that the credibility of U.S. commitments would no longer be in doubt. A stern U.S. response was a convenient and inexpensive method of re¬ building U.S. prestige and power. Moreover, the goals in Central America were viewed as within the capabilities of the United States; thus the risks involved in pursuing an aggressive policy were seen as reasonable and manageable. There was the promise of a global payoff from a modest investment of money, arms, and advisers. The actions were also consistent with the established national strategy of containing com¬ munist aggression wherever it appeared. Slater, “Dominos in Central America” (1987), illustrates the “rational” nature of U.S. policy through an examination of the “domino theory” and its fallacies in Central America.

Structural Theories Structural theorists constitute a number of approaches to foreign policy that include many different values and emphases but have a common assumption: foreign policy is determined primarily by the nature of the international system, its distribution of power, its rules, and its institutions. In some respects, structural theorists borrow from the realists but place the emphasis more on the systemic variables than on the rational calculation of national interests by national leaders. Neorealism. A merger of structural theory and realism is represented by a group of “neorealists,” or structural realists. A leading figure in this area is Waltz, Theory of International Politics (1979). Common to this approach is a focus on the structure or distribution of power in the international system. From this perspective, national foreign policy is the product of a state’s relative power position in the world. Thus, a superpower such as the United States will behave in certain predictable ways because of its status and its worldwide obligations. Toward Latin America, for example. United States involvement would be driven by its interests in the global balance of power, not by the value of any particular issue or country in the region. Indicative of this approach was the general trend of U.S. policy toward Latin America during the Cold War. Problems arising in the hemisphere generated attention in Washington not because they were especially threatening to U.S. interests there, but because their outcome was perceived as affecting relations with the Soviet Union. If the United States, for example, could not contain the communist threat in its own hemisphere, what credibility would its commitment to containment have elsewhere in the world? Secretary Haig (1984: 118) spoke to this connection when he complained about congressional hesitation to become involved in El Salvador: “It was typical that Americans would be reluctant to treat El Salvador as a strategic problem with global implications. Historically, we have been slow to think and act in these terms.”

Process and Explanation

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A recent work that applies geopolitical and systemic methodology to explain U.S. relations with Latin America, particularly during global crises, is Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy (1993). According to Desch, Latin America’s value to the United States is quite variable and rests essentially on its relationship to events and interests outside the hemisphere. Because the region has no intrinsic value to Washington, he writes, its priority for U.S. policymakers waxes and wanes according to their particular global concerns. Other structural approaches have emphasized the development of international interdependence and institutions as forces that have come to play a critical role in shaping foreign policy. For example, regime theorists such as Krasner, In¬ ternational Regimes (1983), suggest that there are certain functional activities in the world around which so extensive a set of rules and expectations has developed that nations are severely constrained in their independent behavior. In other words, out of these systems of rules we have a kind of international order which moderates and directs the autonomous actions of states. Thus, U.S. actions in Latin America may be, in part, explained by the strength and nature of the prevailing “regime,” or network of rules, that applies to a particular issue. Very little of this work has been directed at U.S. policy in Latin America, but the theme may have some relevance. International regimes are said to exist in such areas as human rights and arms control, both areas in which U.S. actions may be regulated. Because of the inter-American agreements on human rights and the general legislative and political commitments of the United States to¬ ward promoting compliance with basic human rights standards, the capacity for Washington to conduct its policy in the region without consideration of these expectations is somewhat limited. Restrictions on the sale and deployment of nuclear weapons in the hemisphere likewise restrict the foreign policy flexibility of all states. Whether or not these regimes constitute a genuine “order” in the region remains in doubt. A variation on the structuralist theme is the use of the hegemonic theory of international relations to explain U.S. policy. Indicative of this school is Poitras, whose The Ordeal of Hegemony (1990) lays out a “modified realism” to de¬ scribe the power relations between the United States and Latin America. Poitras moves beyond the view of hegemony as simply a preponderance of power to an approach that he calls “eclectic hegemony” which deals with the impact of a wide variety of relationships, from coercion and economics to ideology and culture. Nonetheless, this approach rests on the assumption of state actions, on behalf of tangible, objective, and rationally determined national interests. As do other realists, the hegemonic theorists often deal with nations as though they have certain “roles” to play in the world. These roles may be defined variously as “great power,” “revolutionary leader,” or “dependent state,” but they tend to proscribe a place for the nation relative to its power and resources and to the self-image of its historical and cultural place in world politics. Thus,

228

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

the policy of the United States toward Latin American revolutions could be explained as a status quo great power protecting its sphere (or hegemony) against challenges to its dominance. Or, one might argue, U.S. actions are a consequence of its self-appointed role as protector of democracy. U.S. policymakers have, from time to time, charac¬ terized the U.S. mission in Latin America as that of the free-world leader re¬ sponsible for establishing democratic procedures. The Good Neighbor Policy declared this as its goal, as did the Alliance for Progress and the human rights policies of Jimmy Carter. Even Ronald Reagan and George Bush established a number of bureaucratic instruments, such as the National Endowment for De¬ mocracy (NED), to promote alternatives to communism and dictatorships. These issues are explored in both concept and case studies in two volumes edited by Lowenthal, Exporting Democracy (1991). Scholars often have reservations about relying on this approach since it is difficult to separate what might be empty rhetoric from genuine policy moti¬ vation. Wiarda, Finding Our Way? (1987), has been critical of the ethnocentrism in U.S. policy and is clearly skeptical about relying on domestic political values as a source of guidance in foreign policy. Carothers, In the Name of Democracy (1991), indicts the Latin American policy of the Reagan administration but also demonstrates the futility of looking at the U.S. sense of democratic mission as a guide to policy.

Dependency and the World System Another set of systemic models tries to explain relations between nations by focusing not on the states themselves but on the groups or elites that associate with each other with minimal regard for national boundaries. These approaches are not concerned with the specific foreign policy process of the United States, but instead with the interlocking patterns of, primarily, economic relations. The flow of capital, manipulation of labor, and exploitation of raw material producers in the name of capitalist growth are likely to be better predictors of what the United States does in Latin America than a study of what goes on in the De¬ partment of State or White House. Among these approaches is dependency theory, a perspective which gained considerable acceptance in the scholarship of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1970s, and despite its different language, drew considerable inspiration from Marxist theory. One of the original advocates of this approach is dos Santos, “The Structure of Dependence” (1970). Summaries of more recent develop¬ ments include Chilcote and Edelstein’s edited collection of essays, Latin Amer¬ ica (1974), and Chilcote’s, ed., Dependency and Marxism (1982). Here, the focus is on economic elites in the United States, who, with their control over both U.S. politics and money and their extensive ties with economic elites in Latin America, are able to guarantee that the primary emphasis of U.S. actions

Process and Explanation

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in Latin America is to maintain the region’s dependence on both the United States and the global capitalist economy at large. Thus, the direction of the Mexican economy or the fate of Bolivia’s revolution and Guatemala’s attempt to control the United Fruit Company can be explained in terms of these interconnected elites, in league with political leaders, protecting their own economic interests. The “power” that was being enhanced was not necessarily that of any nation, but instead that of central capitalist elites. Taking this approach means looking at evidence of dependence between the United States and Latin America and identifying those groups in the United States which are committed to frustrating any movement in Latin America that threatens the prevailing capitalist system. To a certain extent, it is believed that U.S. policymakers, as members of, or instruments of, the dominant classes, simply take for granted the mission of the U.S. government to maintain the prevailing economic system. Capitalism, in other words, is synonymous with the national interest. For some, dependency has been replaced by the world-system perspective. Taking many of his cues from sociology, the leading exponent of this view, Wallerstein, The Politics of the World Economy (1984), argues that a definable social system exists beyond the borders of nation states and that this system, which is fundamentally capitalist, has established a stable economic and political order throughout the globe. Nation-states help to implement the system; there is no “national” economy in the traditional sense. Instead, states bend to the will of the dominant world economy. Also useful sources for this perspective are the Thompson (ed.) collection, Contending Approaches to World-System Analysis (1983), and Shannon’s An Introduction to the World-System Perspec¬ tive (1989). The connection between bourgeois elites and national power is spelled out further in another sociological study, Petras and Morley, U.S. Hegemony Under Siege (1990). This approach argues that U.S. policy is driven by the desire to integrate Latin America, through the region’s own network of economic elites, into international capitalism.

Pluralism and Domestic Politics The various assumptions that what happens within states is not central to the essence of foreign policy have been under attack for some time. Analysts of U.S. politics argue that in a democratic system, public opinion and interest groups, as well as various elites, are capable of determining the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Thus, we have a category of approaches that, at their base, assume U.S. policy can be understood by looking at the influence of various groups and factions within the country, and that the most fruitful avenue to follow is the one that deals with these internal variables. A rather complex set of approaches derives from the pluralist models of American democracy. Pluralism argues that foreign policy, like domestic policy,

230

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

reflects the general values and consensus arising out of the competition between groups. The basic concept of pluralism is spelled out in Dahl’s classic Pluralist Democracy in the United States (1967). The inference is that while specific foreign actions may not be traceable to this consensus, the general drift of policy is most certainly shaped by domestic political interests. Thus, U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War was reflective of the national political consensus, and the resistance to direct involvement in Central America in the 1980s reflected a breakdown of that consensus brought about by the experience in Vietnam. After the Vietnam War there was a surge of scholarship reexamining that consensus that seemed to have allowed the Executive branch so much freedom of action during the Cold War. The best examples of this analysis include the standard work by Holsti and Rosenau, American Leadership in World Affairs (1984), and the more recent consideration of the political consensus by Melanson, Reconstructing Consensus (1991). Herring discusses the impact of the col¬ lapse of the foreign policy consensus on the shaping of U.S. policy in Central America in “Vietnam, El Salvador and the Uses of History’’ (1985). Today, scholars are generally not so sanguine about the orderly relationship between public consensus and policy. Those who deal with this problem, such as Rosati, The Politics of United States Foreign Policy (1993), do not deny the domestic influence on foreign policy, but instead see hyperpluralism as the crit¬ ical paradigm. This approach borrows from both elitist and pluralist theories and contends that there are so many narrow powerful interest groups, each built around a single issue, that no consensus is possible. Characteristic of this pattern is the influence of bureaucratic agencies and various single-issue cultural and economic groups who control the debate on their particular interest. In turn, there are groups which decision makers cannot ignore on such important issues as human rights, arms sales, or trade, for example. The debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) throughout 1993 illustrates some of the features of hyperpluralism. The Carter administration’s policy on human rights in Latin America had to contend with the no-compromise position of focused influential factions typi¬ cally linked to the Democratic party and key figures in Congress, and at the same time accommodate the interests of the national security bureaucracy and the foreign trade lobby. Of particular use in demonstrating the influence of these various groups is Schoultz’s work, Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1981). Although written more in the framework of bu¬ reaucratic politics, the Schoultz (1981: 5) study does demonstrate the influence of the human rights issue in “determining the values that impinge upon decision making and the process by which decisions are reached.” According to Schoultz, the impact on policy was primarily from interest groups, not public opinion or the foreign policy bureaucracy. By comparison, the Reagan administration’s crusade for the contras might be explained by its need to pacify the ideological right wing of the Republican

Process and Explanation

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party, notwithstanding the lack of national consensus on the issue. It was clear from the beginning of Reagan’s 1980 campaign that his advisers were outlining a new strategy to follow on Central America, one that reflected Reagan’s own personal views as well as those of some of his most fervent supporters. These demands were politically difficult to ignore. Two important features of these “domestic politics” approaches are (1) the ' obscuring of any concern about “national” interests in favor of factional inter¬ ests and (2) the “nonrational” political process by which policy is determined. Policy can be loaded with symbolism, for example, to appease important groups and constantly compromised in order to balance competing interests. Carter’s creation of a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the Depart¬ ment of State, the congressional requirement for annual human rights reports from the department, and even the sanctions imposed against several Latin American states illustrate the kind of symbolic steps taken to deal with the politics of the human rights issue. Whether or not there was any material im¬ provement in the human condition in those countries was largely beside the point. The debate over the consequences of Carter’s human rights policy is explored in Molineu’s “Carter and Human Rights” (1980).

Domestic Politics and Interest Groups: Cases

Although not a “model” of the policy process, focusing on the influence of domestic politics changes the level of analysis from the international arena and national interests to those variables within the nation that shape the making of foreign policy. Of particular interest here are cases involving Latin America where we might find the best explanations growing out of the study of elites and interest groups. We have already mentioned how the Carter administration’s human rights policy might be explained as a response to domestic political pressure. Another illustration emerges from an examination of the Eisenhower policy in Guatemala. Eisenhower and Guatemala. The Eisenhower administration’s actions against Guatemala in 1954 were clearly responsive to the interests of the United Fruit Company. The company’s lobbying efforts in Washington and its leverage with the foreign policy apparatus persuaded the administration to take action it might not otherwise have been inclined to take. See both the general account of the intervention by Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (1982), and Bernays’s own account of his crafty lobbying effort, Biography of an Idea (1965). In other words, pursuing a realist study of the calculation of U.S. national interests, or assuming the answer could be found in the competition among bureaucracies and the White House, would probably not produce as forceful an explanation as one that looks at interest group politics. Although the extensive destabilizing campaign against the Arbenz govern¬ ment may have been, over time, portrayed in either rational actor terms or as a result of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s rigid moralistic beliefs, the

232

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

fundamental decision to intervene emanated from effective lobbying by a com¬ pany with strategically placed friends. When United Fruit’s banana operations in Guatemala were threatened with nationalization during the Truman administration, Washington had concluded the problem was not serious enough to justify more than diplomatic action. After the 1952 election, however, the new secretary of state and his brother, Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA, adopted a different view of the situation. Both they and others in the administration had personal ties to Boston-based United Fruit and were much more open to pleas from the company for strong action on its behalf in Guatemala. United Fruit was assisted by an effective lobbying and public relations effort in Washington that convinced policymakers, members of Congress, and the press that the Arbenz government was run by communists and that the regime’s purchase of arms from Czechoslovakia demonstrated that the country had be¬ come a “beachhead” for Soviet penetration of the hemisphere. That the reality in Guatemala was somewhat different was beside the point. United Fruit’s suc¬ cessful portrayal of events in the country as constituting a communist threat played persuasively with sympathetic policymakers. The result was a covert operation that not only saved United Fruit but brought down a democratically elected government as well. The irony of the U.S.-sponsored coup is that the mythology of the interven¬ tion, from the nature of the Arbenz “threat” and how he was brought down to the reasons for U.S. action, contributed to a mystique that led to efforts to replicate the operation elsewhere in the hemisphere. The idealized formula was invoked to justify the failed Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba in 1961, and again in the 1980s to legitimize the war against the Sandinistas. In any event, different approaches to explaining this policy against Guatemala may well lead to dif¬ ferent conclusions about what actually happened. If one believes it was a result of interest group manipulation of government agencies on behalf of a company in an especially vulnerable country, the “lesson” learned is likely to be different than if one assumes the intervention was a case of the rational actor organizing a “liberation” campaign against an unpopular communist government. Reagan and Cuba. Reagan’s policy toward Cuba illustrates the importance of taking into account the domestic pressures on policymakers and reminds us that we cannot assume that policymakers operate in isolation from public opinion or special interest groups. Reagan’s electoral mandates in 1980 and 1984 were generally interpreted as supporting a harder line against communism, and this mood gave the president considerable sanction for maintaining a hostile position against Castro’s Cuba. More importantly, however, Reagan had been elected with the crucial support of the right wing of the Republican party and various conservative groups, including the vocal Cuban exile community in Florida. In the eyes of these supporters, the litmus test of Reagan’s success in foreign policy was the contin-

Process and Explanation

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ued isolation of Cuba. Hints of any concessions to Castro—or his presumed allies in Managua—were taken as a sign of desertion from the cause. Many interest groups in the United States, however, are frequently satisfied with symbolic responses. If they can be assured that the administration is ‘ ‘doing something,” their concern may be assuaged. Strong rhetoric and symbolic action against Castro and ‘‘communist” forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua helped ' to defuse the demands of the conservatives and thus the policy could be viewed as ‘‘successful.” Blaming Castro for exporting revolution and criticizing his dependence on the Soviet Union established the administration’s sincerity. The setting up of powerful radio and TV transmitters aimed at Cuba (Radio and TV Marti) became a concrete manifestation of Reagan’s tough stance against Cas¬ tro—regardless of whether or not it had any effect on the behavior of the Cuban people and its leaders. Of course, such an examination of domestic political influences on policy reminds us of the restraints that can be imposed on policymakers. The variety of single-issue interest groups focused on foreign policy are frequently more than mere background noise to the policymaking process and may be well po¬ sitioned either to open opportunities for foreign policy action or, more likely, to limit the policymakers’ flexibility. In addition to the tenacious influence of the Cuban-American community, other issues, such as trade with Latin America, have been buffeted by the interests of labor and environmental groups.

Psychological Approaches

Students of foreign policy continue to draw on the contributions of psychol¬ ogy. These approaches underline the importance of remembering that policy is made by people, not governments or agencies. Because of that, it is essential that we acknowledge the role of certain psychological variables as group dy¬ namics, perceptions and beliefs, and cognitive consistency. For example, one cannot help but appreciate the importance of Lyndon Johnson’s personality and his concern for standing tall against threats when we assess his decision to send troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965. Biographies of decision makers can be a valuable source of insight into their personalities and thought processes. Lyndon Johnson’s worldview is captured vividly by Kearns in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976). Among the contributions most closely related to the politics of the foreign policy process is the work by Janis, Groupthink (1982), who developed the “groupthink” model as an aid to understanding the behavior of foreign poli¬ cymakers. Janis demonstrated the importance of applying research on group dynamics to help explain why some foreign policy decisions have resulted in success and others in failure. He uses the Bay of Pigs decision to illustrate how critical thinking was replaced by conformity to group norms and how candid discussion was overcome by concern for maintaining group cohesion. In con¬ trast, he points out how in responding to the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy

234

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

administration appeared to have corrected the mistakes of “groupthink,” so evident at the Bay of Pigs, and developed a flexible strategy characterized by innovation and constant questioning. No doubt those who study the internal workings of the Reagan administration will be struck by the applicability of groupthink to interpreting the origins of the Iran-contra affair. When the president’s personal beliefs and commitments were well known and when he had surrounded himself with a number of likeminded advisers, it was very difficult for dissenting opinions to be heard. Even when those from the inner circle, such as Secretary of State George Shultz, had doubts about the policy, their questions were either ignored or not even asked in the first place. To follow up on that dissent would have been too threatening to the group’s basic unity. Whether or not this precluded an open debate over the wise pursuit of national (or even domestic political) interests was not deemed important. A useful account of this phenomenon is Gutman’s Banana Diplomacy (1988). A second psychologically derived method of seeking to explain foreign policy is to look at the specific beliefs and perceptions of those directly involved in formulating the policy. The unifying theme of these approaches is cognitive consistency. Drawing on the work of cognitive psychologists, we know that since policymakers cannot hope to possess all information about every event they are compelled to be selective about what they do pay attention to. In ad¬ dition, policymakers will filter that information through a variety of lenses, such as personal beliefs and experiences, and in the end seek to “make sense” of what may appear to be contradictory information. This search for “cognitive consistency” enables the decision makers to give order and meaning to the intelligence that flows across their desks and thus provide a rationale for a particular policy. Schoultz, in his National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1987), demonstrates how similar and strongly held personal beliefs of U.S. policymakers since World War II have directly affected policy toward Latin America. He shows the connections policymakers have assumed about the causes of poverty, the rise of communism, the sources of instability, and the requirements for security. Even when these beliefs are not supported by evi¬ dence, they have taken on a compelling logic very difficult to modify. Thus, as Jervis has so aptly demonstrated in his Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976), it is important to understand the policymakers’ perceptions of the world to probe into the process by which they reconcile disparate intelligence and advice. The techniques by which this is accomplished range from biased selection of “facts” to correspond to already held prefer¬ ences, such as “All communists are a threat,” to intuitive seeking out of anal¬ ogies, such as “The Sandinista revolution is just like Fidel Castro’s.” Because it is nearly impossible for policymakers to avoid selective perception and anal¬ ogizing, identifying the source and impact of these tendencies is an essential step in explaining the policy process.

Process and Explanation

235

Analogies and Learning. To elaborate on the impact of analogies and their relationship to how policymakers derive lessons from the past: The historical experiences of policymakers are a major component of their belief systems and the use of analogies is a technique by which these experiences can be cognitively organized and reconciled with new information. This tendency to relate contem¬ porary events to past events as a guide to action is a frequent—and even es¬ sential—procedure in the policy process and provides a useful approach to understanding the role of cognitive consistency in formulating foreign policy. Historians and policymakers often refer to the lessons of the past to demon¬ strate the meaning of current situations. The assumption is that analogies exist and can be useful, that one can “learn” from history if the appropriate model is chosen. As Jervis has pointed out, historical experiences act as filters through which a complex world can be simplified and made more manageable. By far, the analogy with the most influence on recent American policy has been the comparison of the post-World War II world with that of the 1930s. From the 1947 pronouncement of containment until the 1980s, the dominant concern of the United States was to avoid the errors made in the 1930s that led to the outbreak of a global war. Those responsible for making foreign policy, from Truman to Bush, had had their perceptions shaped by their prewar edu¬ cation and experiences. This generation would not fail to halt aggression (by the communists) in its earliest stages as the democracies had failed to stand up to Japanese and German aggression. This is thoroughly explored in two general works, Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time (1986), and Khong, Analogies at War (1992). The eventual outcome of this analogic fixation was U.S. involvement in Vi¬ etnam. Since Vietnam, there has been a battle with a new analogy: “avoiding Vietnams.” Thus, the Vietnam experience has had the kind of catalytic impact on current policymakers that the 1930s had on previous ones. And it was this comparison of the Central American cauldron of the 1980s with Vietnam that imposed significant restraints on the Reagan administration’s intervention in the region. Of course, the administration argued that the Vietnam experience should have taught the lesson that if the United States did not intervene the communists would win, and that a more appropriate analogy for Central America was the model provided by Castro’s success in Cuba. By far, the best analytical work spelling out the “theory” of analogies as well as its application to Latin America is Hybel’s How Leaders Reason (1990). Etheredge, in his work. Can Governments Learn? (1985), argues that U.S. policy in the 1980s failed because it had not learned the appropriate lessons from the earlier experiences with Latin America. U.S. policymakers, for instance, tended to apply the recipe from the Guatemalan intervention of 1954 to later events without fully considering either what had happened in Guatemala and what was different in, say, Cuba and Nicaragua. Etheredge (1985: ix) contends that this “blocked learning” in U.S. foreign policy rests on a “system of strong im¬ agery” of past experience which overwhelms any “analytical reasoning.” From

236

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

this perspective, breakdowns in cognitive thinking or bureaucratic procedures do not explain these events as effectively as learning theory, and wiser policies would emerge if we could remove the political, cultural, and institutional barriers to improved knowledge. Of course, explaining the influence of these psychological variables does not mean that we necessarily have discovered the reality of the situation; instead, we have more closely identified the ways in which the policymakers defined the situation. Consider the vigorous debate over the Reagan policy toward Nicaragua and how the various parties disagreed not just on how to respond but on the very fundamentals of what was actually happening. In part, that debate seldom moved beyond the basic assumptions; it was as though neither side were listen¬ ing to the other. In the end, the White House perceptions of the Sandinistas and contras may or may not have been “accurate,” but they certainly drove a very important set of policies.

Groupthink and Cognitive Consistency: Cases Foreign policy typically emerges from group discussion, whether in the form of extensive review by several different agencies or from the inner circle of the president’s staff: thus the tendency toward “groupthink” and its corollary, cog¬ nitive consistency. Not only do groups seek to maintain their essential cohesion and access to the president, but the premium placed on coherent justification means a general intolerance of cognitive dissonance. Complicated questions and contradictory intelligence, for instance, are not conducive to simplifying the decision process. The Reagan Administration. The prevailing belief system among the Reagan foreign policy team helped to shape the process by which events were interpreted and responded to. And conformity to that belief system was important to par¬ ticipation in the process. Obviously, all we can do here is briefly explore these issues, but at least we can begin to deal with those psychological variables that may help explain the prevalence of that conformity and its impact on policy. In general, Ronald Reagan and his advisers took for granted a Soviet “master plan” for the global expansion of communism. Theirs was an unshakable ide¬ ological and moral view of the world that once put into place made it nearly impossible to consider any compromise. For example, since the Sandinistas were “communists,” they could not be trusted to honor any agreements; this was a given. Nicaragua’s expressed willingness to negotiate was rejected out of hand by the Reagan White House as a ploy to dupe the United States into accepting communist control of Nicaragua. Despite cautions from the U.S. ambassador in Managua during the Carter years that Washington not approach the Sandinistas with “ideological blinders” on, the Reagan administration seemed to do just that; see Dickey, “Central America: From Quagmire to Cauldron” (1984). Once the problem was framed by this ideological prism, it provided meaning to all that was happening in

Process and Explanation

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Central America. Attempts to introduce more pragmatic and complex assess¬ ments into the debate were continually thwarted by the domination of the group by a number of committed believers, such as CIA Director William Casey and UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. When Congress refused in 1985 to continue funding the contras, the true believers were so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that the legal ' and institutional channels of the U.S. government could justifiably be bypassed. Because of the groupthink impulse, the Reagan administration had become locked into a single path and instead of reassessing its position in the face of congressional resistance, it continued on until the policy collapsed after the exposure of illegal arms sales to Iran. The rich lode of material on the Iran-contra affair is supported by the docu¬ mentary efforts of the National Security Archive and its publications, such as The Iran-Contra Scandal, edited by Kombluh and Byrne (1993). A thorough summary of the Iran-contra affair is provided by Draper, A Very Thin Line (1991). That groupthink did take hold may be attributable not only to his advisers’ awareness of the president’s strongly held beliefs and their reluctance to consider alternatives, but also to the widespread lack of knowledge about Central Amer¬ ica. Ignorance and the subsequent attempt to give cognitive consistency to the various events by placing them into an all-inclusive ideological framework pro¬ vide an important determinant of the U.S. reaction to the Nicaraguan revolution. Ignorance, during the Carter administration, contributed to policy drift and inaction. No one knew for certain what was happening in Nicaragua or what could be done to control it. Lake’s Somoza Falling (1989) provides a detailed account of this period, illustrating the gaps in understanding Nicaragua. Ac¬ cording to Lake (1989: 45), “To policy makers in Washington, Nicaragua is a problem, an exercise in logic and ideological debate [and not a process of look¬ ing back for clues or patterns in history].” The lack of expertise and the vague¬ ness of the intelligence made it more likely that policymakers, in the effort to make sense of the world, would fall back on stereotypic and simplistic expla¬ nations. Little was known about the Sandinistas, for example, since there had been little intelligence penetration of the revolutionary movements in the region. The assumption that the moderate anti-Somoza parties had genuine influence was based on wishful thinking and inappropriate comparisons with images of how pluralistic societies operated, not on a true understanding of Nicaraguan politics and history. For example, the belief—or the hope—that the National Guard could be separated from Somoza defied reality. U.S. policy was left with¬ out a clear direction; the conceptual vacuum was filled by Reagan’s allencompassing Cold War framework. The Cold War rationale worked for the Reagan team because it too dealt with Central America from a base of ignorance. The debate therefore became cap¬ tured by those who both possessed very strong beliefs about the communist threat and had close contact with the president. Contradictory information could

238

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

not get through, and it was simply easier intellectually to reduce the “mess” in Central America to a dichotomy:'freedom versus communism. This formulation foreclosed an open discussion, for who could remain part of the group and not accept this logically consistent explanation? The only way the Reagan admin¬ istration could find diplomats to carry out Nicaragua policy was to locate people who had never served in the Central American region. Reagan’s purge of the Latin American bureau and its effects on U.S.-Latin American policy can be found in Goshko, “Clout and Morale Decline” (1987), part of a four-part series on the lack of experts in the handling of the Central American crisis, and Gedda, “A Dangerous Region” (1983), which probes the elimination of Foregin Service officers (FSOs) associated with Carter’s Latin American policies. When a policy is formulated by those unaware of the region’s politics and history, there is a tendency to rely on the broad strategic and ideological views with which they are most familiar. This bias was prevalent in the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam, where policymakers are shown to reject expert testimony and intelligence on the internal dynamics of the conflict in Indochina in favor of a Cold War perspective in which the battle is over halting communist ag¬ gression. Thus, in the Central American debate, we heard an echo of that ten¬ dency: “Don’t bother me with the facts; we know what we have to do.”

Bureaucratic Politics A more narrowly focused approach, bureaucratic politics, derives its impact from providing a way to deal with the political bargaining among the various people, groups, and agencies responsible for making and carrying out U.S. pol¬ icy. Acknowledging the central role of politics, this model enables us to study both the process of formulating policy as well as that of implementing the policy. Allison (1971) deserves credit for articulating this model; Halperin ex¬ tended and clarified the concept and showed more generally how it applied to a variety of cases in his Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (1974). According to this model, the particular action that emerges from a nation reflects primarily the interests of whatever faction happens to be controlling the policy process at the time. The determination of a policy choice is not some agreed-upon “national” interest, but the political effectiveness of the winning coalition. If policy is a result of coalition building and bargaining, we must look inside the foreign policy apparatus to explain why certain policies were adopted. This is not to say that the process is not rational, for those factions pursuing their own goals have a clear idea of what is in their best interests and of how to achieve it, although this would not correspond to the rationality of the “ra¬ tional actor” model. Moreover, competing groups do not ignore the “national” interest inasmuch as each may claim to be acting on behalf of it. At the heart of bureaucratic politics is the assumption that organizations and individuals are motivated by a variety of factors, from personal beliefs and ideology to career interests and agency loyalty. For example, coalitions based

Process and Explanation

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on ideology may be constructed around an issue (such as aid to the contras) regardless of the agency for which a person works. On the other hand, a typical pattern in bureaucratic politics is bargaining on behalf of one’s agency, regard¬ less of personal beliefs: “You can predict a person’s position from where he or she is sitting.” In this model of the policy process, the president is typically the central player ' and can be seen as either directing the policy himself or as being the target of positioning by those seeking to influence his decision. The key players are usu¬ ally senior policymakers and advisers, but depending on the issue, may be mid¬ dle-level officials or selected members of Congress. On the fringes are the press, opinion leaders, congress, and the public. Coalitions try to manipulate and in¬ fluence these peripheral players, for at times they can enhance the influence of a group. One of the assumptions of bureaucratic politics is that the key to understand¬ ing the process is to note the location of the payoff for a particular decision. That is, who benefits? What agency secures resources or status? Which group satisfies its ideological interests? How are the president’s chances for reelection improved? Not only will political competition determine the policy decision, it can also influence its implementation. For example, if the mainline Foreign Service lost the battle for control of the formulation of a human rights policy in Washington during the Carter administration, it was in a position afterward to manage its implementation in the field—and in fact temper its actual impact. Two attempts to apply bureaucratic politics to the policy process on Latin America are May, “The Bureaucratic Politics Approach in U.S-Argentine Re¬ lations, 1942-47” (1974), and Lowenthal, “ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Radical,’ and ‘Bureau¬ cratic’ Perspectives on U.S.-Latin American Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Retrospect” (1974). Art, “Bureaucratic Politics and American Foreign Policy” (1973), explores some of the main shortcomings of the approach. Basically, he contends that the paradigm overlooks the influence of domestic politics on senior policymakers and downplays the dominant influence of the president. The opportunities for scholars to make full use of the bureaucratic politics model are hampered further by the difficulty of gaining access to the day-by-day dynamics of the policy process. Nonetheless, this model reminds us not to overlook the political nature of the struggle for control of foreign policy. After all, if we assume that “pol¬ itics” is at work in determining domestic policy, why should foreign policy be exempt? To summarize: In trying to explain U.S. policy in Latin America, it is quickly apparent that the process of both formulating the policy and implementing it is often not easy to discern. That is, the process does not appear to be “rational,” or necessarily in accord with what the realist would assume to be the national interest. Nor does the policy necessarily reflect popular opinion or the interests of important pressure groups. Instead, it appears to be the outcome of confusing

240

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

and imprecise bargaining among the various foreign policy agencies and the president with occasional participation by certain members of Congress and nongovernmental think tanks and lobbies. In this situation, the bureaucratic pol¬ itics model may offer the most productive route to clarity.

Bureaucratic Politics: A Case Study Reagan and the Contras. The struggle for control over U.S. policy toward Nicaragua during the Reagan administration is remarkable, first, because of the wealth of insider accounts about what happened, and, second, because it so clearly demonstrates the utility of a bureaucratic politics approach. This contest over which coalition—and therefore which policy—would shape the decisions on Nicaragua was characterized by an effective campaign by a highly focused faction with direct access to the president to control the entire policy process. Contrary to the conclusions of the congressional investigating committee and the Tower Commission, this was not an especially small faction, since it in¬ cluded large numbers of people loyal to the president and committed to Exec¬ utive control of foreign policy. But the specifics of the policy were shaped by the very effective leadership of this coalition. Upon Reagan’s arrival in 1981, there was no coherent policy on Nicaragua. As Gutman (1988:39) describes it, the origins of the administration’s obsessive commitment to the contras “is one of the most obscure events in Reagan’s policy.” In fact, the initial push to sponsor an exile force did not come from Washington, but from disillusioned and expelled Nicaraguans, along with var¬ ious Honduran officials and Argentine military officers. The CIA picked up on the idea, apparently in 1980, in concert with influential congressional aides and lobbyists with close ties to the old Somoza regime, and, during the Carter ad¬ ministration, some covert U.S. support was channeled to help start up a coun¬ terrevolutionary force. Although no systematic policy had been discussed or articulated by the for¬ eign policy apparatus (such as the National Security Council) until late in 1981, the United States, well before that time, was clearly becoming involved in Nic¬ aragua as a result of a variety of official and unofficial informal contacts and covert funding. These early commitments obviously had an impact on the later debate and had the effect of presenting the Reagan administration with a ‘ ‘policy in-hand,” a virtual fait accompli. The power of the inertia of these relatively minor actions to drive major policy is demonstrated in Armony, ‘ ‘Argentina and the Origin of the Nicaraguan Contras” (1993). Crucial to the success of this early step in the process were the willingness of the CIA to take the initiative and the apparent indecisiveness of the Carter White House about events in Nicaragua. In controlling policy, a leadership vac¬ uum enables more focused and more interested agencies to take the initiative and undertake commitments that may not be easy to break. In using the bureaucratic politics approach, it is important to identify the

Process and Explanation

241

agencies or individuals likely to benefit from pushing policy in a particular direction. In this case, the CIA was poised to pounce on this opportunity to regain its status as an active player in foreign policy. Especially with the ap¬ pointment of William Casey as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1981, the agency undertook to combat the malaise that had set in during the Carter years after public attacks on secret operations and assassination of foreign leaders and a series of crippling budget cuts. Casey’s promise to restore the agency had the support of many “old hands” who had been let go during the previous decade and who had been active in earlier operations such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Success in Guatemala. According to Mayer and McManus, Landslide (1988:71), for many in the CIA, “the sun rose and set on the Nicaraguan operation.” If any Executive branch agency benefitted from this policy it was the CIA: By 1985, its budget had nearly doubled in four years and it was running six covert wars around the globe. Those supporting the “contra-track” option consisted of a variety of poli¬ cymakers at the Executive level with differing views about how to use covert force against Nicaragua. Some wanted to use the contras to harass the Sandinistas to keep them off-balance and perhaps induce them to negotiate, while others saw the contras as a means of interdicting the presumed flow of arms to leftist guerrillas in neighboring El Salvador. Still others wanted to use the con¬ tras to overthrow the Sandinistas, and some in the Reagan administration seemed less interested in the contras as an instrument of undermining the legitimate authority of the ruling Sandinistas than as a means of satisfying the political pressure from the rightist elements of the Republican party. All of these factions at one time or another claimed to have the support of the president, who apparently could not say no to any proposal. Nonetheless, Reagan did not derail the efforts of Casey and his allies to proceed with fullscale arming of the contras. And the lack of general consensus provided ample opportunity for any highly organized faction to gain control of the policy. The pro-contra coalition cut across agency and department lines and included the president’s national security adviser, the ambassador to the United Nations, the attorney general, and the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. There was at the outset, however, no single unified Executive branch agency in charge of Central American policy. Because of Reagan’s political influence, in 1982 Congress endorsed a vaguely defined covert military option which included funds for the contras. In the period from 1981 to 1983 some Department of State officials pushed for some form of diplomatic solution with the Sandinistas. This corresponded to the standard definition of the diplomat’s function, to try to reconcile differ¬ ences and find a compromise instead of allowing issues to degenerate into con¬ flict. Their reluctance, therefore, to commit fully to supporting the contras excluded them from most of the key decisions on Nicaragua after 1984. Am¬ bassadors who questioned the contra policy such as John Ferch and Frank MacNeil were pressured to leave the Foreign Service.

242

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

Although the secretary of defense publicly backed the contra operation in its early stages, primarily to intercept arms headed for El Salvador, he chose not to contest the battle for control over the policy—even though it involved military commitments. By 1984, the secretaries of defense and state had taken themselves out of the game and conceded control of the policy to the CIA and the NSC staff. Players from the diplomatic side sympathetic to the contras, however, joined the contra coalition, despite the secretary of state’s decision to pull back. The U.S. ambassador in Honduras (John Negroponte), for example, became a co¬ ordinator of the covert operation against Nicaragua. The ambassador in Costa Rica (Lewis Tambs), a political appointee, was recruited by the NSC staff to help the contra cause. Both reported directly to the White House. In 1985, Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs Elliott Abrams became a vocif¬ erous advocate of the armed force option and a key figure in linking the dip¬ lomatic arm with the contra coalition. The pro-contra coalition in the Executive branch also had allies on Capitol Hill—in both parties—and thus were able to thwart efforts to derail their cam¬ paign to destroy the Sandinistas. And, most importantly, they were able to claim the legitimacy of presidential endorsement even though Reagan had not specif¬ ically chosen this option over the others. To appease Congress, the White House encouraged continuation of the negotiating track, although as Gutman (1988: 71-73) points out, there were no serious intentions actually to compromise with the Sandinistas. By 1985, the contra track had taken full control of the policy toward Nicaragua, but a critical ally was lost when Congress suspended funding of the contras. In seeking alternative means of keeping the money flowing, the coalition enlisted the help of the NSC staff (and in particular Lt. Col. Oliver North). In turn this led to the Iran-contra affair. It was also clear by 1985 that while the hard-liners had been winning the battles to support the contras, they were soon to lose the war over the ultimate direction of the policy. Once representing a broad base of allies, the contra faction quickly narrowed, devoting its entire efforts to arming the contras. Changes in personnel, declining presidential power, and a resurgent Congress eroded its previous invincibility. While continuing to dominate the policy de¬ bate, the hard-liners, running out of logistical support and ammunition, were soon forced to walk a very short plank. In bureaucratic terms, trying to conduct a covert war by relying on one agency, the CIA, backed up by a nonoperational, unorganized skeletal staff at the NSC and an isolated group of allies in State and Congress, was not a recipe for long-term success. In the end, the coalition was caught up in a series of politically unacceptable and illegal activities on behalf of a cause for which public and congressional support had dwindled, and they were left without any protective insulation or cushion, even from the Oval Office. Effective bureau¬ cratic bargaining and manipulation had put the hard-liners in charge of a policy that had lost its appeal and credibility.

Process and Explanation

243

The Iran-contra affair suggests a number of characteristics of U.S.-Latin American policymaking. The ultimate collapse of the policy of arming the con¬ tras is attributable to the deterioration of the coalition that had gained control of the policy. Its early success had been due to a number of politically important factors, such as a strong focus, key allies, and access to the president. Continued success was aided by its ability to control the flow of intelligence, neutralize unfavorable public and congressional opinion, and bypass formal channels of command. When a number of key allies left office, when the political clout of the president diminished, and when events in Nicaragua did not always corre¬ spond to their arguments, support eroded. It was the nature of the political struggle, rather than substantive debates, that determined the outcome of the policy process.

CONCLUSION

The academic literature that has focused on approaches to the process of making and implementing U.S. policy toward Latin America suggests a number of conclusions. First, there has been little attention paid to the general problem of the policy process in relation to Latin America. Where deliberate attempts have been made to articulate the determinants of policy, most have relied on broad systemic approaches such as dependency theory or variations of structural realism. As useful as these approaches may be in identifying the context of U.S. relations with the region, they do not shed much light on the process by which policies are drawn up and executed. The plethora of literature on the U.S. foreign policy process in general has typically not included illustrations from Latin American policy. The exceptions, of course, are the studies of the Cuban missile crisis, but those have been con¬ cerned with the response of Washington to Moscow rather than to Cuba and the Caribbean. In other words, there remains ample opportunity for scholars to explore the impact of the process in shaping U.S. policy specifically in Latin America. Clearly, a few works stand out as indicators of the potential for explaining policy by looking at both the political dynamics of the process and the influence of psychological factors. Schoultz (1981) demonstrated, for example, the po¬ tency of considering bureaucratic and interest group politics as determinants of U.S. policy on human rights. And those willing to tackle the growing body of documents on the 1980s struggle for control of policy on Nicaragua should be able to enrich the bureaucratic and institutional political explanations laid out in a preliminary fashion by Gutman (1988). For those convinced of the utility of psychological approaches, the ground¬ breaking works by Etheredge (1985) and Hybel (1990) illustrate how this kind of analytical framework used to study U.S. policy toward major powers can be employed for policy on Latin America. In sum, U.S. policy toward Latin America has too often been presented in

244

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

historical and descriptive terms without being subjected to the analyses typically used to explain the policymaking process toward other parts of the world. This is not to say that the process on Latin America will replicate the process, say, on Europe or Japan, but that a more systematic analysis should enable us to identify those variables that are both familiar to, and unique to, the Latin Amer¬ ican policy process.

NOTE 1. In this essay, I will generally rely on the terms “approaches” or “perspectives,” although the more formal ideas of “theories” and “models” have been used by other authors to explain foreign policy. A general survey is provided in Ferguson and Mansbach, The Elusive Quest (1988).

REFERENCES Allison, Graham. 1971. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bos¬ ton: Little, Brown. Armony, Ariel. 1993. “Argentina and the Origin of Nicaragua’s Contras.” Low Intensity Warfare & Law Enforcement 2 (Winter): 434-459. Art, Robert. 1973. “Bureaucratic Politics and American Foreign Policy: A Critique.” Policy Sciences (December): 467-490. Bemis, Samuel Flagg. 1943. The Latin American Policy of the United States. New York: 1 Harcourt, Brace. Bemays, Edward. 1965. Biography of an Idea. New York: Simon and Schuster. Carothers, Thomas. 1991. In the Name of Demcracy: U.S. Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chilcote, Ronald H., ed. 1982. Dependency and Marxism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Chilcote, Ronald H., and Joel C. Edelstein, eds. 1974. Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond. New York: Schenkman. Dahl, Robert. 1967. Pluralist Democracy in the United States. Chicago: Rand McNally. Desch, Michael C. 1993. When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dickey, Christopher. 1984. “Central America: From Quaqmire to Cauldron” In William P. Bundy, ed. America and the World, 1983. New York: Pergamon Press. Dominguez, Jorge I. 1978. “Consensus and Divergence: The State of the Literature on Inter-American Relations in the 1970s.” Latin American Research Review 13, no. 1: 87-126. dos Santos, Theotonio. 1970. “The Structure of Dependence.” American Economic Re¬ view 60 (May). Draper, Theodore. 1991. A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affair. New York: Hill and Wang. Etheredge, Lloyd S. 1985. Can Governments Learn? American Foreign Policy and Cen¬ tral American Revolutions. New York: Pergamon Press.

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Ferguson, Yale, and Richard Mansbach. 1988. The Elusive Quest: Theory and Interna¬ tional Politics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gedda, George. 1983. “A Dangerous Region: Association with Carter’s Central Amer¬ ican Policies Proved Hazardous to the Careers of Several FSOs.” The Foreign Service Journal (February): 18. Goochman, Charles, and James Lee Ray. 1979. “Structural Disparities in Latin America' and Eastern Europe.” Journal of Peace Research 16, no. 3: 231-254. Goshko, John M. 1987. “Clout and Morale Decline: Reaganites’ Raid on the Latin Bureau.” Washington Post (April 26): 1. Gutman, Roy. 1988. Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua, 1981-1987. New York: Simon and Schuster. Haig, Alexander. 1984. Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy. New York: Mac¬ millan. Halperin, Morton H. 1974. Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Hayes, Margaret Daly. 1984. Latin America and the U.S. National Interest. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Herring, George C. 1985. “Vietnam, El Salvador and the Uses of History.” In Kenneth M. Coleman and George C. Herring, eds. The Central American Crisis. Wil¬ mington, Del.: Scholarly Resources: 97-110. Holsti, Ole R., and James N. Rosenau. 1984. American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus. Boston: Allen & Unwin. Hybel, Alex R. 1990. How Leaders Reason: U.S. Intervention in the Caribbean Basin and Latin America. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell. Janis, Irving L. 1982. Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jervis, Robert. 1976. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. Kaufman, Edy. 1976. The Superpowers and Their Spheres of Influence. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kearns, Doris. 1976. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York: New Amer¬ ican Library. Keohane, Robert, ed. 1986. Neorealism and Its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press. Khong, Yuen Foong. 1992. Analogies at War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kissinger, Henry. 1979. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown. Krasner, Stephen. 1983. International Regimes. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Kombluh, Peter, and Malcolm Byrne, eds. 1993. The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declas¬ sified History. New York: The New Press. Lake, Anthony. 1989. Somoza Falling. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Lowenthal, Abraham F., ed. 1991. Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America. 2 Vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. -. 1974. “ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Radical,’ and ‘Bureaucratic’ Perspectives on U.S. Latin American Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Retrospect.” In Julio Cotier and Richard R. Fagen, eds. Latin America and the United States: The Changing Po¬ litical Realities. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press: 212-235. May, Ernest R. 1974. “The Bureaucratic Politics’ Approach: U.S.-Argentine Relations,

246

Who Makes Latin American Policy? 1942-47.” In Julio Cotier and Richard R. Fagen, eds. Latin America and the

United States: The Changing Political Realities. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni¬ versity Press: 129-163. Mayer, Jane and Doyle McManus. 1988. Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Mecham, J. Lloyd. 1965. A Survey of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Melanson, Richard A. 1991. Reconstructing Consensus: American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Molineu, Harold. 1980. ‘‘Carter and Human Rights: Administrative Impact of a Symbolic Policy.” Policy Studies Journal 8 (Summer): 879-884. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. 1986. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers. New York: The Free Press. Payne, Richard J. 1988. Opportunities and Dangers of Soviet-Cuban Expansion. Albany: State University of New York Press. Petras, James, and Morris Morley. 1990. U.S. Hegemony under Siege: Class, Politics and Development in Latin America. New York: Verso. Poitras, Guy. 1990. The Ordeal of Hegemony: The United States and Latin America. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Reagan, Ronald. 1983. ‘‘Central America: Defending Our Vital Interests.” Current Pol¬ icy, No. 42 (April 27). Rosati, Jeral A. 1993. The Politics of United States Foreign Policy. Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. 1982. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Schoultz, Lars. 1987. National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. -. 1981. Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Shannon, Thomas R. 1989. An Introduction to the World-System Perspective. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Slater, Jerome. 1987. “Dominos in Central America: Will They Fall? Does It Matter?” International Security 12 (Fall): 105-134. Thompson, William, ed. 1983. Contending Approaches to World-System Analysis. Bev¬ erly Hills, Calif.: Sage. Triska, Jan F. 1986. Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. United States Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence Activities. 1975. Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973. Staff Report, 94th Congress, First Session. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Vasquez, John A. 1983. The Power of Power Politics. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1984. The Politics of the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waltz, Kenneth N. 1979. The Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw Hill. Wiarda, Howard J. 1987. Finding Our Way? Toward Maturity in U.S.-Latin American

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Relations. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Re¬ search (AEI). Woodward, Bob. 1987. Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. New York: Simon and Schuster.

The Presidency Stephen G. Rabe

Does the president make the Latin American policy of the United States? Is policy what the president says it is? Does the nation’s Latin American policy change from president to president? Do Democratic presidents approach interAmerican relations differently than do Republican presidents? Or, when it comes to Latin America, is the president merely one of many decision makers, sharing power with the State and Defense departments, the Central Intelligence Agency, Congress, research institutions, and various interest groups? Perhaps presidents exercise their authority on some inter-American issues and ignore others. What powers does the president have to make Latin American policy? Questions such as these are usually implicit in the vast body of scholarly literature on U.S. relations with Latin America. But inter-Americanists rarely make the decision-making process the focus of their studies. Instead, they an¬ alyze the nature of U.S. policies and the impact of those policies on Latin America’s development. Throughout the twentieth century, the United States has wielded predominant power in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. marines have occupied Caribbean nations, and Washington has covertly destabilized South American governments. Scholars have been naturally concerned with the actual use of such power. But how a decision is made and who makes that decision are undoubtedly critical areas of inquiry. The formulation and execution of a policy inevitably affect its nature and consequences. Presumably a presidential decree, whose implementation was closely monitored from the Oval Office, would carry greater significance than a decision made by a Foreign Service officer in the Latin American bureau of the State Department. Such presumptions, however, have not been systematically examined. The question of the president’s role in the making of the Latin American policy of the United States will be pursued by first enumerating what are the broad sources of presidential power in making U.S. foreign policy toward Latin

The Presidency

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America. Thereafter, the chapter will focus on how scholars have depicted pres¬ idents exercising those formal and informal powers. It will analyze general in¬ terpretations and surveys of inter-American relations. Although decision-making issues are often not explicitly addressed in surveys, these surveys do offer in¬ sights into the question of who is responsible for Latin American policy. This analysis will then test those insights and assumptions by reviewing case studies' of presidential administrations during the Cold War, from Harry S. Truman to George Bush. It will conclude by speculating on what role the president might play in Latin American policymaking in the 1990s. This review of presidential administrations will focus on scholarly monographs published in the past two decades and on relevant memoirs, first-person accounts, and official studies.

PRESIDENTIAL POWERS AND LATIN AMERICAN POLICY

The two fundamental sources of presidential power in making U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America are those conferred by or implied in the Consti¬ tution and the informal powers that have emerged from precedent or historical necessity. Levy and Fisher, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Presidency (1994), is an extremely valuable four-volume work devoted to every feature of the U.S. presidency, including numerous entries on presidential powers and Latin American policy. Congressional Quarterly’s Powers of the Presidency (1989) describes the formal and inherent powers of the presidency: chief ex¬ ecutive, legislative leader, chief diplomat, commander-in-chief, chief of state, chief of party, and chief economist. Wiarda, in Foreign Policy Without Illusion (1990), examines the powers and training of presidents in dealing with contem¬ porary foreign policy issues.

Formal Presidential Powers

Commander-in-Chief The constitutional meaning of the power to wage war has long been in dispute, but most presidents have interpreted it quite widely. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, designed to ensure that Congress would play a role in the decision to send the military into combat, has not worked as envisioned, because presidents have refused to limit their freedom of action, and none has conceded its constitutionality. Katzmann, “War Powers: Toward a New Accommodation’’ (1990: 20), maintains, “The War Powers Resolution has proven unworkable because it fails to accommodate presidential and congres¬ sional interests in war-making.” Hargrove, The Power of the Modem Presidency (1974), claims that the Amer¬ ican founding fathers were clear in their debates about war-making powers— the president has no right to start a war. According to Hargrove (1974: 171), “There was no mention of any implicit prerogative of presidential power to order troops into combat without the assent of Congress.” Nonetheless, during the Cold War, presidents asserted such a prerogative when introducing U.S.

250

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

combat troops to Latin America and the Caribbean. Presidents rely on the commander-in-chief power to determine which military strategy is applicable, when to deploy troops to protect U.S. interests, and how and when conflicts involving the United States in foreign lands should be resolved, and to plan and implement covert actions. In the role as head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president has broad powers to conduct secret intelligence operations. Covert actions grew out of the National Security Act of 1947, which created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC). Although presidents saw covert action as a legitimate instrument of foreign policy, Congress grew less trusting of foreign policies that involved assassina¬ tion conspiracies, “destabilization” of allegedly untrustworthy democratic gov¬ ernments, and support of surrogate military forces to overthrow revolutionary governments. In response to the findings of a U.S. Senate Select Committee, the Church Committee, in 1975-1976, Congress responded with the HughesRyan Amendment, which altered the approval process for covert actions. Con¬ gress now required that the president approve all covert actions as important to the national security, notify the Intelligence Committees of each house of Con¬ gress, and produce a Presidential Finding as a precondition for all covert op¬ erations. The legal and historical aspects of a Presidential Finding can be found in Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair with Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views (1987: 375-381). Despite this law, presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, have apparently used Findings to circumvent legal requirements in the conduct of foreign policy and authorized covert actions without a Presidential Finding. Treaty Making. A second formal constitutional power of the president is the power to make treaties “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” It is unclear whether the president is supposed to seek advice and consent before or after a treaty is negotiated and signed or during the process of making a treaty. Crabb and Holt, Invitation to Struggle (1989), examine the president’s treaty-making power and argue that the president retains the initiative throughout the entire decision¬ making process. Executive Agreements. The president has the power to sign executive agree¬ ments—written or oral—with other nations which do not require Senate ap¬ proval. An executive agreement is an understanding between heads of state or persons under their authority. Crabb and Holt (1989) point out that presidents prefer executive agreements, because they involve fewer political and legal squabbles than treaties. Foreign Policy Appointments. The president has the power to appoint the secretaries of state and defense, the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, the director of the CIA, the director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), and all ambassadors, including the U.S. ambassadors to the Organiza¬ tion of American States and the United Nations. Members of the NSC (including the director) and members of the White House staff do not, however, require

The Presidency

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Senate approval. Presidents have traditionally received routine Senate approval of their nominees, although, in the latter part of the Cold War and in the 1990s, individual senators have delayed appointments for political or ideological rea¬ sons. (See Appendix A, “Presidential Letter to Chiefs of Mission,” for an ex¬ ample of policy instructions and lines of authority between the president and his ambassadorial representatives abroad.) ' Power of Recognition. The president has the authority to grant, withhold, or withdraw formal recognition of foreign states. Throughout the twentieth century, presidents, by using this power, have tried to shape the internal nature of Latin American governments. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson refused to recog¬ nize the usurper government of Victoriano Huerta of Mexico, and, in early 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower withdrew formal recognition of Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba. In the 1990s, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton withheld recognition of the military government in Haiti and continued to rec¬ ognize the elected government of the Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide, even though he was living in exile in the United States. Whether the recognition power is an effective tool of the president in coercing a Latin American country to accede to U.S. wishes is a matter of scholarly debate, as Wiarda (1990: 298) demonstrates.

Informal Presidential Powers

In addition to constitutional powers, the chief executive also possesses im¬ portant informal and extraconstitutional powers or techniques in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. Crabb and Holt (1989: 18-22) provide a brief treatment of these “informal techniques” used by presidents. Inherent Powers. Because the president is head of state, he is the individual with the most responsibility for foreign affairs. In the United States v. CurtisWright, the Supreme Court affirmed the president’s powers as “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” But some scholars believe that the president’s ability to exercise power over foreign affairs has diminished. Jentleson, “American Diplomacy” (1990: 146), argues that ‘ ‘American diplomacy has come to involve relations within government almost as much as relations between governments.” To underscore this point, scholars might point to the struggle in the 1980s between the Executive and legislative branches of government over aid to the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, or contras, who opposed the Sandinista government. Members of Congress jour¬ neyed on their own peace missions to Central America, without the approval of President Reagan. And Congress through the Boland Amendments forbade mil¬ itary aid to the contras. Despite these congressional prohibitions, the Reagan administration managed to sustain its war against the Sandinistas. Information. Presidents have unequaled access to information required to con¬ duct foreign relations and are often able to withhold this information from Con¬ gress and the public under the doctrine of executive privilege. The White House

252

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

receives information from executive departments and agencies, U.S. embassies, the intelligence community, and foreign governments. Crabb and Holt (1989: 19) argue, “The scope and nature of the information at the president’s disposal about events and tendencies abroad are among his most influential resources for affecting the course of American diplomacy.” Budgetary Prerogatives. As chief economist, the president has the ability to present recommendations for expenditures in the sphere of foreign affairs. Con¬ gress may alter the budgetary wishes of the president, but the president still possesses wide discretion in the administration of funds. For example, in 1983 the Reagan administration circumvented congressional opposition to expanded economic and military aid to El Salvador by simply shifting funds from one program to another. Rhetorical Skills. The power of persuasion can be a useful addition to the president’s constitutional prerogatives in exercising control over foreign affairs. In Going Public (1986: 148), Kemell argues that a new style of presidential leadership has emerged in the past fifty years that requires presidents to mobilize public opinion in order to retain governing legitimacy. President Franklin Roo¬ sevelt with his “fireside chats” and President John Kennedy with the televised news conference demonstrated how presidents might employ rhetorical skills to help master government and build a public consensus for their foreign policies. News Manager. Presidents regularly use television, radio, magazines, and newspapers to achieve their foreign policy objectives. The president has little difficulty getting the extensive coverage by the news media coveted by other policymakers in Washington. In fact, during the Cold War, presidents were frequently accused of managing, even controlling, the news media. The White House Office of Communications is one of the key instruments that presidents use to ensure that the administration’s position on a foreign policy issue receives the proper attention from the media, the public, and key interest groups. During the Cold War, presidents, with their ability to dominate the news, could auto¬ matically count on majority support from the public once a foreign policy de¬ cision was made, whether to invade a Caribbean nation or to conduct economic warfare against a hemispheric neighbor. As this brief review demonstrates, the president’s constitutional and custom¬ ary power to make foreign policy is impressive. To be sure, other governmental officials and agencies and private institutions and groups may challenge the president’s authority. In A Question of Balance (1990: 16), Mann argues that the dominant position of the Executive branch of government has been eroded by a foreign policymaking process that has become more open, ideological, and international. The president increasingly must compete with Congress and do¬ mestic interest groups and international organizations, like the United Nations and the Organization of American States, to control foreign policy. Rose, in The Postmodern President (1988), agrees, noting that growing international inter¬ dependence requires that U.S. presidents be able to manipulate both domestic and international centers of power. The president’s job may have indeed become

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more demanding, but few scholars profess that any public or private group can match the president’s power. Crabb and Holt (1989: 1-2) express the views of most historians, international relations experts, and political scientists when they conclude that “although recent years have witnessed a new congressional mil¬ itancy in foreign relations, the fact remains that the president is still in charge of American foreign policy.” What this chapter now examines is whether and how presidents have actually exercised that power to make the Latin American policy of the United States during the Cold War.

GENERAL SURVEYS AND INTERPRETATIONS

Scholars who have surveyed inter-American relations in the twentieth century agree that the United States has had constant interests and pursued consistent goals in the hemisphere. Although they never categorically state that it does not matter who is president or who actually decides policy, these authors seem to imply that the nation’s interests transcend party and personality. They associate individual presidents with specific initiatives—the Roosevelt Corollary of Theo¬ dore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, the Alliance for Progress of John F. Kennedy. And their chapters bear such titles as “Theodore Roosevelt and the Big Stick.” But they emphasize that specific initiatives have not altered the essential character of U.S. policy in Latin America. Scholars differ, however, over what exactly characterizes twentieth-century U.S. policies. In both his Latin American-United States Relations (1971) and his essay, “The Kennedy-Johnson Years” (1988), Gil asserts that the United States has constantly pursued two objectives in Latin America. The first has been to exclude from the hemisphere extracontinental powers; the second has been “to secure the dominant politico-economic presence of the United States in the region.” Atkins, in Latin America in the International Political System (1989), agrees that the essential U.S. concerns have been to minimize foreign intrusions and promote stability in Latin America in order to achieve vital stra¬ tegic, political, economic, military, and ideological goals. Interest in Latin Amer¬ ica may oscillate from presidential administration to presidential administration, as Perez has shown in his essay “International Dimensions of Inter-American Relations” (1973). But Gil and Atkins reiterate that the United States has con¬ stantly sought stable regimes in Latin America capable of safeguarding U.S. interests. In his The United States and Latin America (1974), Connell-Smith supports Gil’s argument that the United States has exercised hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Foreign policymakers accept the need to preserve U.S. security, and they share a faith in the virtues of international capitalism. In ConnellSmith’s view, the president makes Latin American policy, and the president’s ability to make policy has increased throughout the twentieth century. He implies that a systematic examination of the decision-making process would be unen¬ lightening, for foreign policy elites agree on broad objectives. To be sure, Con-

254

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

gress, responding to constituent pressure, might restrict free trade, and bureaucratic agencies and interest groups might “tug and pull” at policy, pro¬ ducing the appearance of incoherence. But such confusion would be over tactics, not strategies. During the Cold War, the predominant concern among influential foreign policy actors was to exclude communism from the region. Other surveys have been less critical of U.S. policies. Adopting a “realist” perspective, Mecham, in his A Survey of United States-Latin American Relations (1965), defends the repeated interventions in Caribbean nations as defensive moves designed to protect the region from European imperialism. U.S. policy has not varied but rather has reflected the “vital necessities of national security.” In his classic study. The Latin American Policy of the United States (1943: ixx, 386), Bemis also wrote sympathetically about “benevolent imperialism” or “imperialism against imperialism” and the understandable U.S. desire for na¬ tional security. But once the United States secured the hemisphere from outside aggression, the natural “idealism of the American people came to the fore as a controlling influence on policy.” In a new survey, America and the Americas (1989: xvii), Langley also holds that idealism has been the essential feature of inter-American relations. Western Hemisphere nations have been committed to republicanism and independence, and ‘ ‘America’ ’ has served as a metaphor for an enduring faith in human betterment and community. Political scientists who have recently surveyed U.S. policies in Latin America have also not dissected the decision-making process. In U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (1990), Molineu does not dwell on decision making, choosing instead to develop various interpretive models to explain U.S. policies. Kryzanek, in U.S.-Latin American Relations (1990: 99-100), observes that policy making has become more specialized as the functions of foreign policy—nar¬ cotics control, immigration, fishing regulation, cultural exchanges—have prolif¬ erated. And Congress has increasingly tried to exert its authority in foreign affairs. But the president remains “the dominant force” in foreign policy; he has, for example, been able to intervene in Latin America without congressional approval or popular support. Kryzanek does not, however, test his analytic framework by methodically examining the decision-making process of a presi¬ dential administration. For a brief period, during the 1970s, inter-Americanists focused on decision making as they became infatuated with the “bureaucratic politics” model. As developed by Allison in The Essence of Decision (1971), the bureaucratic pol¬ itics approach treats U.S. policy not as the choice of a single, rational actor, such as a president, but rather as a series of bargaining processes between gov¬ ernmental agencies, such as the National Security Council (NSC), State De¬ partment, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and special interest groups, for example, multinational corporations. The Alliance for Progress, as outlined in President John F. Kennedy’s March 13, 1961, speech, and the twelve-point program of the Charter of Punta del Este seemed to be a coherent, well-defined program for democracy and socioeconomic reform. In practice, however, the

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United States inconsistently applied democratic standards to the region, fre¬ quently overlooking extraconstitutional changes of government. U.S. policy seemed contradictory and fragmented because, as Lowenthal, in “ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Radical,’ and ‘Bureaucratic’ Perspectives on U.S. Latin American Policy” (1974), and May, in ‘‘The Bureaucratic Politics Approach” (1974), point out, power in the modern bureaucratic state is dispersed among numerous agencies and individual decision makers. The Department of Defense, for example, saw security advantages in military rule in Latin America. As such, scholars would have to analyze not only what the president intended but also how bureaucratic agencies and powerful individuals modified, shaped, and circumvented the pres¬ ident’s orders. Other scholars reacted swiftly and skeptically to the bureaucratic politics model. For example, O’Donnell, “Commentary on May” (1974), responded that bureaucratic struggles reflected debates about means, not ends. Foreign policy elites shared the dominant goal of preserving U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, that critique has gained wide acceptance among scholars. Reviewing the history of the bureaucratic politics model, political scientist Clif¬ ford, in “Bureaucratic Politics” (1991: 149), freely admits that intragovernmental disputes may involve tactics more than core elite values. Clifford accordingly makes only a “modest plea” for attention to bureaucratic politics. With the demise of the bureaucratic politics model, students of U.S. relations with Latin America have returned to their traditional task of defining the essen¬ tial characteristics of policy. The field has been recently surveyed in three his¬ toriographic essays by Rabe in “Marching Ahead (Slowly)” (1989b), Gilderhus in “An Emerging Synthesis?” (1992), and Walker in “The Future of InterAmerican Relations” (1992). These essayists find that in recent times the issues of power and purpose have weighed heavily upon the study of U.S. relations with Latin America during the Cold War. Frequently taking a critical stance, scholars analyze questions of economic development, political reform, and rev¬ olution in Latin America; the response of the United States to events in Latin America; and the connections between U.S. actions and the Cold War. In pursuing such questions, they have conducted multiarchival research and at¬ tempted to place inter-American relations within an international context. But historians have not explicitly addressed questions about decision making. As Gilderhus observes, the bureaucratic perspective and by implication other de¬ cision-making models have had only selective impact on contemporary schol¬ arship. To examine the role of the president in the making of the Latin American policy of the United States, it is necessary to tease that issue out of the mono¬ graphic literature.

HARRY S. TRUMAN (1945-1953)

Compared to other eras, during the presidency of Harry S. Truman interAmerican relations seem uneventful and unexciting. President Truman did not

256

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

announce any new bold initiatives such as an Alliance for Progress or despatch U.S. Marines to quell disturbances in Caribbean nations in the manner of a Theodore Roosevelt or a Woodrow Wilson. And when his administration had problems with Latin American governments, he apparently did not resort, as his successors did, to ordering the CIA to destabilize those governments. This sense of calm, even neglect, toward Latin America is reinforced by the memoirs of both President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1949-1953). In his two-volume Memoirs (1955-1956), Truman barely mentions Latin America. In Present at the Creation (1969: 257-258), Acheson characterizes his Latin American policy as “nothing new.” Indeed, Acheson conveys his indifference to inter-American affairs with the condescending observation that “HispanoIndian culture—or lack of it—had been piling up its problems for centuries.” Despite this stated official indifference, scholars believe that the Truman ad¬ ministration pursued a coherent Latin American policy. As outlined by Haines in The Americanization of Brazil (1989), the administration worked to preserve and expand U.S. influence in the region. In particular, the United States wanted to exclude communist influence from the hemisphere and promote free trade and investment principles so that Latin America would continue to be a source of raw materials and foodstuffs and a market for U.S. industrial wares and finished goods. Other historians, such as Bethell and Roxborough in “Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War” (1988), Green in The Containment of Latin America (1971), Trask in “The Impact of the Cold War on United States Latin American Relations, 1945-1949” (1977), and Rabe in his two essays, “Inter-American Military Cooperation, 1944-1951” (1974) and “The Elusive Conference” (1978), accept Haines’s analysis. But they add that the Cold War increasingly intruded upon policymaking. The administration created a military alliance with Latin America, the Rio Treaty of 1947, and began to provide military assistance to all Latin American governments, whether they be democracies or dictatorships. The administration also stopped protesting when popularly elected governments were overthrown by military men, probably reasoning that conservative, authoritarian governments would be especially vig¬ ilant against communism. Nonetheless, the Truman administration felt relatively secure about Latin America during the early years of the Cold War. Latin Amer¬ ica remained the only major area of the world that did not receive U.S. economic assistance. What part President Truman specifically played in developing these policies is unclear, for no scholar has systematically examined the question of Truman and Latin America. The common wisdom is that Truman was a strong and decisive leader who was instrumental in developing such Cold War initiatives as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the North Atlantic Treaty Or¬ ganization (NATO). Anyone interested in examining Truman and his foreign policy should begin by consulting Leffler’s monumental study, A Preponderance of Power (1992). But Truman the decision maker is conspicuously absent from the aforementioned books and articles on inter-American relations, 1945-1953.

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The State Department, particularly Assistant Secretary of State for Latin Amer¬ ica Edward G. Miller, Jr., seems to have been the most influential voice in the making of Latin American policy during the Truman years. President Truman did, however, make a critical decision on a divisive issue— U.S. relations with Argentina’s Juan Peron. From 1942 on, the State Department had feuded with Argentina over Argentina’s unwillingness to declare war against ' the Axis powers and its alleged fascist sympathies. This continued in the im¬ mediate postwar period with Spruille Braden, the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires, noisily denouncing Colonel Peron, the new Argentine strongman, as an erstwhile sympathizer of Nazi Germany. The dispute is analyzed in the May essay (1974) and Woods’s The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the “Good Neighbor’’ (1979), two studies based on the bureaucratic politics model. The confrontation ended, as Wood details in his The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (1985), when in 1947 Truman dismissed Braden and proceeded to normalize relations with Peron’s Argentina. Truman decided that continental solidarity and the Rio Treaty were more important than Peron’s past sympathies. An analysis of the Argentine imbroglio reveals that, when a Cold War issue was at stake in inter-American relations, President Truman became directly involved in policymaking.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1953-1961)

During the 1980s, historians and political scientists studied extensively the leadership abilities and decision-making skills of President Dwight D. Eisen¬ hower. Divine in Eisenhower and the Cold War (1981), Greenstein in The Hid¬ den-Hand Presidency (1982), and Ambrose in Eisenhower (1984) helped define the historiographical movement that has become known as “Eisenhower revi¬ sionism.” These respected scholars challenged the traditional view of Eisen¬ hower as a genial but bewildered chief executive who left the conduct of foreign policy to his strident, fanatical secretary of state, John Foster Dulles (1953— 1959). Eisenhower revisionists hold that Eisenhower approached the presidency in a thoughtful and systematic way. He had developed during his military career superb management skills and a knowledge of international affairs, and he used those assets to master the presidency and dominate the policymaking process. Eisenhower’s leadership was particularly apparent during foreign policy crises, such as those of Dien Bien Phu (1954) and Suez (1956), when he astutely steered the nation away from potential disasters. On the basis of the archival record, scholars now readily accept the argument that Eisenhower retained control of foreign policy decision making. But some still question the wisdom of those decisions, arguing that Eisenhower pursued a narrowly anticommunist foreign policy. These scholarly debates can be sampled in Rabe’s review essay, “Ei¬ senhower Revisionism” (1993). As for Latin America, historians have usually depicted the Eisenhower ad¬ ministration as maintaining the policies of its predecessor. Historians frequently

258

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

lump the period from 1945 to 1960 together, as Baily does in The United States and the Development of South America, 1945-1975 (1976). The administration tried to build a secure and stable hemisphere by promoting anticommunism and international capitalism in the region. It maintained the military aid program and continued to deny economic assistance to Latin America. What perhaps distin¬ guished the Eisenhower administration’s approach from the Truman administra¬ tion’s was that it displayed few qualms about working with anticommunist dictators. Indeed, the administration openly embraced such tyrants as Fulgencio Batista of Cuba and Marcos Perez Jimenez of Venezuela. President Eisenhower sanctioned these policies. Accepting the thesis of revisionists that Eisenhower was an active and well-informed leader, Rabe in Eisenhower and Latin America (1988) demonstrates that the president frequently reviewed the administration’s Latin American policy at lengthy NSC meetings. Eisenhower also directed U.S. covert activities in Latin America. Historians such as Cook in The Declassified Eisenhower (1981), Gleijeses in Shattered Hope (1991), Schlesinger and Kinzer in Bitter Fruit (1982), and, most notably, Immerman in The CIA and Guatemala (1982) have outlined how the adminis¬ tration in 1954 helped destroy the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala. The administration judged the Guatemalan to be either a communist or blind to the communist conspiracy. Eisenhower personally directed the CIA-sponsored exile invasion of Guatemala and kept full knowledge of the plot confined to a few trusted aides. In March 1960, Eisenhower also authorized, as Higgins shows in The Perfect Failure (1987), the CIA to organize an exile invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Eisenhower further urged President¬ elect John F. Kennedy to support the invasion project that culminated in the Bay of Pigs debacle in early 1961. A good review of Eisenhower’s reaction to Castro can be found in Welch’s Response to Revolution (1985). What remains unclear, however, is what role Eisenhower and his successor played in assassination plots involving Latin American leaders. A select U.S. Senate Committee issued a report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (1975), that revealed that the CIA had launched attacks against Castro and Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. The committee could not determine definitively whether Eisenhower or Kennedy authorized or knew of assassination efforts, although individual committee members, such as Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, believed that the presidents indirectly ap¬ proved the plots. Nonetheless, what declassified papers prove is that President Eisenhower took extraordinary steps to wage Cold War in Latin America.

JOHN F. KENNEDY (1961-1963)

In a stirring speech on March 13, 1961, President Kennedy initiated the Al¬ liance for Progress, a U.S. commitment in the 1960s to a long-term economic assistance program to facilitate economic growth, social modernization, and po¬ litical democratization in Latin America. Alarmed by Castro’s rise to power.

The Presidency

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Kennedy and his advisers believed they needed to counter the Cuban’s revolu¬ tionary appeal with a program of progressive, evolutionary change. The United States subsequently pledged that Latin America would receive during the decade over $20 billion in public and private capital from the United States and inter¬ national lending agencies. U.S. officials predicted that this new money, when combined with domestic investment, would produce a real economic growth ' rate of not less than 2.5 percent a year. The Alliance for Progress helped generate the promised $20 billion in outside capital. But the program failed to transform Latin America. Latin American econ¬ omies performed poorly in the 1960s, and imperceptible progress was made in health, education, and welfare. And Latin American societies remained grossly in¬ equitable and undemocratic. A scholarly consensus has not been reached on why the Alliance failed. A critical analysis is Levinson and Onfs’s The Alliance That Lost Its Way (1970). More sanguine about the Alliance’s achievements is The Al¬ liance for Progress (1988), edited by Scheman. President Kennedy maintained interest in the program that he launched. He frequently spoke about the Alliance; kept in close contact with Alliance officials such as Richard Goodwin and Teodoro Moscoso; and constantly prodded bu¬ reaucratic agencies to accelerate aid to Latin America. He also personally iden¬ tified with constitutional governments, making goodwill trips to Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, and Costa Rica. Indeed, as presented in Schlesinger’s loving tribute, A Thousand Days (1965), John F. Kennedy was the Alliance for Pro¬ gress. When the president died in Dallas, Texas, so did the U.S. commitment to socioeconomic change within a democratic framework. President Kennedy was also determined to defeat Castro-style guerrilla move¬ ments in Latin America. He approved approximately $77 million a year in mil¬ itary aid to Latin America, a 50 percent increase over the average annual aid given in the 1950s. In addition, in a series of national security action memo¬ randa, the president ordered subordinates to develop new courses on riot control, psychological warfare, and counterguerrilla operations at military schools in the United States and Panama; to establish an inter-American police academy to train Latin Americans in mob control and counterinsurgency; and to fund civic action programs in which Latin American military units would contribute to the economic infrastructure by building roads and bridges. As both Tulchin, in his article “The United States and Latin America in the 1960s” (1988), and Rabe in his essay “Controlling Revolutions” (1989a), reveal, Kennedy insisted that this feature of his Latin American policy be given the highest priority. Both authors also argue that this emphasis on counterinsurgency and military aid demonstrably bolstered regimes that were undemocratic, conservative, and fre¬ quently repressive, thereby undermining the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy was also engaged in inter-American affairs. But he was obsessed with Cuba. During the 1960 presidential campaign, he relentlessly attacked Ei¬ senhower and Vice President Richard M. Nixon for permitting Cuba to become a communist outpost in the Western Hemisphere. Kennedy strongly implied that

260

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

he would combat Castroism vigorously. During his presidency, he kept his cam¬ paign pledge. Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs operation and Operation Mongoose, a massive terrorist and sabotage campaign against Cuba. He perhaps also knew that the CIA continued to hatch assassination plots against the Cuban. The president pressured Latin American leaders to break with Castro. And, in October 1962, he confronted the Soviet Union over its missiles in Cuba. In the history of twentieth-century inter-American relations, it would be difficult to cite another example of when a president was more intimately involved in the con¬ duct of relations with an individual Latin American country than John Kennedy was with Cuba. As Richard Helms of the CIA observed, “My God these Kennedys keep the pressure on about Castro.” This history can be analyzed in Paterson’s essay “Fixation with Cuba” (1989: 123) and Hershberg’s review of newly declassified documents on U.S.-Cuban relations “Before ‘The Missiles of October’ ” (1990). An important documentary source that analyzes the de¬ cisions that led to the Bay of Pigs is Operation ZAPATA (1981).

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON (1963-1969)

President Lyndon Baines Johnson presumably gave short shrift to relations with Latin America. He intended to focus on his domestic reform agenda, the Great Society. His presidency was consumed, however, by the Vietnam War. Hard pressed for both time and money, Johnson, at least as Kennedy partisans such as Schlesinger (1965) allege, gutted the Alliance for Progress. Johnson inadvertently confirms that view in his memoirs. The Vantage Point (1971), for he infrequently mentions Latin America, other than to defend the U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. But this interpretation of John¬ son may change. His records at the Johnson Library, which in the early 1990s have begun to be declassified, suggest that Johnson was keenly interested in Latin America. Indeed, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who served under both Kennedy and Johnson, pointedly notes in his memoirs, As I Saw It (1990), that Johnson did not dramatically alter Kennedy’s Latin American policy. Johnson’s admirers also remind us that economic assistance to Latin America actually rose during the Johnson years and that Latin American nations enjoyed their best economic performance of the decade in 1968. Many of these issues can be examined in LaFeber’s historiographic article on Johnson and Latin America “Latin American Policy” (1981). Johnson turned to Latin American affairs within a month after becoming president. He dismissed the Kennedy people responsible for Latin America in the State Department and the Agency for International Development (AID) and named the veteran Foreign Service officer and fellow Texan Thomas Mann as both assistant secretary of state for Latin America and coordinator of the Alli¬ ance for Progress. As vice president, Johnson had complained that the Alliance was plagued by bureaucratic overlap and delay, and he wanted to signal to government officials that Mann would be “Mr. Latin America.” In 1964, Mann

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earned notoriety when he declared, in his so-called Mann Doctrine, that the United States would work with all noncommunist governments, including au¬ thoritarian ones, in the region. By seemingly renouncing a fundamental premise of the Alliance for Progress, Mann, and by implication Johnson, had, as Gil (1988) sees it, made a radical break with Kennedy’s policies. But in his essay (1989b), Rabe responds that Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary Edward Martin, with ' Kennedy’s approval, had made, in 1963, a speech on recognition policy that was remarkably similar to Mann’s and that Kennedy had worked with nondemocratic governments in Latin America. Whatever the outcome of the change/continuity debate, Lyndon Johnson left his mark on Latin American policy. As a Texas politician, he fancied himself an expert on Mexico and, as president, he successfully resolved festering land and water disputes along the Rio Grande border. Johnson’s Mexican policy can be surveyed in Niemeyer’s article “Personal Diplomacy” (1986). Johnson also initiated the process that would lead to the Panama Canal Treaties of 1978. In early 1964, an ugly riot broke out in the Canal Zone over a flag raising incident. When calm returned, Johnson committed the United States to negotiate an end to the U.S. claim of sovereignty over the canal. Johnson deflected domestic criticism by astutely garnering the support of former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. LaFeber analyzes Johnson’s efforts in The Panama Canal (1990). Like other postwar presidential administrations, the Johnson administration fought the Cold War in Latin America. Parker in The Quiet Intervention (1979) and Leacock in Requiem for Revolution (1990) have outlined how the United States in 1963-1964 encouraged the Brazilian military to overthrow the consti¬ tutional president, Joao Goulart. As in the case of Guatemala’s Arbenz, U.S. officials judged Goulart either a secret communist or one who was willfully blind to the communist conspiracy. As a tangible sign of support, the Johnson administration prepositioned petroleum, oil, and lubricant supplies and military hardware for possible use by the military conspirators. The Brazilian generals quickly executed the coup and did not require U.S. aid. President Johnson rec¬ ognized the new government within hours after Goulart’s ouster. Because the documentary record remains incomplete, it cannot be determined whether Pres¬ ident Johnson took as active a role in directing the covert campaign as Eisen¬ hower did with Guatemala and Kennedy with Cuba. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon and Vernon Walters, a military attache, seem to have been the ones most intimately involved with the Brazilians. Shortly before the April coup, Gordon met with Johnson in Washington. In an article, “U.S.-Brazilian Re¬ prise” (1990), Gordon denies the United States conspired against Goulart. But in an important new study. Cold Warriors and Coups d’Etat (1993), Weis sub¬ stantially supports the findings of Parker and Leacock. In April/May 1965 over twenty thousand U.S. troops landed in the Dominican Republic. President Johnson pronounced his “Johnson Doctrine” explaining, ‘ ‘The American nations cannot, must not, and will not permit the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.” Although the

262

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

Dominican intervention was a critical Cold War event in the Johnson presidency, it has not yet received a full scholarly examination based on documentary sources. In the 1970s, Slater, Intervention and Negotiation (1970); Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (1972: 150); and Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis (1978) produced useful studies. The three authors built their work primarily on interviews with key participants, with some privileged access to classified doc¬ uments. But these studies, especially the Slater and Lowenthal books, have a journalistic quality, for the condition imposed on the authors for the privileged access was that the information obtained not be attributed. What emerges from these volumes is that President Johnson seems to have been at the mercy of his advisers. Using the bureaucratic politics approach, Lowenthal even suggests, “One cannot even say without qualification that the Dominican intervention reflected a presidential choice to use military force, for the Dominican case exemplifies the fact that ‘the ultimate decision’ may be largely determined by the time it reaches the president’s desk.” But archival material presently being declassified at the Johnson Library and the State Department records on the intervention, which are scheduled for declassification in 1997, may affect that judgment. The president seems to have been extraordinarily active and well informed. As Secretary Rusk has observed in his Oral History (1969: 15-26) on deposit at the Johnson Library, Johnson served as the “desk officer” for the Dominican Republic in 1965.

RICHARD M. NIXON (1969-1974) AND GERALD R. FORD (1974-1977)

At present (1995), assessments of the role of the president in the making of Latin American policy become speculative for the post-Johnson period. Foreign policy documents are not normally declassified until they are at least thirty years old. Scholars are forced to rely on memoirs, congressional testimony, press releases, and interviews for their raw material. This type of evidence can prove to be inaccurate and misleading. But this will only become evident when schol¬ ars have the opportunity to compare the public record with the archival one. A scholar can puckishly hope, however, for a constitutional crisis like Watergate or Iran-contra. In the aftermath of such scandals, Congress will launch extensive investigations and order the declassification of important documents. As with the Johnson administration, it is commonly assumed that President Richard M. Nixon and chief foreign-policy adviser Henry A. Kissinger assigned a low priority to relations with Latin America. Their major international con¬ cerns were to extricate U.S. troops from Indochina while attaining “peace with honor,” preventing a great power confrontation in the Middle East, and con¬ structing a “generation of peace” through understandings or detente with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. As such, the Nixon admin¬ istration lumped Latin America with other poor, weak Third World nations who seemingly weighed little in the balance of power. Indeed, the administration

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sharply cut economic aid programs to the region and rejected the advice of its own 1969 fact-finding mission to Latin America headed by Nelson Rockefeller, The Rockefeller Report on the Americas, to establish new regional alliances and programs. As President Nixon once explained to correspondents from Latin America, the United States would no longer pursue “the illusion that we alone can remake continents.” Both Nixon and Kissinger convey this official indif- ' ference in their memoirs. Relations with Latin America are never discussed in the president’s RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978) or in Kissinger’s 2,690 pages of text, The White House Years (1979) and Years of Upheaval (1982). Nixon does, however, devote a page and a half and Kissinger two chapters to the issue of Chile and its president, Salvador Allende. In the many investi¬ gations that followed Watergate, Congress unearthed evidence that, between 1970 and 1973, the Nixon administration conducted a series of clandestine op¬ erations aimed first at denying the Marxist Allende the Chilean presidency and then at destabilizing his government. This history can be traced in Alleged As¬ sassination Plots (1975) and the U.S. Senate’s report, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (1975 : 23-26). These congressional reports suggest that President Nixon directed the anti-Allende campaign. In an extraordinary outburst in Sep¬ tember 1970, he demanded that CIA Director Richard M. Helms do whatever was necessary to “save Chile.” Helms later testified that “if I ever carried a marshall’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day.” The president also signed National Security Decision Memorandum 93, which or¬ dered governmental agencies to conduct economic warfare against Allende’s Chile. In their memoirs, Nixon and Kissinger minimize these decisions, empha¬ sizing that the United States pursued a cool but correct policy toward Allende and that covert activities were designed to preserve democracy in Chile and not to harm Allende. In particular, Kissinger claims that the president was prone to “grandiloquent” statements and that his orders to Helms were not taken seri¬ ously within the government. Others who have analyzed U.S. policy toward Allende have been less con¬ cerned with decision making and more with the question of whether the Nixon administration was responsible for Allende’s overthrow in 1973. Two scholarly studies that absolve the United States of responsibility are Sigmund’s The Over¬ throw of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (1977) and Falcoffs Modern Chile, 1970-1989 (1989). Nathaniel Davis, who served as U.S. ambas¬ sador to Chile from 1971 to 1973, agrees with Sigmund and Falcoff in his The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende (1985). Davis apparently did not have any direct contact with President Nixon. Harsh indictments of the U.S. role can be found in Hersh’s The Price of Power (1983) and Schulzinger’s Henry Kissinger (1989). After Allende’s overthrow and the seizure of power by the tyrannical General Augusto Pinochet, Latin America again seemed secure from communism and apparently drew little attention from the White House. President Gerald R. Ford

264

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

in his memoirs, A Time to Heal (1979), does not mention Latin America other than to complain that Ronald Reagan recklessly used the issue of negotiating with Panama the status of the Panama Canal against him during the 1976 Re¬ publican presidential primaries.

JIMMY CARTER (1977-1981)

Unlike his Republican predecessors, President Jimmy Carter attached impor¬ tance to relations with Latin America. Carter considered himself versed in interAmerican affairs, having traveled widely in Latin America prior to becoming president. Moreover, while a student at the Naval Academy, Carter had studied Spanish, and he continued his language lessons in the White House. As presi¬ dent, Carter actually delivered a speech in Spanish in Mexico. Perhaps also Carter felt obliged to continue the tradition of the Democratic party, as estab¬ lished by Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, of having a special policy for Latin America. Certainly Carter believed the Republicans had damaged rela¬ tions. During the presidential campaign, he repeatedly deplored the U.S. inter¬ vention against Salvador Allende. The day after his inauguration, Carter made his first foreign policy decision, ordering a resumption of negotiations with Panama over the canal. As testified by U.S. Ambassador to Panama William J. Jorden in his Panama Odyssey (1984), Carter thereafter played a pivotal role in the negotiations. The president firmly explained to the Panamanian leader, General Omar Torrijos, that Panama could not have unequivocal sovereignty over the canal. Any new treaty would have to cede to the United States the right to guarantee the canal’s neutrality. Carter also directed in the first half of 1978 the difficult struggle to secure Senate ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties. A majority of U.S. citizens opposed relinquishing control over the canal. Carter relentlessly pressured senators to support the treaties. Indeed, Carter confessed to his diary in March 1978, “It’s hard to concentrate on anything except Panama.’’ The massive lobbying cam¬ paign is recounted in Hogan’s The Panama Canal in American Politics (1986). By securing passage of the treaties. Carter believed that he had rectified a his¬ torical injustice and initiated a new era of inter-American harmony. Carter also applied his human rights concerns, which he called “the soul of our foreign policy,” to Latin America. During the 1970s, right-wing military rulers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay ordered the wholesale detention and frequently the execution of political dissidents. Carter suspended economic and military aid to the military tyrants. And he gave visible support to Patricia Derrian, his outspoken and aggressive assistant secretary of state for humani¬ tarian affairs. The military men grudgingly responded, freeing prominent cap¬ tives such as the Argentine newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman. Carter also successfully interceded in the Dominican Republic in 1978, when he warned President Joaquin Balaguer and his military supporters to accept the democratic election of Antonio Guzman to the presidency. Carter’s human rights policy is

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analyzed and praised in Schoultz’s Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1981) and Smith’s Morality, Reason, and Power (1986). What particularly distinguished Carter’s approach to Latin America, at least during the first two years of his administration, was that he focused on issues that did not involve vital national security issues. But, with the appearance of leftist guerrillas in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Cold War concerns dominated ’• Carter’s agenda and thereafter inter-American relations throughout the 1980s. Carter in Keeping Faith (1982) and his chief lieutenants, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in Hard Choices (1983) and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in Power and Principle (1983), say surprisingly little in their mem¬ oirs about the fall of Anastasio Somoza in 1979 and the rise to power in Nic¬ aragua of the Sandinista movement. But Robert Pastor, who served as the Latin American expert on the NSC, has provided an inside look at policymaking in Condemned to Repetition (1987). He demonstrates that Carter was somewhat distant from the crisis. The president, consumed by strategic arms negotiations, peacemaking in the Middle East, and the fall of the shah of Iran, did not have time to attend the administration’s task force meetings on Nicaragua. However, he faithfully read and commented on the reports he received. But he was inclined to limit U.S. actions to encouraging a multilateral mediation of the conflict in the hope that a compromise solution or “middle way” could be found. Carter apparently believed that Latin Americans would appreciate his rejection of in¬ terventionism. When, in mid-1979, it became apparent that, short of intervention, the United States could not control the polarized political milieu of Nicaragua, Carter acted remarkably, within the context of inter-American relations during the Cold War: He recognized the new junta, briefly met with its Marxist-Leninist leader Daniel Ortega, and authorized U.S. economic aid for Nicaragua in the hope of taming the Sandinista revolution.

RONALD W. REAGAN (1981-1989)

Restraint did not characterize the Latin American policy of President Ronald W. Reagan. Reagan charged that the Sandinistas were communists, that they were in league with Castro’s Cuba, and that they were bent on fomenting rev¬ olution throughout Central America. Moreover, as expressed by the new am¬ bassador to the United Nations, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, in her Dictatorships and Double Standards (1982: 25), the Reagan administration believed that Carter had jeopardized the national security of the United States by abandoning So¬ moza, “a moderate autocrat.” Reagan pledged to avoid such naivete. As he warned a joint session of Congress in April 1983, “The national security of all the Americas is at stake in Central America.” Indeed, Reagan foresaw the day when Sandinistas, if unchecked, would rumble through Mexico in armed pickup trucks and menace Texas border towns. True to its word, the administration fervently pursued its anticommunist pol¬ icies in Central America. Between 1981 and 1989, it poured $5 billion of eco-

266

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

nomic and military aid into El Salvador to prevent a leftist guerrilla victory. And it organized and financed an army of Nicaraguan exiles, the contras, who waged war on the Sandinistas from bases in Honduras. When Congress, through the Boland Amendments, blocked further expenditures of U.S. funds for the contras, administration officials scurried to find other sources of revenue. Their efforts included organizing private fund-raisers, asking foreign governments for contributions, and selling overpriced weapons to Iran and sending the profits to the contras. These secret activities, the Iran-contra scandal, became public in late 1986. What part President Reagan played in directing these machinations, both legal and illegal, remains a mystery. The president undoubtedly set the tone for the administration with his colorful warnings about the Sandinista threat. And he signed orders, such as National Security Decision Directive 17 (1981), which authorized the CIA to organize the contras. The operation of Reagan’s NSC can be observed in Menges’s Inside the National Security Council (1988). But the president may have not fully realized all that he approved. His two secretaries of state, Alexander M. Haig, Jr. (1981-1982), and George P. Shultz (19821989), portray their boss as disengaged, uninterested in details, and at the mercy of his staff. Haig, in Caveat (1984: 82-84, 355-357), observed that Reagan’s problem “was how to gather the facts and how to manage them once they were in his possession.” Shultz laments in Turmoil and Triumph (1993: 263) that the president had a “tendency to rely on his staff and friends to the point of ac¬ cepting uncritically—even wishfully—advice that was sometimes amateurish and even irresponsible.” Reagan needed to read briefing books and follow up aggressively the management of foreign policy. Shultz even implies that, when it came to Nicaragua, White House and NSC officials issued documents in Rea¬ gan’s name without his knowledge. The Tower Commission Report (1987: 7980), the U.S. President’s Special Review Board empowered to investigate Iran-contra, drew similar conclusions. The Tower Commission ruled that “the president is supposed to be the decisionmaker.” But Reagan’s lax “personal management style” kept him unaware “of a lot of things that were going on.” Admiral John Poindexter and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, NSC officers who directed the contra campaign, have further clouded the issue of what Rea¬ gan knew. In congressional hearings, Poindexter accepted responsibility for the diversion of funds to the contras and explicitly exonerated the president of any illegal acts. But at his trial Poindexter testified that he carried out the president’s policy. Colonel North similarly implied to Congress that Reagan was not fully aware of the illegal efforts to aid the contras. In Under Fire: An American Story (1991: 13), however, North alleges that Reagan “knew everything.” For his part, Reagan insisted that he “hardly knew” the colonel. Reagan also knew or cared little about the rest of Latin America. On a tour of South America in 1982, he became confused about what country he was visiting. He was also apparently unaware that other government agencies cir¬ cumvented his Latin American policies. Reagan embraced the Kirkpatrick doc-

The Presidency

267

trine, which held that authoritarian regimes were preferable to totalitarian. He repeatedly praised General Pinochet, noting that he had rescued Chile from communism and that the dictator should be a guest at the White House. But, in the late 1980s, the State Department resumed the Carter administration policy of criticizing the Chilean tyrant for violating human rights and demanded that he schedule a free election. In part, the State Department moved against Pinochet' as a way of balancing off its demand that the Sandinistas adopt democracy. How was it possible for the State Department to carry out a policy that the president did not favor? As Thomas Carothers, who served in Reagan’s State Department, dryly notes, in In the Name of Democracy (1991: 158), “President Reagan had ‘instincts’ on most issues, not well-developed, detailed views. The vagueness of those instincts and his lack of close involvement in policy-making resulted in his exercising little influence over many policies.’’

GEORGE BUSH (1989-1993) George Bush served as the last of the Cold War presidents. The collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the conse¬ quent end of the Cold War undoubtedly contributed to the Bush administration’s reassessment of U.S. policies in Central America. Notwithstanding Ronald Rea¬ gan’s apocalyptic rhetoric, Nicaragua and El Salvador posed no strategic threat to the United States. What was conceivable was that the Soviet Union or its client, Cuba, might use Central America as a base to foster turmoil and disorder throughout the region. Beyond believing that it should respond to the momen¬ tous changes in international politics, the new administration also wanted to end the poisonous domestic debate over U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. In November 1988, shortly after being elected. Bush journeyed to Capitol Hill to make peace with Speaker of the House Jim Wright, a vociferous critic of Reagan’s Central American policy. As such, the Bush administration, within a few weeks after taking office, supported the Central American peace plan that President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica had designed in 1987 and agreed to suspend aid to the contras until elections were held in Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan elections took place in February 1990 and led to the surprising defeat of the Sandinistas. For¬ mer President Carter led a group that monitored these free elections. The Bush initiatives in Central America can be surveyed in Lowenthal, “Changing U.S. Interests and Policies in a New World’’ (1992), and Pastor, “George Bush and Latin America” (1992). While promoting peace in Nicaragua and El Salvador, President Bush con¬ ducted war against the Panamanian strongman General Manuel Antonio No¬ riega. Noriega had been a U.S. Cold War ally; since the 1950s, he had been a CIA “asset,” and, in the 1980s, he had collaborated in the covert campaign to arm the contras. In the mid-1980s, he actually met with Vice President Bush to discuss Central America. But Noriega was also a thug and a drug trafficker. And, in May 1989, he and his henchmen infuriated international opinion when

268

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

they rigged electoral results and viciously assaulted the rightful winners. Events in Panama caught the attention of the U.S. public, for it involved the explosive domestic issue of drug abuse and the continuing belief of many citizens that the United States should safeguard the Panama Canal. Personally affronted by Noriega’s villainy, President Bush ordered a military invasion of Panama in mid-December and, by January 1990, the Panamanian was in a U.S. jail awaiting trial on narcotics charges. General Noriega perhaps had not calculated that, with the Cold War over, he was of no value to the United States. The invasion of Panama took place one month after the opening of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic end of the Cold War. At present, the best source to analyze Bush’s decision to capture Noriega is the Washington Post correspondent Bob Woodward’s The Commanders (1991: 205). The book is based on over four hundred interviews, but sources are not identified in the text. Woodward emphasizes that Bush was at the center of decision making. He notes that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin L. Powell noticed a “sharp contrast between Bush and Reagan’’: “Unlike Reagan, Bush wanted the details,” and he wanted to be “the guy who made as many calls as possible.”

CONCLUSION This review of the literature on inter-American relations during the Cold War confirms the interpretations and insights offered by such respected scholars as Atkins (1989), Connell-Smith (1974), and Gil (1988). Throughout the twentieth century, the United States has practiced sphere of influence politics in the Western Hemisphere. It has tried to maintain peace and order, exclude foreign influences, expand U.S. trade and investment, and shape Latin America’s development. Rooted in that tradition was the Cold War anticommunism that characterized U.S. policies between 1945 and 1989. As Kryzanek (1990) would have it, the president can be the dominant force in the making of Latin American policy. During the Cold War, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic and Panama; sponsored an exile invasion of Cuba; waged secret wars against Cuba and Nicaragua; worked to destabilize governments in Guatemala, Brazil, and Chile; and sponsored assassination plots against Latin American leaders. These forceful actions were carried out by the Executive branch, without the advice and consent of Congress or the U.S. public. In the cases of Eisenhower and Guatemala, Kennedy and Cuba, Johnson and the Dominican Republic, Nixon and Chile, and Bush and Panama, the president not only authorized these interventions but also closely monitored the planning and conduct of the operations. Only in the case of the contra war against the Sandinistas does it seem that a president who ordered an intervention failed to manage it. As implied by close associates, President Reagan apparently lacked the intellectual energy to master the details of the covert war against Nicaragua. Bipartisanship marked U.S. policy toward Latin America during the Cold

The Presidency

269

War. Whether Democrat or Republican, U.S. presidents assigned the highest priority to keeping Latin America safe from communism, although Democratic presidents were perhaps more inclined to place Latin America within a regional rather than a global, Cold War context. President Kennedy, with his Alliance for Progress, pledged to uplift the Latin American poor and transform their societies. But the Alliance was also a Cold War policy founded on the belief ' that the keys to stability and anticommunism were democracy, economic growth and development, and social change. Only in the case of Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign did a president launch a significant initiative in Latin American policy that did not have strong Cold War overtones. Indeed, Carter seemed to to be the only president intrinsically interested in Latin American politics, his¬ tory, and culture. And Carter has maintained this concern in his postpresidential career. Other presidents restricted their Latin American interests to containing communism. This chapter fundamentally agrees with the thesis about decision making of¬ fered by Francis in “United States Policy Toward Latin America During the Kissinger Years” (1988). Francis argues that, during the period from 1969 to 1976, the foreign policy bureaucracy, principally the Department of State, han¬ dled most inter-American issues. An issue received presidential attention only if it involved East-West relations or had domestic political significance. Francis’s thesis can be applied to the entire Cold War period. Presidents acted boldly when they perceived that the Soviet Union was expanding its influence in Latin America. The only other issue that consistently garnered presidential attention was the status of the Panama Canal. In view of the proprietorial attitude of many U.S citizens about the canal, presidents believed they had to address Panamanian issues in order to maintain domestic political harmony. In general, however, presidents focused on relations with Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and turned to Latin American affairs only during Cold War emergencies. Whether the patterns of the past of inter-American relations will be replicated is characteristically a matter of scholarly debate. Hartlyn, Schoultz, and Varas, eds., The United States and Latin America in the 1990s (1992: 11), suggest that the U.S. historical capacity to act unilaterally and to dominate and coerce its regional neighbors and exclude extrahemispheric rivals may be over. In the post-Cold War era, presidential power will be limited by competing policy¬ making groups and the ability of Latin American governments to express their demands internationally. As Hartlyn, Schoultz, and Varas see it, “Latin Amer¬ icans have learned how to use international law, multilateral forums, and ad hoc institutional channels, as well as the broader international system, as a weapon of the weak to seek to limit U.S. influence in their countries.” Such brave predictions can be countered, however, by the reality of the past century of inter-American relations and the development of new hemispheric relationships. On January 1, 1994, Mexico joined the United States and Canada to form the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). And other Latin American nations hope to become free trade partners of the United States. The growing

270

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

economic presence of the United States in Latin America may provide the pres¬ ident with new ways to exert power and influence in the region.

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icy. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. Kemell, Samuel. 1986. Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership. Wash¬ ington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly. Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. 1982. Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kissinger, Henry. 1982. Years of Upheaval. Boston: Little, Brown. -. 1979. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown. Kryzanek, Michael J. 1990. U.S.-Latin American Relations. Second Edition. New York: Praeger. -. 1990. The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective. Updated Edition. New York: Oxford University Press. -. 1981. “Latin American Policy.” In Robert A. Divine, ed., Exploring the John¬ son Years. Austin: University of Texas Press. Langley, Lester D. 1989. America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Leacock, Ruth. 1990. Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961-1969. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Leffler, Melvyn P. 1992. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Levinson, Jerome, and Juan de Oms. 1970. The Alliance That Lost Its Way. Chicago: Quadrangle. Levy, Leonard W., and Louis Fisher, eds. 1994. Encyclopedia of the American Presi¬ dency, 4 Vols. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lowenthal, Abraham F. 1992. “Changing U.S. Interests and Policies in a New World.” In Jonathan Hartlyn, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds. The United States and Latin America in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. -. 1974. “ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Radical,’ and ‘Bureaucratic’ Perspectives on U.S. Latin American Policy.” In Julio Cotier and Richard R. Fagen, eds., Latin America and the United States: The Changing Political Realities. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. -. 1972. The Dominican Intervention. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mann, Thomas E., ed. 1990. A Question of Balance: The President, Congress and For¬ eign Policy. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. May, Ernest R. 1974. “The Bureaucratic Politics Approach: U.S.-Argentine Relations, 1942-1947.” In Julio Cotier and Richard R. Fagen, eds., Latin America and the United States: The Changing Political Realities. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni¬ versity Press. Mecham, J. Lloyd. 1965. A Survey of United States-Latin American Relations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Menges, Constantine C. 1988. Inside the National Security Council. New York: Touch¬ stone, Simon and Schuster. Molineu, Harold. 1990. U.S. Policy toward Latin America: From Regionalism to Glob¬ alism. Second Edition. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Niemeyer, E.V., Jr. 1986. “Personal Diplomacy: Lyndon B. Johnson and Mexico, 1963— 1968.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 90 (October): 159-186.

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The Presidential Advisory System Gabriel Marcella

Presidents must respond to a growing number of Latin American policy issues: defense and national security, human rights, international cooperation and devel¬ opment, foreign assistance, trade and commerce, immigration, illicit drug traffick¬ ing, and the environment. How U.S. presidents react to these issues rests to a large degree on the advice and administration of the Departments of State and Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other cabinet departments and agencies. Overlaps of foreign and domestic policy are significant and frequent in the making of U.S.-Latin American policy as evidenced by the circumstances involved in the invasion of Panama to remove General Noriega in 1989 and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico in 1993. The pluralistic (some would say hyperpluralistic) nature of the American political system also means that pres¬ idential foreign policy decision making is accessible to friends and relatives of the president, nongovernmental organizations, pundits, political party represen¬ tatives, as well as those on the receiving end of U.S.-Latin American policy: the Latin Americans. The purpose of this chapter is to examine three government agencies that provide the lion’s share of advice to the president in dealing with Latin Amer¬ ican policy issues: The National Security Council (NSC) and its staff, the De¬ partment of State (DOS), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The role of the Defense Department (DOD), Treasury, and U.S. ambassadors in Latin America will be analyzed in separate chapters in this volume.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL ADVISORY SYSTEMS There are actually two advisory systems that assist the president in the making of U.S. policy toward Latin America: the formal and informal. The president may possess the constitutional authority to shape and direct U.S. policy toward

276

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

Latin America but must depend on information, analysis, and on-site represen¬ tation and assessment of government officials in key departments, agencies, and councils. The informal system lies outside the inner circle of governing bodies and is dominated by nongovernmental organizations, individuals, and groups. Political appointees at various levels often bridge the two advisory systems, bringing ideas and advice from powerful think tanks, corporations, the media, and prestigious academic institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown universities.

The Formal Advisory System The formal advisory system has a structure and staff in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), consisting of twelve divisions, and key cabinet depart¬ ments and agencies with some responsibility for Latin America. Those that are most significant for advising the president on U.S.-Latin American policy within the EOP include the National Security Council, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and National Economic Council. The key players outside this arena that are involved in the coordination, control, and accountability of U.S.-Latin American policy include the Department of State (particularly the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs), the Defense Depart¬ ment, the Treasury and Commerce departments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, of course, the U.S. Congress, which must debate the merits of the policy, ap¬ prove all related funding, and maintain scrutiny over expenditure and policy implementation. In the area of intelligence policy, the president receives advice from two advisory boards—the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board (PIOB)—that review and assess the quality of intelligence and whether the U.S. intelligence agencies are operating within the law. The power of these two advisory bodies, consisting of “distinguished citizens,” is that they have access to highly classified infor¬ mation and report directly to the president. Henry Kissinger, former national security adviser and secretary of state under President Nixon, was a member of PFIAB until his resignation in 1990. The primary purposes of these executive departments, offices, and councils are to provide the president with current information, recommend policy options, and implement policy decisions. What is surprising about U.S.-Latin American policymaking is the relatively few people involved in the process within the Executive branch in Washington. Table 12.1 examines the key Executive branch institutions and the number of top policymakers currently involved in the process of formulating and implementing U.S.-Latin American Policy. Outside the De¬ partment of Defense, it is surprising how few top Executive branch personnel are involved on a day-to-day basis with Latin American and Caribbean affairs. There are two additional points that need to be emphasized concerning the number of top Executive branch personnel involved in U.S.-Latin American policymaking. First, the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs has relatively few

The Presidential Advisory System

277

Table 12.1 Top Executive Branch Personnel with Jurisdiction over Latin American Affairs Key Institution

Personnel

1. National Security Council Staff

3-5

2. Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (ARA)

114 (about 320 in Latin America)

3. Permanent Mission to the OAS

11

4. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Affairs (ASD/ISA)

10

5. Department of Commerce

5

6. Department of Treasury

5

7. Agency for International Development

75

S. U.S. Information Agency

19 (204 in Latin America)

9. Department of Defense , Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Affairs Joint Chiefs of Staff, J5 U.S. Army U.S. Navy U.S. Air Force U.S. Southern Command (in Panama) U.S. Atlantic Command (Norfolk, with jurisdiction over Caribbean) Defense Security Assistance Agency Totals

10 15 15 15 15 200 5 12 521

resources when compared with the other bureaucratic components of the presi¬ dential advisory system. Except for people, information, diplomatic skills, and communications facilities, the State Department’s resources are quite small. Sec¬ ond, the asymmetry in number of personnel (and size of annual budget) between civilian agencies and the branches of the U.S. military should not be taken to mean that the military dominates the policymaking process. What it does mean, however, is that the military has considerably more resources and the institu¬ tional capability to protect portions of their bureaucratic turf than other parts of the presidential advisory system. With the State Department undergoing an or¬ ganizational restructuring of its Inter-American Bureau, it may soon be able to expand its ability to influence presidents and their thinking about Latin America and the Caribbean. We now turn to the role of the informal advisory system on presidential policymaking toward Latin America. The Informal Advisory System The informal advisory system can be found outside the Executive Office of the President and the various cabinet departments and agencies. The sources of

278

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

informal advice that the president may seek are legion. They include the agenda setting newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times), personal friends and contacts, close rela¬ tives, political and ideological confreres, the president’s favorite think tanks, prominent academics, and policy activists of all persuasions. Senior White House officials must be aware of and be prepared to respond to the latest story or editorial commentary in the media. They may spend as much as the first two or three hours of the workday in preparation for the daily press conference. This is so because the media are a major source of information for the Congress and the policy relevant publics. By virtue of having an intelligence community to keep him and his advisers informed, the president has an awesome advantage over other actors (governmental and nongovernmental) in the policymaking process: greater access to information about events and issues (much of it clas¬ sified) than the Congress, the media, or the American people. But there is no guarantee that presidents will either seek advice or listen to a variety of policy proposals. Hoffman, “Zip My Lips: Bush’s Secret Conduct of U.S. Policy” (1990), points out that President Bush preferred to make policy in relative se¬ crecy, even leaving some of his small circle of trusted insiders—Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Richard Damian, Dick Cheney, Nicolas Brady, and John Sununu—outside his decision making process. According to Hoffman, “Bush has not surrounded himself at the White House with independent minds who could contribute to the presidency. Rather, he has opted for loyal implementers who will leave the [key] decisions to him.” Latin American leaders have been known to influence the president’s policies toward the region. During the “drug summit” in Cartagena, Colombia, on Feb¬ ruary 13, 1989, President Alan Garcia of Peru is reported to have said to George Bush, “Where’s the beef, Mr. President?” Pern’s president wanted an economic payoff in return for his continued cooperation with the United States on the Andean drug war. President Bush subsequently instructed his top staff to de¬ velop a new economic strategy for Latin America. That strategy later emerged from the Commerce Department as the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative and then the framework for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. Bush developed a strong relationship via reciprocal visits and telephone conversations with some Latin American leaders, notably President Carlos Menem of Argentina and Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico. Bush’s son Jeb married a Mexican, heads the Republican party in Florida, and has swayed his father on U.S. relations with Cuba and Central America. Pres¬ ident Carter struck up a strong relationship with President Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela over the Nicaragua crisis and Omar Torrijos of Panama when dealing with the passage of the Panama Canal Treaties. Pastor, Condemned to Repetition (1987), chronicles the impressive amount of communication between Perez and Carter and Carter’s close relationship with Torrijos of Panama. There is also a negative side of accepting advice from those who make up the informal advisory system. When U.S. policy toward Latin America is pri-

The Presidential Advisory System

279

vatized through the use of individuals working through extraofficial channels to carry out policies, problems of accountability and legality can readily arise. The creation of the “Enterprise,” under the direction of William Casey at the CIA, designed to handle arms sales to Iran and diversion of profits to the contras in Central America, contributed to one of the principal constitutional crises of the American republic. The privatization of foreign policy may give the president more confidence that he is dealing with private citizens he can trust, but relying on this kind of advice can quickly erode his constitutional authority and the legitimacy he needs from other government agencies to govern effectively. The formal and informal advisory systems overlap in the form of political appointees to senior positions, such as the assistant secretary of state for interAmerican affairs, the counterpart position in the Department of Defense, and even the deputy assistant secretary of state positions. Under President Reagan, it was ordained that all State Department bureaus would have one political appointee deputy assistant secretary. This was done to ensure greater policy coordination and bureaurcatic loyalty, thus ensuring that lower-level policymak¬ ers would not run off in directions unfriendly to the White House. Of course, the most notable area of political appointments is traditionally the ambassador¬ ships. The advantage of having political appointees at senior policy levels is that they frequently bring new energy and ideas to the formal advisory system. We now turn to an examination of the structure and major policy functions of the formal advisory system.

THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AND STAFF At the apex of the formal advisory system is the National Security Council, consisting of four statutory members—the president, vice president, secretary of state, and secretary of defense—and two advisory members, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the CIA (see Table 12.2). Some presidents have added other members at their discretion. The purpose of the National Security Council is to help the president coordinate domestic, foreign, and military policies. The key players in U.S.-Latin American policy are the NSC staff (largely drawn from other agencies) and the assistant to the president for national security affairs (commonly referred to as the national security ad¬ viser). The job of the national security adviser is to coordinate the NSC staff and advise the president. The national security adviser relies on the NSC’s di¬ rector of Latin American affairs for matters relating to Latin America and the Caribbean. Since the NSC is the most malleable of the agencies that advise the president, its role varies considerably with each president. Unlike the director of the CIA, the president’s national security adviser does not have to be con¬ firmed by Congress and does not have to testify before congressional commit¬ tees. President Nixon expanded the advisory role of the NSC while President Carter greatly reduced and simplified its decision-making structure. Under the Reagan administration, members of the NSC were given wide latitude and some

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

280

Table 12.2 Composition of the National Security Council Statutory Members of the NSC President Vice President Secretary of State Secretary of Defense

Statutory Advisers to the NSC Director of Central Intelligence Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Other Attendees Chief of Staff to the President Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Secretary of the Treasury Attorney General Others as invited by the President

ventured into the implementation of Latin American policy, such as the NSC staffer Oliver North. President Bush returned the NSC to its more traditional advisory role by assigning his longtime friend Brent Scowcroft as national se¬ curity adviser. Draper, A Very Thin Line (1991: 563), examines the role of the NSC and the NSC staff in the Iran-contra affair, arguing that a “combination of compartmentation, deniability, and secrecy” made it possible for a few in¬ siders such as John Poindexter and Oliver North to take over aspects of Latin American policy with little accountability within the advisory system. The National Security Council has a relatively small staff (fewer than five people handle Latin American affairs) organized along functional and regional policy lines. Latin American Affairs is one of six regional units within the staff

The Presidential Advisory System

281

structure. Functional units deal with intelligence, defense policy and arms con¬ trol, and international economic affairs. According to Kamen, “The Incredible Shrinking NSC” (1994: A17), 91 of the 151 NSC staff members are career government workers “detailed from the Defense Department, the State Depart¬ ment or the CIA, which pay their salaries.” The following works provide useful examinations of how the NSC works as an advisory system to the president: Draper (1991); Inderfurth and Johnson, Decisions of the Highest Order (1988); Lowenthal, U.S. Intelligence (1984); Shoemaker, Structure, Function and the NSC Staff (1989); Shoemaker, The NSC Staff: Counseling the Council (1991); and U.S. Congress, Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition/House Select Committee to Investigate Co¬ vert Arms Transactions with Iran, Report of the Congressional Committees In¬ vestigating the Iran-Contra Affair (1987). Brzezinski, Power and Principle (1983), provides his own account of the role he played as national security adviser during the Carter years, although he devotes only five pages to Latin American policy. Brzezinski (1983: 135) argued with the regionalists within the State Department that the United States should not have a hemispheric Latin American policy ‘ ‘because to Latin Americans that has always smacked of pa¬ ternalism.” Henry Kissinger’s role as Nixon’s national security adviser and the formal and informal processes of the Nixon-Kissinger system are discussed in Hersh, The Price of Power (1983). In his discussion of Kissinger’s role in U.S.Latin American policy, Hersh chronicles his disdain for Latin America and his role in destabilizing Chile under Allende. According to Hersh (1983: 296): The President and his national security advisor had differing motives for their high-risk attempt to prevent Allende’s election. Nixon was primarily protecting the interests of his corporate benefactors, Jay Parkinson, Donald Kendall, and Harold Geneen. For Kissinger the issue was more complicated, linked not only to his need to please the President and dominate the bureaucracy but also to his world view and his belief that no action to stop the spread of communism was immoral.

Kissinger provides his own account of the fall of Salvador Allende in Years of Upheaval (1982: 374), claiming that “our government had nothing to do with planning his overthrow and no involvement with the plotters. Allende was brought down by his own incompetence and inflexibility.”

Director of Latin American Affairs The director of Latin American affairs on the National Security Council staff coordinates U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean; he is not the creator or implementor of interagency policy on Latin America. As part of the NSC staff, the director keeps his superiors informed about significant events in the region, sets interagency agendas, and solicits input and develops consensus options for the national security adviser to present to the president. By virtue

282

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

of having these policy-related responsibilities, the director can influence the shaping of U.S.-Latin American policy in significant ways. Because successful policy requires frequent articulation of both its ends and its means, the director plays an important role in the preparation and clearing of senior level—including presidential—policy speeches on Latin America. The actual task of drafting the remarks often engages the talents of writers in the State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs and the White House. According to Menges, Inside the National Security Council (1988: 79), “The first draft of nearly everything a president says or writes about foreign policy is written by the NSC staff and then often given to White House speech writers.” During the Reagan years, the following individuals served as director of Latin American affairs on the NSC: Roger Fontaine, Constantine Menges, Raymond Burghardt, Jose Sorzano, and Jacqueline Tilman. Clinton’s director of Latin American affairs on the National Security Council staff is Richard E. Feinberg, formerly executive vice president of the Overseas Development Council and president of the Inter-American Dialogue. Although Feinberg is not a career diplomat, the director of Latin American affairs position in recent years was filled by senior ranking diplomats such as William Pryce (currently Clinton’s ambassador to Honduras) and Ted Briggs (formerly ambas¬ sador to Panama and Honduras, later to Portugal), and political appointees such as Jose Sorzano (formerly Jeane Kirkpatrick’s deputy at the United Nations and former professor at Georgetown University). During the Carter years a political appointee, Robert Pastor, held the position. The director of Latin American affairs needs to have at least the following capabilities to perform the job suc¬ cessfully: know Latin America and the interagency policy process and be able to work with the national security adviser, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, the Defense De¬ partment, and Congress. Feinberg’s background and views on U.S.-Latin American policy are discussed in Davidson, “Laying Out a Vision for the Amer¬ icas” (1992). Pastor discusses his role as director of Latin American affairs in Condemned to Repetition (1987) and Whirlpool (1992).

THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE The role of the State Department is to help implement the Latin American policy of the United States. It is a large bureaucratic organization with close to twenty-four thousand employees (only about thirty-five hundred are Foreign Service officers) and over 250 diplomatic missions overseas. The existing struc¬ ture of the Department of State, illustrated in Figure 12.1, shows the regional and functional complexity of this cabinet department. However, it should be noted that this organization reflects a decision-making structure from a previous era and is currently being reorganized. The secretary of state ranks first among the president’s cabinet members. The assistant secretary of state for InterAmerican affairs has major responsibility for Latin American and Caribbean

The Structure of the Department of State

Figure 12.1

Rubin, Barry. 1985. Secrets of State: The State Department and the Struggle Over U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. 1982. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Scott, Andrew M. 1969. “The Department of State: Formal Organization and Informal Culture.” International Studies Quarterly (March): 1-18. Sigmund, Paul E. 1977. The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Smith, Earl E. T. 1962. The Fourth Floor: An Account of the Castro Communist Revo¬ lution. New York: Random House. Smith, Winston. 1980. “Political Appointees: A Case Study.” Foreign Service Journal 57, no. 1 (January): 28-32, 39-40. Trask, Roger. 1984. “Spruille Braden vs. George Messersmith” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 26 (February). United States Congress. 1991. 1991-1992 Official Congressional Directory, 102d Con¬ gress. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. United States Department of State. 1991. Principal Officers of the Department of State and United States Chiefs of Mission, 1778-1990. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Gov¬ ernment Printing Office. -. 1984. Realism, Strength, Negotiation: Key Foreign Policy Statements of the Reagan Administration. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Public Affairs. Vannucci, Albert P. 1987. “Elected by Providence: Spruille Braden in Argentina in 1945.” In C. Neale Ronning and Albert P. Vannucci, eds. Ambassadors in For¬ eign Policy: The Influences of Individuals on U.S.-Latin American Policy. New York: Praeger. Whitaker, Arthur P. 1954. The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Wiarda, Howard J. 1990. Foreign Policy Without Illusion: How Foreign Policy-Making Works and Fails to Work in the United States. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman. -. 1984. In Search of Policy: The United States and Latin America. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. -. 1969. The Dominican Republic: Nation in Transition. New York: Praeger.

14

_

The U.S. Military Charles T. Call

What is the Pentagon’s role in U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Car¬ ibbean? Despite the general agreement among those who have studied the Pen¬ tagon that it functions as both an implementor and a formulator of foreign policy, the extent of its role in policy formulation is still a subject of much debate. On the one hand, the major recent studies of U.S.-Latin American re¬ lations give little attention to the Defense Department. For example, Lowenthal’s Partners in Conflict (1990) has only two single-page entries for the Defense Department in the entire book. In Whirlpool (1992), Pastor does not examine the role of the Pentagon despite his focus on “recurring interventions” in Latin American politics by the United States. Atkins, Latin America in the Interna¬ tional Political System (1989), devotes only a few pages to the history of U.S. military cooperation with Latin America and the Caribbean. In “From Coercion to Partnership” (1992), Varas probes some of the important changes—democ¬ ratization and a reduced emphasis on military cooperation—in U.S. security policy since the end of the Cold War but does not examine in any detail the Pentagon’s role in the formulation and implementation of U.S. policy toward the region. Even in Fauriol’s introductory chapter (1992) to a book published by the Pentagon’s National Defense University—Kjonnerod, ed.. Evolving U.S. Strategy for Latin America—the Department of Defense is mentioned only once in passing, and there is no reference to Latin American armed forces. While these works frequently point to the importance of strategic-security concerns to U.S. policy, they fail to analyze how the U.S. military interacts with other Ex¬ ecutive and legislative bodies in policymaking toward Latin America and the Caribbean. On the other hand, many Latin Americans believe that the U.S. military is the key U.S. actor in the region. During the Cold War, U.S. military aid and advisers proliferated in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the same time, the United States engaged in controversial projections of power in the hemisphere.

The U.S. Military

335

often in support of politically powerful armed forces in the region. Together, these developments prompted analyses of the U.S. military as the dominant force in U.S. policy in the hemisphere. In fact, there tends to be broad agreement in academic and policy literature that the Department of Defense has an important effect on U.S.-Latin American policymaking—at times surpassing other competing elements of the presidential advisory system. Kryzanek, U.S.-Latin American Relations (1990: 122), devotes little of his book to the role of the armed forces but argues, ‘ ‘Pentagon officials and U.S. military officials in the field can play a significant role in charting future policy. Since presidents and top White House aides depend on reports from military commanders, their opinions and recommendations can be criti¬ cal.” Furthermore, defense attaches and military advisory groups connected with U.S. embassies in the region also influence foreign policymaking. Serafino, an analyst with the Congressional Research Service (CRS), argues in “A Review of Military Participation in U.S. Policy Towards Latin America” (forthcoming), that “the U.S. military has long had a significant role in U.S. policy towards Latin America, and is likely to continue to do so for the remainder of the century.” The Defense Department’s role in foreign policy toward the region should not be overstated. U.S. policy toward Latin America is developed primarily by civilians through complex interaction among the White House, the State De¬ partment, other Executive agencies, and the U.S. Congress. Studies such as Betts’s Soldiers, Statesmen and Cold War Crises (1977) have found that, throughout most of the Cold War years, it was civilian authorities who were more willing to use military force than military officials. The Defense Depart¬ ment is only one player at the decision-making table, whose recommendations are often not taken. At the same time, the Pentagon is an important player in the policy process. The U.S. military has designed and guided counterinsurgency activities carried out by Latin American military forces, has shaped the military doctrine and ideological currents in the region, and has most recently organized multination drug raids in the Andes. Much of the Defense Department’s role in U.S.-Latin American policy does not derive from its seat at the table where high-level discussions and decisions are made, but from (1) the sizable resources it holds— people, aircraft, armaments, intelligence systems—and its ability to propose op¬ tions regarding their use to civilian policymakers and (2) its authority to determine how to carry out the broad missions it is given (or asks for). Civilians in both the Congress and other Executive agencies often defer to the expertise of military professionals on defense questions. The Pentagon has affected Latin America through its development of counterinsurgency and antinarcotics strat¬ egies, elaboration of military curriculum for Latin American military trainees, suggestions regarding grant military equipment, and ongoing dialogue with the region’s military commanders. This pattern of influence has been amplified by the powerful political role played by Latin America’s armed forces over the past

336

Who Makes Latin American Policy?

four decades. The political influence wielded by the region’s militaries has meant that the U.S. military’s role has had an impact beyond simply technical func¬ tions, resulting in controversial and divergent interpretations of how the Penta¬ gon’s role affects Latin American policy. The purpose of this chapter is to present a fourfold analysis of the Pentagon’s influence in U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean, relying mainly on books, journal articles, and government documents written over the past thirty years. First, it examines the key institutions in the Defense Department and how they interact with other Executive and legislative bodies in policy formulation and implementation toward the region. Second, it analyzes the Pentagon’s op¬ erations and military assistance activities in the region. Third, some of the U.S. military’s most prominent current missions are presented as a way of under¬ standing the Defense Department’s influence over policy. Finally, it concludes with some thoughts on the Pentagon’s future role in the process of making policy toward Latin America now that the Cold War is over.

THE PENTAGON’S ROLE IN U.S. POLICYMAKING TOWARD LATIN AMERICA The Secretary of Defense Although a presidentially appointed civilian, the secretary of defense tends to be the U.S. military’s principal voice in foreign policy decision making. As described in Marcella’s Chapter 12, The Presidential Advisory System,11 in this volume, the defense secretary interacts with the State Department, the president and the White House staff, the president’s national security adviser and the National Security Council staff, the CIA, other departments and executive of¬ fices, and U.S. ambassadors in the region. The “big four” congressional actors on U.S. policy toward Latin America are the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Foreign Operations Subcom¬ mittees, respectively, of the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee. These four congressional bodies have tended to be more important in Latin American policy, even on questions of military activ¬ ities, than the Armed Services Committee of each chamber. The latter have focused more on Pentagon resources and readiness and on security issues in the former Soviet Union and Europe. It is important to point out that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have expanded their influence within the interagency advisory process since the 1950s at the expense of the Department of State because of the growing military power of the U.S. globally and the preoccupation with security concerns during the Cold War. These trends are examined and discussed in Wiarda, Foreign Policy Without Illusion (1990); Black, Sentinels of Empire (1986); and Rosati, The Politics of United States Foreign Policy (1993).

The U.S. Military

337

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and Commanders-in-Chief (CINCs) Uniformed officers also play a part in formulating and implementing U.S. policy toward Latin America (see Figure 14.1). The four-member Joint Chief? of Staff, together with their chairman and vice-chairman, are routinely consulted on important security matters, especially by the secretary of defense. According to Perry, Four Stars (1989), this role has changed over time, often as a response to perceived imbalances in the U.S. civil-military relationship. Civilians, while requiring military expertise in formulating and weighing military options, want to exercise final control of when and how military forces are used. The armed services, on the other hand, seek to ensure that their forces are not used inap¬ propriately or in circumstances that could leave priority security requirements unmet. Since Vietnam, the Armed Forces leadership has been especially sensi¬ tive about when, why, and how military forces are committed; in some cases, including in Central America, they have backed training/advising foreign mili¬ tary forces as a substitute for directly committing U.S. troops. In contrast to the first part of the twentieth century, when the U.S. military directly governed Central American and Caribbean countries for long periods, the Pentagon’s as¬ sumption of public order functions has recently been limited to short stints in urgent circumstances, as in postinvasion Panama. This development reflects di¬ minishing tolerance at home and in Latin America of large-scale, sustained U.S. military presence in the region.1 In addition to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the ten commanders-in-chief (CINCs) of unified and specified commands around the world are critical actors in the formulation of policy options related to the use of military forces.2 Of these ten commands, six have territorial responsibilities for U.S. military forces and in¬ terests around the globe. Several unified commands have responsibilities that bear directly on Latin America, the most important of which is the U.S. Southern Command, with responsibility for all U.S. military forces and activities in Cen¬ tral and South America. The Atlantic Command (ACOM), located in Norfolk, Virginia, is responsible for U.S. military forces in the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, including U.S. installations in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A number of important case studies of the Defense Department’s involvement in the use of military force during military operations in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Panama illustrate how the U.S. military has presented options, lobbied policy positions, and implemented policies during interventions. The major case studies include Dinges, Our Man in Panama (1990); Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (1982); Allison, Essence of Decision (1971); Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis (1978); Gleijeses, Shattered Hope (1992); Donnelly et al., Operation Just Cause (1991); Schoonmaker, Military Crisis Management (1990); and Woodward, The Commanders (1992). These accounts provide an understanding of how the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Staff, and the relevant commanders-in-chief (CINC) influence the

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