The Good Neighbor Strategy

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A presidential election too close to call. Aggrieved voters in the streets. Partisans exchanging accusations of fraud and demanding manual recounts. Lawyers drooling in expectation of weeks of court fights.

Sound familiar? It should. Mexico City today feels a lot like Tallahassee, Fla., six year ago. But Mexico's election is about much more than who will become the country's next President, and its result will have lasting implications for Latin America as a whole. In 2000, although U.S. voters were choosing between two very different presidential candidates, only a minority felt that the outcome would drastically alter the basic foundations of the nation. Not so for Mexicans. Voters believed the election would not only decide who would run the country for six years but also, more fundamentally, what kind of political and economic system Mexico would have. The platforms of the two leading candidates--the conservative Felipe Calderón and the leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador--differed on the roles of the state vs. the market, the nature of political institutions, how to fight poverty and what kinds of links Mexico should have with the rest of the world.

That clash of visions is not confined to Mexico. Similar battles are raging throughout Latin America, which is witnessing the rise of a generation of politicians seeking to capitalize on frustration with the free-market, pro-American policies commonly pursued in the region in the 1990s, when much was promised and little was accomplished in terms of raising living standards. The leader of this turn toward populism is Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who has cast himself as the heir to Fidel Castro, using his country's oil bonanza to purchase political influence all over the continent. But in recent months, the Chávez movement has run up against opposition from forces that view it as wrongheaded, militaristic and undemocratic. In Mexico's election, as in Peru's last month, Chávez turned out to be more of a liability than an asset to the leftist candidate carrying his banner.

That ambivalence provides an opportunity for the U.S. The issues fueling the Chávez movement--poverty, inequality, exclusion, corruption and widespread frustration--haven't gone away. Despite the perorations of populists like Chávez and Castro, Latin America's maladies are not made in Washington but are self-inflicted wounds originating in the predatory élites that control policymaking in places like Buenos Aires, Caracas, Brasília and Mexico City. Those are problems for which Washington has never had the skills or the means to influence. On the whole, the U.S. is better off letting Latin Americans figure out how to solve Latin America's problems.

But indifference has its costs too. After Sept. 11, the U.S.'s priorities of fighting Islamic terrorism and waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have led the Bush Administration to ignore Latin America as mostly irrelevant, which has allowed leaders like Chávez to attack U.S. policies at will and sully Washington's reputation in the region. But the U.S. can still repair much of the damage--if it takes two bold initiatives that would break through the shortsighted policies that limit its opportunities in Latin America.