What is at Stake

For the United States
In the wake of the Cold War, Latin America has been peripheral to U.S. national security concerns. Soviet support for armed insurgencies no longer exists, and with the exception of Cuba, almost all of the region's countries are at least electoral democracies as opposed to dictatorships. There are good reasons, however, why the U.S. should pay greater attention to threats from the South.

At least seven major terrorist organizations have an active presence in the region, including three with ties to transnational Islamic terrorist groups.2 In 2002, the Brazilian government arrested Hesham al-Tarabili, a suspected agent of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, who is believed to have been involved in the 1997 attack on tourists in Luxor, Egypt.3 Although Latin America has not been used to launch attacks directly at the United States, it serves as a support base for criminals, illegal armies, and terrorist groups.

According to Ambassador Cofer Black, U.S. Department of State Coordinator for Counterterrorism:

Terrorists in this hemisphere are becoming more active in illicit transnational activities, principally the drug trade, but also arms trafficking, money laundering, contraband smuggling, and document and currency fraud. Not only do these provide sources of income, but terrorists also take advantage of their well-established underground supply routes to move funds, people and arms across borders.4

Other security interests include the future peace and economic success of a region that comprises 800 million people. Mexico is America's second largest trading partner behind Canada. Although the rest of Latin America accounts for less than 6 percent of U.S. world trade, there is potential for much more. Nearly 30 percent of America's crude oil imports, more than the United States receives from the Persian Gulf, come from Latin America.5

Regrettably, however, an estimated 300 metric tons of illegal drugs also reach the United States through its southern border, contributing to about 20,000 deaths every year, not to mention an estimated $160 billion in related costs.6

For Latin America
The flowering of democracy and economic growth portended peace, stability, and broad-based prosperity. Yet gains over the past 20 years are in danger of unraveling into rising unemployment and the re-emergence of autocratic regimes.7

For one thing, regional troublemakers like Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez have reportedly been fanning flames of social unrest by encouraging indigenous activists in Bolivia and Ecuador to rise up against elected leaders. Chávez's own security forces have allegedly given safe haven and material support to Colombia's FARC guerrillas, and his government is supporting the Castro regime by selling oil to Cuba at concessionary prices on generous credit terms even though Cuba has been unable to pay most of the bill. In exchange, Fidel Castro has sent more than 10,000 doctors, teachers, and intelligence specialists to Venezuela and advises Chávez on domestic and foreign policy.8

While free trade agreements have provided opportunities for growth, lagging economic reforms have blocked the rise of living standards in such countries as Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Venezuela, and even, to some degree, in Mexico.9 Nearly half of the region's inhabitants live in poverty. To help support them, relatives living in the United States send back about $32 billion in remittances each year, but that does not compensate for the absence of a broad middle class--or its destruction, as happened in Argentina following its 2000 financial collapse. Large populations living on the margin are an inadequate tax-base to support public institutions.

As a result, poorly supported security forces such as those in Bolivia and Ecuador are unable to project state authority throughout national territory, leaving vast rural areas at the mercy of criminals, subversives, and terrorists. In some countries, security forces involved in civil wars in the 1980s have been reduced in strength and reorganized to separate the police from the military in order to follow the U.S. model; but new civilian law enforcement was not established in time to counter the spread of gangs, as well as narcotics and arms traffickers, particularly in El Salvador and Honduras.

Scant disaster preparedness and health infrastructure is another problem. A virulent, biological attack on the United States might easily work its way south, with potentially devastating consequences on countries with limited health facilities.10 Drug trafficking that once was focused on the lucrative North American market is shifting south where narcotics use is now greater than in the United States. Arms smuggling and human trafficking are increasing as well. The U.S.-Mexico border is the focal point for firearms trafficking into Mexico and the smuggling of persons into the United States.

Post-September 11 measures taken by the United States have affected Latin America as well. U.S. demands for added security at overseas ports and screening of agricultural products have drawn complaints that Washington is foisting its own cost of self-protection onto governments that can ill afford the expense. Latin American leaders say the United States is making it difficult for developing countries to compete in the global economy by "pushing out" its borders with new security restrictions.

Washington's Eroded Security Strategy

Military Command Quandary
Since 1941, what be-came the U.S. Southern Co-mmand (SOUTHCOM) has overseen and coordinated U.S. military operations in the Caribbean and south of Mexico to the Straits of Magellan. Formerly headquartered in Panama along with two Air Force bases and extensive army and navy facilities, it moved to Miami, Florida, with the handoff of the Panama Canal to Panama in 1999. By then, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) had turned over the bases and other military property to Panama, and the U.S. Army South (USARSO) and other components had relocated to various sites in the United States and the Caribbean. Panamanian leaders wanted the United States to pay in order to stay. Senior U.S. policymakers decided that retaining assets like Howard Air Force base, useful for launching counterdrug surveillance flights, was not worth it.

Through the 1980s, SOUTHCOM not only collaborated with DOD security assistance agencies, but also funded and coordinated military exercises, personnel exchanges, deployment of training teams, and guided military actions on the ground. Since the early 1990s, when security assistance took on a counternarcotics character, civilian agencies like the Department of State and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency assumed some of SOUTHCOM's responsibilities. Thus, since moving to a suburban office park in Miami, it has played less of a direct role in security assistance and more of a supporting one.

Now the Pentagon is contemplating abolishing SOUTHCOM and making the entire Western Hemisphere the responsibility of a new unified command.11 After the September 11 attacks on the United States, the DOD created the Northern Command (NORTHCOM) under the unified command plan (UCP), which prescribes the geographic boundaries and functions of the combatant commands charged with conducting U.S. military operations worldwide.12 NORTHCOM is mostly a coordinating structure with no resources or command elements for conducting exercises, foreign liaison, international intelligence gathering, or collaborating in security assistance to foreign nations. For now, SOUTHCOM's demise would remove what focus there is for regional engagement on security matters.

Confused Lines of Authority
Over the past decades, judicious military engagement led by SOUTHCOM has assisted in building military capacity, but now the command lacks adequate resources to continue that function as well as prosecute the global war on terrorism. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the interagency process, the means by which federal agencies determine how to work together, is declining. The Department of State's International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Bureau (INL) has assumed greater authority over police and military assistance programs, creating an overly complicated multi-agency assistance chain that blocks the timely delivery of support and training.

Today, counternarcotics and counterterrorism are the major security concerns in the region, and the Department of State--with a sluggish internal financial system and without the support resources, training, doctrine, standardized procedures, and evaluation mechanisms characteristic of the U.S. military--is the lead agency. Assisting either directly or through contractors is a proliferating array of government entities, including the U.S. Coast Guard, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms among others. Throughout the Andean region, contractors substituting for U.S. military and police personnel have lost crews and aircraft in accidents that could have been prevented through more unified supervision and by prioritizing safety and mission success over expediency.13

While federal and local law enforcement and military agencies have been learning to cooperate on countering terrorism in the United States since September 11, U.S. diplomats and military representatives in Latin America are still encouraging the region's new democracies to sever once-close ties between their armed forces and police. Such changes may have resulted in better civilian oversight and improved respect for human rights, but the spread of stateless criminal organizations has taxed their capabilities before new forces, procedures, and lines of communication have had time to gel. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which used to cooperate with the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development on justice system reform and law enforcement training--critical elements in curbing terrorism in Latin America--has refocused its foreign programs on Eastern Europe.

Tutorial Relations.
Military-to-military relations still manifest an assistance-focused mindset--what Jay Cope, fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, calls a "deep belief that the United states must tutor, supply, and in many ways aid, or manipulate the region's institutions."14 This approach is a holdover from the Cold War, and even earlier, when Latin American armies were largely unprofessional and served to enforce loyalty to dictators and powerful political groups. A combination of assistance and pressure to abandon politics leveraged existing local efforts into transforming most Latin American armies into more modern public institutions at the service of elected leaders.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon still keeps Latin American militaries at arm's length, leading mostly to one-way exchanges based on equipment donations, training exercises, personnel exchanges, and ship visits. There is little U.S. consultation with the region's elected leaders over security matters unless it involves fighting drug trafficking--something in which the United States has been keenly interested. More comprehensive relationships between the U.S. and Latin American militaries are more the exception than the rule, depending on the U.S. ambassador in country and the U.S. Military Group commander.

U.S. development assistance is even less effective. Where used to construct infrastructure, it focuses on turnkey operations with little follow-up. U.S. aid has funded road-building in Latin America since the 1960s, but local governments often fail to maintain what has been built. This practice overlooked the region's military engineers and medical practitioners, who share a command structure that could do these jobs and respond to threats such as terrorism and natural disasters in ways that the private sector will not and fledgling civilian bureaucracies cannot. The United States could take advantage of this synergy more effectively through the strategic use of military road-building exercises such as Nuevos Horizontes, yet budgets for these programs have been declining.

Roadblocks to Productive Engagement
Section 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits advising and training foreign police except as exempted by legislation--a policy based on the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which correctly sought to limit Army abuses against civilians during Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War. Section 660 specifically addresses concerns over U.S. training given to foreign police that subsequently committed human rights abuses.

As sensible as Section 660 appeared when enacted, however, it now distorts U.S. security assistance programs. Three-quarters of SOUTHCOM's funding is earmarked for counternarcotics use--mostly a law enforcement function--which means that SOUTHCOM cannot easily use those funds. For instance, U.S. Army units may not directly provide human rights training to foreign police units without enabling legislation. Transfer of surplus equipment from military inventories and by military means is similarly restricted, while U.S. assistance to foreign police is limited by the fact that American law enforcement is largely community-based and has no foreign operations component.

Outdated Accord
The 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance was meant to invoke a collective response against a threat from outside the hemisphere. That made sense when the Soviet Union was arming subversives to install communist governments in Latin America, but with the failure of such movements in the 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of extra-hemispheric aggression receded.

Just prior to September 11, Mexican President Vicente Fox suggested simply scrapping the Rio Treaty. Today, an agreement to provide cooperative assistance to neighbors facing terrorism, transnational crime, or natural disasters seems more appropriate.

In the background, the Organization of American States has passed more than 90 resolutions on various aspects of security since 1995, from non-proliferation to clearing land mines; but without money to pay for specific measures and the political will to persuade voters at home to adopt them, such resolutions are little more than promises. A treaty requires local legislative approval and action, and thus could form the basis for common procedures and support mechanisms.

However, a NATO-like pact is unlikely in the near term. For one thing, there is the problem of asymmetry. For many Latin American leaders, the economically and militarily powerful United States seems like a gorilla in the sandbox. These leaders see U.S. attempts to forge an Inter-American security system as a precursor to violations of their sovereignty--a concept many Latin American countries are only now attempting to define.15 For another, some countries are attempting to define their mutual security relations, such as Argentina with Brazil and Venezuela with Cuba.

Furthermore, broad agreement on security is lacking. Some, like Mexico, define it as defending internal order.16 Others, like Argentina, view it as protecting borders. Some, like El Salvador, try to guard against a range of threats, from external aggression to natural disasters. Recently, representatives to the Organization of American States (OAS) made progress by agreeing on a declaration listing eight threats at the OAS's Special Conference on Security in Mexico City on October 27-28, 2003.17

Finally, multilateral bodies like the OAS-affiliated Inter-American Defense Board and the OAS Commission on Hemispheric Security serve mainly as forums, not action focal points. The OAS does not often coordinate with the military-dominated Defense Board, reflecting a lingering lack of trust between civilians and soldiers. Moreover, the OAS Permanent Council handles all urgent security issues.

Conclusion

The United States is closely tied to its hemispheric neighbors through geography, shared history, and trade. The security of the neighborhood in which America exists cannot be ignored. To defend the U.S. homeland and help hemispheric allies meet similar challenges, the United States needs a new strategy that treats nascent democracies differently from the dictatorships they once were, meets the new threats from within the region, and moves beyond current tutorial and assistance relations toward sustained collaboration.

SOUTHCOM plays an important role in securing the U.S. southern flank from a multitude of transnational threats. To address the dangers facing America in the 21st century, the command's organization and operation need to be revitalized and better integrated with other national activities. While the United States has spent 20 years encouraging the separation of military and police functions in Latin America, it should rethink how it will work with each country's unique security architecture.

U.S. policymakers must sort out and clarify America's approach to hemispheric threats while persuading multinational forums on regional security to develop a new basis for achieving that goal. Failure to move forward on such an agenda will give terrorists and criminals the upper hand.

James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security, and Stephen Johnson is Senior Policy Analyst for Latin America, in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.