Today, the discourse among the countries of our Hemisphere is motivated by a new set of realities, and yesterday’s concerns have emerged as priorities for today’s policymakers. Education, social development, the environment, tourism, sustainable development, culture, and a number of other like-minded issues have all joined trade as priorities. Furthermore, as these have been added to the international agenda, they have tended to push aside, with relative ease, those preoccupations that we were so accustomed to hearing our leaders debate in the past.

After the great ideological debates of the 1970s and 1980s and the domestic “war” (there is no better term) over Central America policy, a quite remarkable consensus had emerged in the 1990s regarding United States policy in Latin America. The new consensus was surprisingly bipartisan, having been largely continuous from the Bush to the Clinton administrations and actually having its origins in the even earlier Carter and Reagan administrations. For those who remember the rancorous, divisive battles, stretching back over two decades, over such issues as human rights, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the emergence of a consensus on US foreign policy towards Latin America was nothing short of astounding. There are three basic elements in this new consensus, usually referred to as the "Washington Consensus," all interrelated:

1. (1) an emphasis on furthering democracy and human rights;

2. (2) an emphasis on free (or at least “fair”) trade and economic integration; and

3. (3) an emphasis on open markets, state downsizing, and privatization: i.e., on capitalism or neoliberalism.

The key to understanding Latin American relations with the United States as the century, and the millennium, draw to a close is to realize that all of the nations in the Western Hemisphere are still caught up in the transition from the Cold War. That transition, which began nearly a decade ago, is proceeding more slowly, and with greater confusion, than most observers had anticipated. The issues that constitute the framework, or infrastructure, for Hemispheric relations in the coming century emerge from the efforts of each nation in the Hemisphere, including the United States, to effect their insertions into the emerging world order. Given the priority accorded commercial and economic questions in the insertion of most Latin American nations, those are the questions that dominate the discourse. However, questions of governance — and what I call the international code of good behavior — are rapidly assuming greater salience in inter-American relations. It is my judgment that they will dominate relations among the nations of the Hemisphere in the 21st century.

As of 1997, the United States faces an unprecedented degree of security, stability, and economic prosperity in its relations with Latin America. Never before have US strategic interests in Latin America been as well-protected or have its prospects seemed, at least on the surface, so promising. Yet while the US strategic interests are in better shape — militarily, politically, and economically — this decade than at any time since the end of the Second World War, some problems remain. Over the long run, there is also the risk that old problems, which today seem to have ebbed away, will return. Thus, the positive tone of any contemporary assessment must be tempered with an awareness of remaining areas of concern as well as of possible future crises.

The United States, during the past several years, has squandered a heaven-sent opportunity to cement its already deep economic relations with Latin America. There is no certainty that the neglect will be altered in the near term.

A series of transformations made the 1990s an ideal time to consolidate improved economic relations with Latin America. The end of the Cold War meant that US dealings with Latin America could be based on mutual realities in the Hemisphere rather than be shaped through the one-way prism of East-West confrontation. There was a profound paradigm shift that swept just about all the countries of the Hemisphere, away from protectionism and toward open markets as the path to economic growth.

There has always been a certain attitude in Washington having to do with Latin America. It is that Latin America is not quite a grown-up place and, therefore, is worthy of intense US interest only when the region, or part of it, falls into a crisis that crosses paths with one of the US hot-button issues of the moment: drugs, immigration, human rights, communism (until recently) and, farther back, fascism. In other words, Latin America has been worthy of attention only when the United States decided to “do good” (e.g., human rights crusades), incorporate the region into efforts at solving US domestic problems (e.g., drugs), or needed firm support from the region in some international effort (e.g., the Cold War and World War II).

Now that the nations of the Americas have emerged from the trauma of the debt debâcle of the 1980s and are well on their way to overcoming the effects of the Mexican financial crisis of 1994, it is useful to examine more closely the instruments that brought the region through this turbulent period. During this time, in which Latin America had neither direction nor resources, the policies were incubated that propelled a prodigious transformation in the economies and governance, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) matured into a major resource for the American nations.

Faced with rapid changes in the global system, most Caribbean countries may seem to be doing everything right. The English-speaking Caribbean countries, in particular, have been exemplary in their practice of democracy and political stability. Others, such as Suriname and Haiti, are nurturing new democratic regimes. Economically, the region has followed the neoliberal reform rule book and implemented policies mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. They have trimmed fiscal deficits, privatized state-owned commercial enterprises that were losing money, and liberalized their trading regimes. These measures have been implemented either by reform-minded governments or governments which have seen no alternative. Only Cuba continues to labor under a discredited, ideological model that does not encourage democracy, while its economy mirrors some version of “á la carte capitalism” in the face of an accelerated US embargo.

When Commodore David Porter resigned from the US Navy to accept the post of commander-in-chief of Mexico’s nascent naval forces, he began a tradition of US involvement with Latin American armed forces that has endured to the present day. Porter’s decision was supported by President John Quincy Adams, who hoped that it would both strengthen the US influence in Mexico and act as a curb on possible Mexican efforts to seize Cuba, a prize which the president coveted himself (for details, see Long, 1970). These objectives signaled another enduring heritage: efforts by the United States to use ties with Latin American military institutions to promote agendas that were frequently unrelated to, or even at variance with, national interests in Latin America. This would be especially true whenever the United States perceived itself as competing with other nations for influence in the region. In 1826, the rival was Great Britain; in this century, it was first Germany and then the Soviet Union, but, in all cases, the bottom line was the same: a determination to make Washington’s influence paramount.

The past few decades have seen profound changes in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Mexico. The interests of the two countries, which often diverged during the Cold War years, increasingly began to converge following collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. With this convergence, bilateral relations seemed to enter a more cooperative stage. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 was deemed a fitting symbol of the new, mutually beneficial relationship between the two countries.

With the passage by the 104th Congress of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 (Helms-Burton), signed into law by the president on 12 March 1996, relations between the United States and Cuba became the subject of quietly intense international discourse. Whether this multinational concern serves simply to strain US relations with its European and Latin American allies or to precipitate fundamental change in Cuba depends largely on the actions of President Clinton and, of course, on those of his nemesis, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro.