Policy Podcast: Update on Western Hemisphere Affairs

MR. MCCORMACK: Tom Shannon, thanks for joining us once again here at the Policy Podcast. Let me start by asking you a little bit about what we accomplished last year in the Western Hemisphere, your area of responsibility, and how do you see the next year playing out? What are the various embassies -- we've got one year left in this Administration, what is it that you hope to accomplish?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: Well, thanks Sean, I appreciate being here. 2007 for us was a great year. We called it the year of commitment. We consider our commitment to the region to be historic and to be positive. And starting with President Bush's trip to the region in March, where he visited five countries and underscored his social justice agenda for the region, we've been focusing on how we can help our partners in the region attack poverty, attack inequality and attack social exclusion by providing sustainable job growth, quality education, and access to good public healthcare, while working with governments to improve security so that individuals have some degree of control over their destinies and their lives and those of their families.

And we think we did a lot; I mean, starting with the President's trip, we then had a series of visits by cabinet officials. Almost every cabinet member visited the region at least once and some, such as Secretary Gutierrez of Commerce and Secretary Paulson visited three or four times. This kind of high-level engagement at the level of the President, at the level of the cabinet and subcabinet, is historic. There hasn't been this kind of connection.

But then we started implementing, kind of, on-the-ground projects designed to produce results. We deployed the U.S. naval vessel, the Comfort, which visited 12 countries, attended to over 100,000 patients as part of our healthcare agenda. On the education side, we committed to the Partnership for Latin American Youth, which provides 75 million for scholarships. We worked with the Chilean Government to provide scholarships for Chilean students to study in the United States.

On the healthcare side, we established a regional healthcare training center in Panama that all the Central American countries are able to send real health promoters to, to improve healthcare in the most difficult areas of Central America.

On the jobs front, through our trade policy, we passed the Peru Free Trade Agreement, which creates a string of free trade agreements that stretch from Canada to the tip of Chile. It covers two-thirds of the GDP of the hemisphere. It's just kind of a massive project. And we're waiting on our Congress to approve the Colombia and the Panama free trade agreements, the --

MR. MCCORMACK: So, wait, let me interrupt you there.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: Sure.

MR. MCCORMACK: Where does that stand? Where does the Colombia agreement stand right now? It's a pretty tough fight with the Congress, isn't it?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: It's a tough fight in the Congress, but it's a fight that's getting a lot of attention. Secretary Rice was just in Medellin, Colombia with nine members of the House of Representatives, all Democrats, all trying to show the positive impact that trade has had in Colombia and address their concerns about violence and impunity. And what I think we've shown is that the Colombian Government's making good progress on human rights protection. It's making good progress to move from a culture of impunity to a culture of justice. And that ultimately, the way you improve trade union rights, the way you improve human rights, is through expanding the authority of the democratic state. And one way you do that is by creating prosperity, economic growth and opportunity and that's what we think the free trade agreement does.

But aside from these free trade agreements, the President, through his G-8 debt relief initiative, incorporated that into the Inter-American Development Bank and we won debt relief of $3.4 billion for five of the poorest countries in the region. And these are just a few examples of some of the things we think we did in 2007 to make an impact. But what we're hoping to do in 2008 is make this year of commitment a year of partnership by consolidating what we had, by creating a strong enduring relationship between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean so that when this Administration ends in January, it will be handing to the next administration a strong developed agenda for the hemisphere, good partnerships, and a vision for the future that the next administration will be able to pick up on.

MR. MCCORMACK: Tom, well, that sounds like a -- it's a lot of work. But have we seen any benefits from this? Have we moved the needle in terms of positive perceptions of America in the hemisphere after -- as a result of all of this?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: I think we've moved it a lot. In fact, the speech the President gave on March 5^th at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in which he laid out his social justice agenda and talked about how social justice issues in the Americas are in the national security interests of the United States and why we have to help these countries face poverty and inequality and build jobs and create access to good education and quality healthcare, it resonated in the United States, but it resonated in Latin America because it shows that we were listening and that we understood the kinds of challenges these governments have faced.

And his trip to the region highlighted this, because in each trip, in each stop, he made sure he met with people who were parts of marginalized populations, whether it was street kids in Sao Paulo, whether it was Afro Colombians or whether it was the indigenous in Guatemala and Mexico, he devoted himself personally to this and it had an impact.

And as we initiated each of the different projects and programs that I talked about earlier, it just built off this. And I think there is a realization in the region that we want to be a helpful partner, that we want to engage. And that has had a really positive impact.

MR. MCCORMACK: Let me go back to the phrase "social justice." This is not something that typically has been in the lexicon of American foreign policy. As a matter of fact, we've sort of shied away from it because it had certain political overtones within the hemisphere coming from the political left end of the spectrum.

How do we get there? How do we end up settling -- embracing this term, "social justice" that really -- I can't -- at least for the past seven years, I know that we really hadn't -- hadn't talked about it too much.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: It's a great term and it's really -- I mean, it's a great question about a great term. And it's really the product of an evolution. If you go back to the beginning of this Administration, one of the first things this President did was attend the Quebec Summit of the Americas. At that summit, there was a commitment to democracy in the summit process and an instruction to the OAS to negotiate the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

On September 11, 2001, the same day of the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the OAS approved in Lima the Inter-American Democratic Charter. And what that charter did was link democracy and development and it said that democracy is the only legitimate form of government in the Americas, but also that democracy is essential for the social, economic and political development of the Americas. And by linking democracy and development, we suddenly had a tool, a conceptual tool to understand how you make sure that democracies deliver the goods, but also how development can be democratic. And as we’ve worked through our summit agenda with our partners, both in the summit and the ministerial-level meetings, but also through the OAS, we began to realize that the vocabulary that we’ve been using about job creation, about counter-narcotics and security and counterterrorism was misunderstood in the region and was not understood as actively addressing their social concerns about poverty and equality and social exclusion.

And when Secretary Rice started as Secretary of State, one of the first things she did was ask Karen Hughes and I to travel through the region and talk to the different leaders in the region and try to understand where this disconnect happened. And as we did so, we realized that we needed to give a – to our vocabulary a social content as we talked about trade, as we talked about job creation, as we talked about education and healthcare and that this way it would resonate.

And so as we worked through this process, as we drew more tightly this connection between democracy and development, we realized that we needed to talk about trade in terms of job creation and we needed to talk about counter-narcotics and counterterrorism in terms of personal security and individual security that affected people. And that as we talked about investing in people, we needed to focus on education and healthcare, which were the two key items that people need in order to have the capacity to take care of economic opportunity. And the President actually used the term social justice in a speech he gave in Brazil in 2005, right after the Mar del Plata summit, and he also talked about a revolution of expectations. So when we get to March 5, 2007 and he talks about his social justice agenda, it is actually an agenda that has built itself substantively since the very beginning of his Administration in concrete steps. But rhetorically it was built really with the arrival of Secretary Rice through the State Department.

MR. MCCORMACK: We’re going to run out of time soon here, so let me go to a lightning round. Let’s go to a few of the other countries around the hemisphere and talk a little bit about -- very quickly about some of the issues that are there. Mexico and the Merida Initiative -- I know this is something that you worked on personally with President Calderon and his administration. Where do we stand on that effort and just – if you can go into a little bit of the background about it, so people understand what it is.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: Well, as you know, the Merida Initiative is an effort started by President Bush and President Calderon and the presidents of Central America to build a regional security strategy that would help us work with Mexico and with the countries of Central America to attack drug trafficking and organized crime. President Bush submitted to the Congress a fiscal year 2008 supplemental budget request of $550 million as the first tranche for the Merida Initiative. It’s going to be a three-year program, starting with the supplemental request. He has just submitted his 2009 budget also for $550 million. And again, the idea is to focus on providing equipment and training and other resources to help Mexico and Central America fight drug trafficking and organized crime -- two challenges that threaten the ability of a democratic state to govern in those countries. And the President, working with leaders in Mexico and Central America, identified drug trafficking and organized crime as shared challenges, but also shared responsibility, since the United States is the market for most of the drugs moving through central America. But also a lot of the weapons and a lot of the bulk cash that gets laundered in the United States and gets sent to Mexico and Central America also contributes to the problem. So we need to be working together.

Our Congress is in the position right now of considering both of these budget requests. We’ve had a series of hearings on the Hill. There have been congressional delegations traveling to Mexico and staff delegations traveling to Mexico and Central America. The response has been positive. There’s real interest. There’s real scrutiny to what we want to spend the money on, but this is good. This is the Congress exercising its authority. And so we feel positive about where this initiative is right now and we feel positive about what is says to our neighbors in Mexico and Central America in terms of our willingness to help them protect themselves and protect us at the same time.

MR. MCCORMACK: One last quick question, Venezuela, the government there is much in the news recently talking about cutting off the flow of oil to the United States, that probably hurt the Venezuelans more than anybody else, but what’s going on internally in Venezuela? A lot of news stories coming out now about a lot of ferment within their political system. What’s going on there?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: Well, as you know, President Chavez on December 2^nd lost a political referendum in which he sought to significantly reform and change the Venezuelan constitution. The Venezuelan people voted no on his reform proposals.

This has had a huge impact inside of Venezuela and a huge impact outside of Venezuela as people realize that unless something else happens, President Chavez will leave office in 2013. And this is building political ferment as political leaders, both in the opposition but also with inside of Chavismo begin to understand that they have to look for other candidates to run in the election of 2012, but also understand the political phenomenon that Venezuela faces as not being controlled simply by a single man but really as being something that all Venezuelan people have to involve themselves in in some fashion. So this is a dynamic moment inside of Venezuela and there’s a lot going on.

MR. MCCORMACK: Tom, thanks so much for joining us today and taking some time to talk about the Western Hemisphere and all the things that are happening. Thanks a lot.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHANNON: Thank you. Appreciate it.