The recent midterm election in the United States didn't just put the Republican Party in a greater position of influence over U.S. domestic policy -- it also gave a small section of southern Florida significant power over the country's diplomacy toward Latin America. The new Congress's influential House Committee on Foreign Affairs will likely be chaired by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who represents the Miami area, while the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere will likely be led by Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), who represents the nearby Fort Myers area. Both lawmakers are throwback Latin American cold warriors, catering to their Cuban-American constituents with belligerent policies toward any neighboring government that seeks independence from U.S. influence. Needless to say, what's satisfying for this narrow segment of Floridians won't be in the United States' greater national interest.
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The duo's intransigence will be most felt in terms of the five-decade-old embargo against Cuba, on which Ros-Lehtinen and Mack have refused to compromise, though most objective analysts have questioned the policy's strategic and tactical sense. They have also indicated that they will push President Barack Obama's administration to end its attempt at nuanced diplomacy in Latin America and replace it with the George W. Bush administration's simplistic policy of dividing the region into "friends" and "enemies." Obama seemed to acknowledge the folly of this black-and-white approach to the region when he spoke of an "equal partnership" with the region and said that "we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements" in a 2009 speech at the Summit of the Americas.
But if certain members of Congress think they can drive a wedge among the countries of the region, they are mistaken. Latin American countries have been expanding their ties with one another -- including a recent rapprochement between Venezuela and Colombia -- and there is a deepening consensus that their differences should be worked out in an atmosphere of mutual respect. (The inaugural co-chairs of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a regional organization set to be founded in 2011, are Chile and Venezuela, two countries that don't see eye to eye on everything, but are willing to cooperate.) For instance, even though the United States opposed Cuba's entry to the Organization of American States, the group last year approved its readmittance. If Washington, instead of accepting this new reality, relies on antagonistic foreign-policy dogma to placate local constituencies, it will only lose in regional and global influence.
Now is an especially inopportune time for the United States to alienate its southern neighbors. Latin American countries are gaining in confidence and increasing their political and economic connections with the rest of the world, both regionally through organizations like UNASUR and bilaterally with countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It's not just Latin America that needs the United States anymore; increasingly, the United States needs Latin America.
Unfortunately, Ros-Lehtinen and Mack are hard-line ideologues. Given that she once called for Fidel Castro's assassination, it's no surprise that Ros-Lehtinen is an anti-Cuba hawk. But she has in recent years also become more aggressive toward Venezuela. This year, for example, she made unsubstantiated accusations against Venezuela for serving as a conduit between the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and al Qaeda. In a March 11 interview with the Council of the Americas, Gen. Douglas Fraser, chief of U.S. Southern Command, debunked those claims in no uncertain terms: "I don't see any evidence of terrorist activity within Latin America or the Caribbean from outside of the region."
Even more disturbing was Ros-Lehtinen's meeting with Venezuelan terrorist Raúl Díaz in Miami several months ago. Díaz had just arrived in the United States after escaping prison in Venezuela, where he was serving a sentence for participating in the 2003 bombings of the Spanish and Colombian consulates in Caracas. It is troubling that Ros-Lehtinen would think it appropriate to use the powers of her office to extend legitimacy to a violent criminal simply because he opposes Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. (Venezuela has yet to receive any answers on how Díaz could have been granted a visa to enter the United States in the first place.)
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