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US-Latin American initiatives are driven by domestic, not foreign issues

In the post-cold-war world, US foreign policy is geared more towards satisfying interest groups back home than to pursuing ideology or the defense of international alliances. With the election of George Bush, the least traveled of modern presidents, the inward focus of foreign policy is all the more evident. So it's not surprising that domestic political considerations are behind most new policy initiatives related to Latin America, located as it is in the United States' back yard.

The jury is still out on the ongoing debate in the Latin American boardrooms: diversify and stay local or specialize and go global? Specialization, management consultants tell their clients, provides enormous scales of economy in production, marketing, administration and knowledge development. That certainly makes sense in the US market, where the sheer size of the market encourages specialization. But the theory can break down when crossing borders. In smaller markets characterized by flexible regulations and wealthy elites, high level political and corporate connections may be more important to the bottom line than economy of scale or industry knowledge. Mexico provides a useful laboratory for experiments with both of these theories.

A widely discussed rumor tells the story of Carlos Salinas, early in his term as Mexico's President, losing in a publicly staged game of Polo. Disgusted and embarrassed, Salinas reportedly grabbed a pistol from one of his guards and shot his horse in the head, in front of several hundred invited guests. Recoiling in shock, each member of the audience, including the press, had the film stripped from their cameras. We'll never know if this modern legend is authentic, because the tightly controlled Mexican press never covered the event. President Salinas went on to win awards for his environmental and humane achievements as Mexico's reformist President. Only after Salinas finished his term and fled Mexico did we learn more about his unsavory past. Another story tells of an episode when he and his older brother, Raul (age 7 at the time), stalked a terrified household maid with their father's rifle and murdered her at close range.

The vivid television images of violent demonstrations in Quebec City this month demonstrate the extent to which the concept of free trade has fallen out of favor in the public mind. Like the Seattle protesters before them, the demonstrators have succeeded in stoking the natural fears of a skeptical public. The pre-scripted and hollow-sounding words of the hemisphere's politicians do little to mitigate the suspicions of those who envision their way of life at the mercy of unscrupulous multinationals. Latin Americans fear the return of a US-led corporate conquest and a loss of sovereignty. Americans and Canadians fear the loss of jobs to poorer competitors. Across the Americas, organized labor and environmental groups predict cataclysmic results.