US Aid-cutback Plan Sends Wrong Message

Andres Oppenheimer
The Miami Herald
February 7, 2010

If President Barack Obama's foreign aid budget request for 2011 is a reflection of his priorities in world affairs, it looks like the president is saying ``adios'' to Latin America.

The administration's foreign aid request to Congress for next year calls for a 13 percent increase for Africa, a 7 percent increase for the Middle East and a nearly 60 percent increase for South and Central Asia, mostly for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By comparison, it requests a nearly 10 percent cut in aid for Latin America.

Has Latin America become irrelevant to the Obama administration? As recently as April 17, 2009, at the opening ceremony of the 34-country Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Obama stated, ``I'm here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration."...

...``It's a myopic view of the world,'' says Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas, a New York-based group that represents multinationals doing business in Latin America. ``Guatemala is falling apart, right on the border with our strategic partner Mexico.''...

...My opinion: The Obama administration can hardly be blamed for making marginal budget cuts here and there when it is fighting key wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and when the U.S. budget is already strained by domestic needs in the midst of the worst economic depression since the 1930s. And a small cut in Latin America's military aid programs is no big drama.

What's much more worrisome is the absence of any major Obama initiative to promote closer economic ties with Latin America, expanding trade and opening markets to help create new jobs from Alaska to Patagonia. One year into the Obama administration, we're still waiting for the ``new chapter of engagement'' with the region to begin.

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