The Foreign Service Journal, April 2006

ical change advocated by Chavez and Morales. One leader often described as leftist, but who has pur- sued decidedly non-radical policies, is Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. “Were Lula to shave his beard, he and his economic poli- cies would almost be indistinguish- able from his more neoliberal pre- decessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso,” writes Davidson College’s Crandall. Thomas Shannon, the Oxford-educated career diplomat who took over as head of the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs last September, says Lula’s economic views are basically in step with Washington’s own. “Brazil under Lula,” Shannon observed in January, “has recognized the importance of the market, the impor- tance of property rights and the importance of trade as drivers of economic growth.” Chile, which has often in the past two decades had the highest growth rates in Latin America, follows the same policies, Shannon points out. Successive U.S. Secretaries of State have worried about the durability of democracy in Latin America if gov- ernments cannot do a better job of delivering social ser- vices. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the need for good governance in the region the underlying theme of her visit to Brazil, Colombia, Chile and El Salvador in April 2005. (Rice returned to Santiago this past March to attend Chilean President Michelle Bache- let’s inaguration.) On a global level, President Bush’s Millennium Challenge Assistance fund is an attempt to induce gov- ernments to embrace effective policies. When they meet certain good governance goals, they can be reward- ed with MCA funds. These criteria include creation of market economies, promotion of free trade and an embrace of effective health and education policies — or, as State Department officials are prone to say, “investing in people.” Four years after Bush launched his Millennium Challenge initiative, however, the only recipient countries in Latin America have been Honduras and Nicaragua. They were awarded rural development grants worth a combined total of $390 million in 2005. Under the previ- ous government, Bolivia applied for a $600 million grant to assist microentrepreneurs. But Morales’ election last December has made U.S. approval of the project somewhat doubtful. At times, the State Department can be quite blunt about the need for Latin American governments to do better. An example was the testi- mony of Charles S. Shapiro, a for- mer ambassador to Venezuela and now a top State Department Latin America expert, in testimony last fall before the House International Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. He noted that polls of Latin Americans by and large show they don’t trust their governments and their institu- tions. “Survey numbers suggest that virtually all countries of the region have little or no confidence in their execu- tive, judiciary, legislature, political parties, armed forces or police.” In many cases, he said, political elites exhibit aloofness toward the people they are supposed to serve, a situation that is being exacerbated, he contended, by the legal immunity often granted legislatures and the impunity afforded many other governmental and political actors. “The resultant mutual mistrust between voters and the government encourages corruption, as citizens resort to one of the few ways available to persuade government officials to actually work on their behalf — pay them directly,” Shapiro said. Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian political writer, says elected governments in the region have yet to deal with the legacy of authoritarian structures that he believes are responsible for persistent backwardness. “We’ve had basically a history of tremendous state power, of authoritarianism, in the belief that authority could solve people’s problems, and we basically dele- gated the responsibility for solving those problems to those who held power,” Vargas Llosa said in a speech last year. “And the result of that has been, of course, that half of the population in Latin America lives in poverty, and we need to confront this myth head on, unless we want to continue for the next few decades to live under the mis- guided impression that the government is there to solve people’s problems.” F O C U S 22 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 6 Four years after Bush launched his Millennium Challenge initiative, the only recipient countries in Latin America have been Honduras and Nicaragua.