Thank you so much to everyone who was able to join our briefing “Two Hundred Years is Enough!: Moving Past the Monroe Doctrine Toward a New Era in US-Latin American Relations” this week in person and virtually.
If useful, we’ve included highlights from the event below, as well as digital versions of the materials distributed at the event. A full recording of the briefing can be found here, and a Tweet thread of highlight clips is here.
Materials
The Current Migrant Crisis: How U.S. Policy Toward Latin America Has Fueled Historic Numbers of Asylum Seekers by Juan González, published by UIC Great Cities Institute
It’s Time to Move On From the Monroe Doctrine op-ed by Rep. Nydia Velázquez
CEPR Reports
CEPR Sanctions Watch November 2023
Summit of the Americas Underlines Widespread Discontent with U.S. Policy Generally
OAS Continues to Dodge Accountability for Actions in the 2019 Bolivian Election
Biden Should Reverse Trump’s Designation of Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism”
Key quotes from panelists
Representative Nydia Velázquez (NY-7): “The United States cannot call itself a leader on the world stage as it continues to have colonial rule, like in the case of Puerto Rico, where more than 125 years of American imperialism has brought the island its worst financial crisis in history and accelerated population decline. The United States cannot talk about promoting democracy while continuing to support policies that hurt everyday people just to send political messages, like in the case of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela, which has sparked migration and human rights crisis.”
Representative Greg Casar (TX-35): “How we are going to survive together, how is it that we are going address the climate crisis together given that in Latin America and the United States we are both subject to enormous storms and climate disruption but also the technologies and renewable energy of the future can really be built by us working together. How is it that we can tackle the global migration challenges together, and deal with political instability together, and deal with the rise of the far right and authoritarianism together instead… Leaving the Monroe Doctrine behind is not only leaving coups and extraction and putting corporate interests and political elites before everyday people behind – that’s one key part – but it also opens up this enormous realm of possibility [for collaboration].”
Representative Chuy García (IL-4): “International Financial Institutions (IFIs) play a central role in the international financial architecture, and they claim to do so in the name of poverty reduction and sustainable economic growth. But IFIs are also political institutions, and the policies that they follow are the products of different interests, local, national, corporate, competing on uneven ground with tremendous consequences for internal displacement, migration, public health, and sustainability. I’m proud to be leading the congressional fight against IMF surcharges, which the US has long supported at the expense of other countries’ economic flexibility. I’m also pushing for another allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) which offers a cost free opportunity for developing countries to invest in public health, education, and poverty alleviation.”
Juan González, Senior Fellow, Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois-Chicago: “Despite all that money [the US spends on border enforcement], migrant encounters at the border are at record levels and our immigration system remains completely broken. While we wait for the long-overdue revamping of our immigration laws, however, we can still address this most recent crisis. To start, we should end the sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Congress should sharply increase foreign aid to Latin America to address the root causes of why people leave. It should provide increased federal assistance to the northern cities and southwest border towns that are feeding and housing the migrants. And we, as a nation, need to renounce, once and for all, the Monroe Doctrine’s legacy of imperial control over Latin America.”
Gimena Sanchez, Director for The Andes, Washington Office on Latin America: “A new US relationship with Latin America should seek a relationship where governments are treated as equals, and to strengthen peace efforts [in Colombia] by designating a State envoy, and doing all it can to facilitate peace, including taking Cuba off of the terrorism list. As first the international accompanier to the Ethnic Chapter [of the Colombian Peace Accord] the US should be at the forefront of advancing Afro-Colombian indigenous rights. It goes without saying that ethnic rights, Afro-Colombian indigenous rights, is also beneficial to the world because it is also defending the environment.”
Laura Carlsen, Director, Mira: Feminisms and Democracies: “There’s great concern over the role of the U.S. Ambassador Laura Doku in support of elements of the old regime and corrupt business class. She has publicly spoken against efforts to clean up the notoriously corrupt attorney general’s office, criticized reform of fraudulent contracts entered into under the narco dictatorship, especially in energy, and supported the economic development and employment zones called ZEDEs that were repealed in 2022 as unconstitutional, even going as far as to indicate support for investors who filed an 11 billion dollar lawsuit against the Honduran government for protecting its own national laws and sovereignty that could leave the entire nation destitute. These zones essentially cede Honduran resources and territory to transnational corporations and are widely opposed as an affront to sovereignty. They are a source also of violent repression against local communities, especially Afro and Indigenous communities that pose them on their lands…policies that strengthen abusive security forces and foreign investment that denies human rights, indigenous and women’s rights in particular, virtually guarantee further attacks. If the US government actively obstructs efforts in Honduras to eliminate corruption, roll back illegal land grabs, and reform the legal system including the criminal and tax codes, instability, impunity, and poverty will continue, and out-migration will rise.”
Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research: “Latin America succeeded from 2003 to 2013, the majority of the hemisphere had left of center independent democratic governments, that never happened before. And what happened? Poverty fell from 44% to 28%, after increasing for 20 years prior to that…And unfortunately, some of these governments came under attack from the United States, but I think this is changing now. That’s why we have this government in Colombia now, why we have a government in Mexico…I think, a radical change, a radical new idea to replace the Monroe Doctrine, which is that people get to choose their own governance in Latin America.”