Though often cloaked in a rhetoric of democracy promotion and human rights, Washington’s political playbook in Latin America can be summarized as follows: coddle the governments and movements that support U.S. economic, security, and foreign policy objectives and try to eradicate those that don’t.
Source: The Hill
Vice President Biden is a man on a mission. Over the last few weeks, the White House’s go-to guy on Latin America has made every effort to persuade Congress to approve a $1 billion aid request for Central America. In separate op-eds in The Hill and The New York Times, Biden has argued that this money could help jump-start the region economically and pave the way for “the next great success story of the Western Hemisphere.” But Biden’s billion-dollar plan has already encountered resistance in Congress, and from fellow Democrats no less. “We’ve spent billions of dollars there over two decades,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) recently noted. “And we’ve seen conditions get worse in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador.”
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019