Joe Biden's Plans For Latin America Fall Short

Joe Biden’s Plans for Latin America Fall Short about:reader?url=https://theintercept.com/2020/04/18/trump-latin...
theintercept.com
Joe Biden’s Plans for Latin America

Fall Short
John WashingtonJohn WashingtonApril 18 2020, 11:00 a.m.
18-23 minutos
Photo illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images
With Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, Joe

Biden has become the Democratic Party’s presumptive
nominee. The almost-octogenarian old-guard white male has
nearly 40 years of seasoning in Washington, stewing in the
Beltway’s conventional foreign policy wisdom. It’s a school of
thought that overlooks corruption and human rights abuses
when it’s convenient, prioritizes aid to police and militaries,
1 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
relies on international development bank loans contingent

upon strict austerity measures, and favors corporate-friendly
policies which often include natural resource extraction. When
it comes to Latin America, Biden’s campaign platform is
particularly uninspiring and, indeed, downright damaging.
No one denies that the Trump administration has been

uniquely calamitous for Latin America — both with regards to
foreign policy and to Latin American migrants who want to
make a life in the United States. Trump and his acolytes have
caged children, slashed refugee and asylum protections,
forced people into dangerously squalid camps in northern
Mexico, and detained more migrants in the United States than
ever before. They’ve also cut aid to Central America, forced
regional governments to receive asylum-seekers when they
are clearly unable to offer safety, looked the other way in the
face of serious human rights violations and rampant
corruption, and emboldened aspiring autocrats like Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro and Salvadoran President Nayib
Bukele to lash out at the media and tighten their grips on
power. Slamming the brakes on these policies must be a
priority for a Democratic administration, but it won’t be nearly
enough. If Biden wins the nomination and the presidency, he
will also face a region suffering the impact of the novel
coronavirus (spread, in some cases, by deportations from the
United States) and crippled by economic recession, as well as
the drying up of remittances from outside.
Biden once said, “The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my

brand.” Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin America.
Yet Biden, in promising a return to what he recalls as the
2 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
golden days of the Obama administration in which he served,

and in touting that administration’s approach to migration and
the region’s multifaceted crises, all while reaching further back
to claim credit for the multibillion-dollar anti-drug campaign
Plan Colombia, offers a return to a status quo that was rank
with its own problems. Biden’s rubric of stratagems may not be
as bitterly cruel as those of the Trump administration, but it still
supports short-term American interests, overlooks serious
human rights abuses, relies on militarized “security” responses
to instability, and promotes an extractive neoliberal agenda.
Biden’s plan for Central America — one of 28 “bold ideas”

featured on his campaign website — dressed up in left-tilting
rhetoric for primary season, harkens back to the same, often
failing and sometimes flailing, strategies he espoused as vice
president and as a senator.
As Biden put it to Politico in 2014,“The only thing I know is I

ain’t changing my brand.” Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin
America.
Plan Colombia
Though a senator since 1973, Joe Biden only began marking

his “brand” in Latin America with Plan Colombia, a massive
foreign and military aid package aimed at taking down the
illegal drug trade that was signed into law by Bill Clinton in
2000. Biden championed the legislation as member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and, in a way, the plan
was a continuation of the anti-drug measures he’d promoted
throughout the 1980s as a member of the Judiciary
Committee. Domestically, as a tough-on-crime senator, Biden
3 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
pushed for more policing, even criticizing Reagan for not

locking up enough people. In Latin America, efforts Biden
backed played out as whack-a-mole strategies, with the Drug
Enforcement Agency and international partners chasing drug
traffickers from one route to another, but doing little to curb
total production, demand, or the northward flow of drugs. Plan
Colombia only increased the emphasis on a heavy-handed,
militarized response to the drug problem, pushing production
and trafficking routes from more isolated to more populated
parts of Colombia. As Steven D. Cohen put it recently in The
Baffler, “Plan Colombia was in effect to Global South
pacification what the 1994 crime bill had been to domestic
policing.”
This past January, during a primary campaign stop, Biden said

to the Des Moines Register, “I’m the guy who put together
Plan Colombia,” which, given the legacy of the plan, might
sound like a confession, but was certainly meant as a boast.
Though it effectively achieved none of its original objectives,
the plan continues to be lauded by some American politicians,
including Biden, as an exemplary success — embodying the
establishment’s tunnel-vision focus on military expenditures
and open markets. John Kerry called Colombia, in reference to
the plan, “one of the great stories of Latin America.” The plan
has also served as a model for other such “security” policies
throughout the region: in Mexico and in Guatemala, Honduras,
and El Salvador, the northern triangle of Central America.
“These human costs were never part of the policy calculus for
Joe Biden.”
María Teresa Ronderos, a Colombian journalist who has
4 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
written extensively on politics and war in the country, told me

the plan was “a disaster — not something to be proud about.”
Dawn Paley, author of “Drug War Capitalism,” explained that
the plan was a “success” only in “in terms of opening up the
country’s economy and laying the groundwork for the
Colombia–U.S. Free Trade Agreement,” which was signed in
2006. In perhaps the most obvious sign of failure, after the
implementation of the plan, cocaine flowed northward at
higher rates and lower prices than ever before. The other clear
result was an increase in violence: Between 2003 and 2007,
the Colombian army, funded and emboldened by the United
States, killed thousands of civilians and falsely claimed they
were guerrilla soldiers killed in combat, in what became known
as the “false positives” scandal. During the same period, as
John Lindsay-Poland, author of “Plan Colombia,” explained,
more than 7 million Colombians were displaced by the armed
conflict. “These human costs were never part of the policy
calculus for Joe Biden,” Lindsay-Poland said.
From 2000 to 2008, as Paley recounts in her book, “the

Colombian military received $4.9 billion worth of U.S. State
Department and Defense Department assistance, the majority
of which was provided under the rubric of Plan Colombia.”
Paley also notes that the CIA operated in the country with a
“multibillion-dollar black budget,” and that “battalions of the
Colombian army were trained to protect oil pipelines belonging
to U.S. companies.” During the same period, there were more
homicides counted than ever before in the nation’s history.
“If it was meant to put an end to the guerrilla armies, it wasn’t

effective. If it was a plan to stop drug trafficking, it just pushed
5 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
[trafficking] to more populated areas, which was overall worse

for Colombia,” Ronderos told me.
Besides its anti-narcotics focus, Plan Colombia also helped

speed along privatization and other neoliberal reforms. The
International Monetary Fund, along with the World Bank,
began working in Colombia to restructure its economy in 1990;
in the following decade, the unemployment rate went from just
over 10 percent to nearly 20 percent. In 1999, the IMF loaned
the country $2.9 billion dollars that was contingent on strict
austerity measures, including “severe cutbacks in public
investment in basic social services-health care, education and
social security.” Another $2.1 billion loan went through in 2003,
along with another wave of austerity measures, including “the
restructuring of the pension program, cuts to the public sector
workforce, and the privatization of a major bank,” Paley wrote.
(While not officially a part of Plan Colombia, the Colombian
government leveraged the plan to push for the IMF loan.)
Paley also traces the benefits reaped from the plan by palm oil
companies, mining companies, and major transnational
corporations like Chiquita. Lower-class and especially rural
Colombians saw little to none of those benefits, and millions of
hectares of land were stolen from mostly Indigenous
communities.
In 2020, Biden is again promoting, via his campaign platform,

the so-called development banks as a key part of his Latin
America policy, calling on the World Bank to prime Latin
American countries to engage “with the private sector” and
“promote foreign investment.” And he’s proudly claiming Plan
Colombia as something that “strengthened that government
6 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
out for a long while,” even as the country continues to teeter

on the edge of war and the peace process signed in 2016
continues to unravel. In 2019, according to the U.N., there
were between 107 and 120 human rights defenders killed in
Colombia.
Joe Biden, as vice president, speaks with then Guatemalan President

Otto Pérez Molina, Inter-American Development Bank President Luis
Alberto Moreno, then Salvadoran President Salvador Sánchez
Cerén, and Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández during a
seminar on “Investing in Central America” at the Inter-American
Development Bank in Washington, D.C., November 14, 2014.
Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Alliance for Prosperity
The other major Latin American policy that, despite its

towering failures, Biden boasts of being an architect of, was
called the Alliance for Prosperity. It came in 2014, on the heels
of an increase in the arrival of Central American children at the
7 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom came alone, seeking

asylum. Biden referred to the children at the time as a
“dangerous surge of migration.” Dana Frank,
professor emerita of history at University of California Santa
Cruz and an expert on Honduras, sees that framing as
“fanning the flames of hysteria, and setting the stage for
Trump” to invoke anti-immigration sentiment and ride it to
victory in 2016.
The money went to “increasingly militarized police forces and

military forces involved in countless human rights abuses.”
Biden was dispatched by Obama to address the crisis and

responded by requesting a billion dollars to supposedly tackle
the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Honduras. The money — $750 million was eventually
approved — primarily went to security assistance, which
increased from $161 million in 2015 to $252 million in 2016.
As Alexander Main, of the Center for Economic Policy
Research, put it, the money was for “increasingly militarized
police forces and military forces involved in countless human
rights abuses, including the assassination of activists like
Berta Cáceres in Honduras,” which involved at least three
active and retired military officials.
Frank sees the aid as “just a front for how U.S. officials want to
shore up these regimes … basically giving even more money
to the perpetrators.” She pointed out that there’s no way Biden
and others in the U.S. government didn’t know about rampant
corruption in the region. Juan Orlando Hernández, elected as
president of Honduras in disputed elections in 2013, for
example, has since been accused by U.S. prosecutors of
8 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
taking drug money for both his 2013 and 2017 election
campaigns. His brother has been charged with drug trafficking,
his wife has been implicated, and Mexican drug kingpin
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán allegedly gave him $1 million in
exchange for protection. In 2014, in celebration of the Alliance
for Prosperity, Biden, bearing his signature alligator grin,
posed with Hernández and the presidents of Guatemala and
El Salvador. Biden and Hernández were both giving thumbs-
up. (Last August, Biden called Venezuelan president Nicolas
Maduro “a tyrant, who has stolen elections, abused his
authority, allowed his cronies to enrich themselves.” He has
offered no such condemnation of Honduras president
Hernández, who has done all of the same.)
Despite an ongoing exodus from the region, Biden claims that

“the Biden approach” to Central America “reduced violence
and helped to ensure that families and children remained in
their home countries.” Though emigration from Central
America dipped briefly in 2015, it has continued at 2014 levels
or higher ever since, with record numbers of people seeking
asylum since 2014. Asylum claims at the southern border
increased fourfold from 2014 to 2017. And while some
statistics point to a decrease in homicides in Honduras, for
example, Peter Hakim, president emeritus and a senior fellow
at the Inter-American Dialogue, is dubious of that accounting.
“They fudged figures in the election,” he said. “Why couldn’t
they fudge homicide statistics?”
“Particularly troubling,” Main of CEPR told me, “is the fact that
according to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO)
report, there has been ‘no real assessment of outcomes’ for
9 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
most of the over $2 billion worth of U.S. assistance programs

since 2013, and the few assessments that the GAO obtained
showed, at best, ‘mixed results.’” CEPR showed in a 2016
report that the one study frequently pointed to as proof of a
positive outcome from security aid was “based on flawed
statistical analysis, and its findings therefore had no validity.”
Still, in 2020, the Biden campaign proposes more of the same:

a four-year, $4 billion investment plan for Central America,
with a few new details thrown in. In acknowledging the
destabilizing and migration-driving effects of climate change in
the region, for example, the only response the Biden plan
offers is support for unspecified “clean energy” and a vague
throwaway line about “adaptation and resilience.” This
relegates one of the most severe problems in the region — a
ravaging yearslong drought that is pushing huge tracts of
Central America to desperation — to an imprecise talking
point.
“Many people are leaving Honduras in part because their

electrical bills have shot up dramatically.”
As with Colombia, Biden claims the World Bank and the Inter-
American Development Bank can develop infrastructure in the
region. To cite Honduras again, the country has relied on
multimillion-dollar loans contingent on austerity before, with
the government using the money to build infrastructure for
export-oriented sweatshops that have since spawned gang-
ruled slums in their circumference. Honduras also succumbed
to IMF pressure to privatize energy companies. In 2019,
“many people are leaving Honduras in part because their
electrical bills have shot up dramatically,” Frank told me.
10 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
It’s also revealing to look at what’s not in Biden’s current

proposal for Central America. “There is nothing in there about
the enormous human rights crisis, and little to offer about
building a functional state that should provide health care and
other basic services. It’s all about extraction,” Frank said.
Biden, she said, “has been a key cause in producing and
exacerbating the very problems he is now claiming to
address.”
Migrants are guided by Mexican authorities through the Ceibo border

crossing between Mexico and Guatemala on January 19, 2020.
Photo: Jair Cabrera Torres/picture alliance via Getty Images
Migration
Any assessment of foreign policy in Latin America cannot

ignore U.S. immigration policy. Remittances from Salvadoran
and Honduran migrants living in the United States account for
around 20 percent of each countries’ GDP. Overall, hundreds
11 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
of thousands of migrants are deported to the region every

year, and hundreds of thousands also migrate to or toward the
United States. Migration from the Northern Triangle “cannot be
effectively addressed if solutions only focus on our southern
border,” another “bold idea” from Biden’s 2020 campaign
website correctly remarks.
Read Our
Complete CoverageThe War on Immigrants
But Biden’s ideas for what lies beyond the southern border still
prioritize stopping migration over improving lives. Along with
the Alliance for Prosperity, the Obama administration pushed
Mexico to establish the Programa Frontera Sur, funding and
inciting Mexican officials to crack down heavily on Central
American migrants in southern Mexico. As a result, migrants
were pushed into more dangerous territory, where notoriously
abusive Mexican agents hounded, arrested, abused, and
sometimes killed them with blanket impunity. (Trump took a
similar approach, though he has threatened rather than funded
the Mexican government to crack down on U.S.-bound
migration.)
At the same time, though deportations from the United States

dropped in 2014 and 2015, there were still significantly more
12 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
deportations under Obama and Biden than during any other

administration. If Obama was the deporter-in-chief, as critics
and immigrant rights activists took to calling him, Biden was
his deputy. While Trump has deported fewer people in his first
three years in office than the same period under Obama, he
has locked up significantly more. And yet, as Christina Fialho,
co-founder and co-executive director of Freedom for
Immigrants, told The Intercept, “The expansion of immigration
detention since the early 1980s has been a bipartisan
initiative. Where we are today is the result of three decades of
increasingly aggressive policies under both parties’
leadership.”
Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network,

emphasized the fact that “the Obama administration greatly
increased the immigration detention infrastructure.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Shah added. “With Covid-19,

the demand to end immigration detention has become clearer
and more urgent. The billions of taxpayer dollars used to fund
ICE’s detention system should instead be used to fund critical
healthcare, education, and housing programs that support our
collective wellbeing.”
“We cannot just undo the Trump administration’s policies or

revert to the Obama administration’s policies. We must end
the whole system.”
As Shah’s comment reflects, the Democratic Party during

Trump’s presidency has moved left on immigration, and Biden
has tried to claim that he has too. His campaign website states
that as president, he would “immediately do away with the
13 of 14 19/04/20 17:05
Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies,” listing

off the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols, asylum bans,
family separation, and expanded detention among other
policies he plans to end. In the last debate with Sanders, he
committed to a temporary moratorium on deportations.
But the anti-immigration momentum built up by the Trump

administration — with immigration judges, the Supreme Court,
and attorneys general locking in xenophobic policies; the
continued construction of wall and fencing infrastructure along
the southern border; and an emboldened ICE and Border
Patrol — cannot be “immediately” done away with. And given
Biden’s history, advocates are skeptical that he will carry
through with his left-leaning promises.
“If we truly want to be a country that lives by its values of

‘liberty and justice for all,’ we cannot just undo the Trump
administration’s policies or revert to the Obama
administration’s policies. We must end the whole system,”
Fialho added. Building a more just and human system of
immigration will require ideas outside the Biden brand.
The same is true of foreign policy. As Paley put it, “Biden’s

plan represents the continuation of the same model of military
and private sector intervention in Central America that has
displaced and harmed so many.” While there’s nothing bold in
his plans for Latin America, there is plenty that is old, and
Biden’s position is clear: He promises more Biden.
14 of 14 19/04/20 17:05

Joe Biden's Plans For Latin America Fall Short

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Joe Biden's Plans For Latin America Fall Short

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Joe Biden's Plans For Latin America Fall Short

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Joe Biden’s Plans for Latin America Fall Short about:reader?url=https://theintercept.com/2020/04/18/trump-latin...

Joe Biden’s Plans for Latin America

Photo illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

With Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, Joe

relies on international development bank loans contingent

No one denies that the Trump administration has been

Biden once said, “The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my

Yet Biden, in promising a return to what he recalls as the

golden days of the Obama administration in which he served,

Biden’s plan for Central America — one of 28 “bold ideas”

As Biden put it to Politico in 2014,“The only thing I know is I

Though a senator since 1973, Joe Biden only began marking

pushed for more policing, even criticizing Reagan for not

This past January, during a primary campaign stop, Biden said

María Teresa Ronderos, a Colombian journalist who has

written extensively on politics and war in the country, told me

From 2000 to 2008, as Paley recounts in her book, “the

“If it was meant to put an end to the guerrilla armies, it wasn’t

[trafficking] to more populated areas, which was overall worse

Besides its anti-narcotics focus, Plan Colombia also helped

In 2020, Biden is again promoting, via his campaign platform,

out for a long while,” even as the country continues to teeter

Joe Biden, as vice president, speaks with then Guatemalan President

Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Alliance for Prosperity

The other major Latin American policy that, despite its

U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom came alone, seeking

The money went to “increasingly militarized police forces and

Biden was dispatched by Obama to address the crisis and

Despite an ongoing exodus from the region, Biden claims that

most of the over $2 billion worth of U.S. assistance programs

Still, in 2020, the Biden campaign proposes more of the same:

“Many people are leaving Honduras in part because their

It’s also revealing to look at what’s not in Biden’s current

Migrants are guided by Mexican authorities through the Ceibo border

Photo: Jair Cabrera Torres/picture alliance via Getty Images

Any assessment of foreign policy in Latin America cannot

of thousands of migrants are deported to the region every

At the same time, though deportations from the United States

deportations under Obama and Biden than during any other

Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network,

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Shah added. “With Covid-19,

“We cannot just undo the Trump administration’s policies or

As Shah’s comment reflects, the Democratic Party during

Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies,” listing

But the anti-immigration momentum built up by the Trump

“If we truly want to be a country that lives by its values of

The same is true of foreign policy. As Paley put it, “Biden’s

You might also like