Reordering regional security in Latin America.

• Author: Trinkunas, Harold
• Position: Security

In the wake of the Cold War, regional democratization and economic liberalization were supposed to usher in an opportunity to build a common hemispheric security agenda, designed to unite the United States and Latin America in collaboration against the "new" security threats posed by organized crime and violent nonstate actors. Two decades later, the threats remain much the same, yet the hemispheric security agenda has fragmented, replaced in part by projects designed to build specifically South American regional institutions. As some scholars predicted, heterogeneous threat perceptions across the region, differences over democratization, and tensions over the effects of free trade and market liberalization have confounded the effort to build a hemispheric security agenda. Yet the efforts by former President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to radically transform the regional security order by building a Bolivarian alliance of states as an explicit counterweight to U.S. power have also fallen short. Instead, Brazil's ascent as a global economic power and the growing prosperity of the region as a whole has created an opportunity for Brazil to organize new mid-range political institutions, embodied in the Union of South American States (UNASUR), that exclude the United States yet pursue a consensual security agenda. This emerging regional order is designed by Brazil to secure its leadership in South America and allow it to choose when and where to involve the United States in managing regional crises. Yet, Brazil is finding that the very obstacles that confounded hemispheric security collaboration after the Cold War still endure in South America, limiting the effectiveness of the emerging regional security order.

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Contemporary accounts of insecurity in Latin America focus with good reason on the rising tide of violence and threats to public safety in cities such as Caracas, Ciudad Juarez, and Kingston; along borders--particularly the U.S.-Mexico and Mexico-Guatemala border; and along smuggling routes in Central America and the Caribbean. Organized crime, narcotics, smuggling, gangs, and other violent nonstate actors are the main threat to security, and in some cases, give rise to the talk about failed states in the Western Hemisphere. (1)

These threats are similar, although perhaps played out in different settings and with other actors, to those Latin America faced during the 1990s in the wake of the Cold War. At that time, the wave of democratization and liberalization that swept through Latin America gave rise to the hope that the region would move away from traditional geopolitical tensions and towards a cooperative regional security agenda that countered the new security threats posed by organized crime and supported the prevailing agenda for free elections and free trade. In turn, free trade would support deepening economic interdependence, a convergence of security interests between the United States and Latin America, and a regional democratic peace. So what went wrong?

In his seminal 1998 article, "Security in Latin America," Andrew Hurrell observed that the enduring heterogeneity of interests and threat perceptions between states in the Southern Cone of South America, the Andes, Central America, and the United States were obstacles to regional collaboration. He argued that democratization and regional integration were as likely to accentuate disagreements as to resolve them, and he predicted that variation in perceptions of threat among states would hinder cooperation against transnational crime. (2)

Today, Hurrell's warnings have by and large been borne out: threat perceptions remain heterogeneous across the region; disagreements over what is a democracy have produced new ideological tensions between states; integration projects have advanced modestly amidst great argument; and the perennial calls to regionalize responses to growing criminal violence have foundered on national interests. However, the centrality of the United States for the regional security order has decreased during the past decade, at least for states in South America. Steady economic improvement in states across the region and the limited impact of the global financial crisis on regional economies since, has provided governments, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela, with new latitude to pursue regional security arrangements and agendas that do not include the United States as a participant.

Key Latin American states--such as Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela--have historically had the ambition to establish a more autonomous foreign and security policy. Argentina thought itself the economic rival of the United States, nearly equal in GDP per capita at the end of the nineteenth century. Brazil sought the diplomatic prerogatives associated with great power status by becoming a co-belligerent during the First World War and a member of the Allies during the Second World War. During the 1960s and 1970s, Venezuela played a leading role in forming the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Contadora Group. Historically, these ambitions were eventually checked by crises of development and growth. (3) More recently, steady gains and increasingly favorable terms of trade for exports have provided some Latin American states with a period of stability from the late 1990s to 2008--a contrast with the economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s. This upturn has been particularly significant in the case of Brazil, which has become one of the ten largest economies in the world, and Venezuela, which benefited from unprecedented windfall oil rents due to the steady climb in the world price for oil for the past decade. (4)

Economic gains during the past decade provided both Brazil and Venezuela with the wherewithal to renew their ambitions for regional leadership and a revised security order. Venezuela, under the leadership of former President Hugo Chavez, attempted to use its booming oil revenues to consolidate a regional coalition, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), with an explicitly revisionist agenda towards the international order and towards the U.S. role in this order. (5) Brazil has pursued an alternative diplomatic approach to building new regional institutions, focused on the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and its associated defense wing, the South American Defense Council (CDS). (6) Significant Brazilian elites aspire to a global role, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and UNASUR is part of a strategy of consolidating regional leadership.

Revisionism aimed at the security order in South America is unlikely to produce a radical shift in the focus of the regional security agenda. The regional security threats remain the same, at least in nature if not in the specific identity and location of violent nonstate actors and organized crime groups. (7) Brazil, the only power in the region that has the potential to achieve major power status based on traditional indicators used in the literature on power transition--population size, economic growth, and stage of development--seeks marginal adjustments to the international order that accommodates its ambitions to be a great power. (8) However, the same obstacles that plagued the development of a consensual regional security agenda during the 1990s--questions about democratization, tensions over economic integration, and differences in threat perceptions--are now on the agenda of the new regional security institutions, regardless of their exclusion of the United States as a participant.

OBSTACLES TO A REGIONAL APPROACH TO SECURITY IN LATIN AMERICA AFTER THE COLD WAR

At the end of the Cold War, some observers were optimistic about prospects for regional peace and security in the Western Hemisphere, believing that economic interdependence, regional integration, and democratization would produce a hemispheric "Kantian" peace. (9) The end of military dictatorships across the region during the 1980s provided an opportunity to test the reach of this democratic peace theory. (10) Free trade and market liberalization, the so-called Washington Consensus, were the prevailing economic doctrine, and following the successful ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), negotiations for a region-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were foremost on the regional trade agenda. At least theoretically, deepening economic interdependence in the region suggested that interstate tensions should diminish. Finally, the prevalence of nonstate threats to regional security such as organized crime, smuggling, and other forms of illicit trafficking gave rise to the hope that a collaborative region-wide security agenda was possible. After all, surely states could agree to cooperate to combat violent nonstate actors that were a threat to all of their citizens. (11)

As David Mares argues, the international status quo in Latin America is deceptive, in that war is infrequent but the alternative is a "violent peace," a situation in which there are few interstate wars but enduring border disputes. (12) Latin America is geographically distant from conflicts between great powers in Eurasia; many of its state borders lie along remote, difficult to access terrain; and regional military capabilities are relatively modest. This has translated into a small and declining number of major interstate wars within the region since the nineteenth century. There is also a regional predilection for addressing territorial disputes via arbitration and international law on the basis of uti possidetis juris, a legal doctrine that enshrines the legitimacy of inherited colonial boundaries. (13) However, many border disputes go unresolved for decades, such as those between Peru and Chile over maritime borders, Bolivia and Chile over access to the sea, and Colombia and Nicaragua over the San...