New Report: “Time to Listen: Trends in U.S. Security Assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean”
The Just the Facts project is pleased to present “Time to Listen,” our new report on U.S. defense and security trends in Latin America and the Caribbean. The report can be found in both English and Spanish here.
The report finds that U.S. assistance has dropped near the lowest levels in more than a decade—about US$2.2 billion foreseen for 2014. But dollar amounts are deceptive. While U.S. diplomatic efforts are flagging, other less transparent forms of military-to-military cooperation are on the rise:
• Special Operations Forces, whose budgets are not being cut and who have less role to play in Iraq and Afghanistan, are deploying more frequently to Latin America for training and other missions.
• U.S. personnel are working alongside Central American and Caribbean security forces to patrol their coasts and jungles. Disturbingly, some of these counternarcotics operations have led to the deaths of civilians.
• U.S. funds are sending Colombian soldiers and police to train with thousands of counterparts around the region.
• And as new unmanned technologies begin to proliferate around the continent, the U.S. use of weaponized drones elsewhere in the world has set a dangerous precedent.
While military-to-military relations remain robust, the U.S. diplomatic effort is flagging. That is partially due to budget cuts and a more intense focus on other parts of the world. But much of it has to do with a failure to listen to Latin American leaders’ growing calls for change. These calls are loudest in the realm of drug policy.
However, the vast majority of U.S. security assistance continues to flow through counter-drug funding programs: eradicating the crops of the poorest, transferring weapons and lethal skills to institutions with recent records of human rights abuse, and increasingly with direct participation in interdiction operations—some of them disturbingly violent—on other countries’ soil, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. U.S. drug policy in Latin America looks much as it has since the 1980s and 1990s.
It would not be hard to break out of the current moment of paralysis, to begin treating this hemisphere as one of opportunities instead of potential threats. But it would require the Obama administration to do something that Washington has rarely done in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations: to listen to the region’s leaders and civil societies. That is the thread woven through the report’s ten recommendations for an improved U.S. security relationship with Latin America.
Time to Listen is a product of the “Just the Facts” project (www.justf.org), a collaboration between CIP, LAWGEF, and WOLA dating back to 1997.
Soon, the project’s name will change: the Center for International Policy, in partnership with several non-governmental partners, is taking “Just the Facts” global. The resource currently hosted at www.justf.org will become the Latin America section of Security Assistance Monitor at www.securityassistance.org, a site documenting U.S. security assistance to every region of the world.