United States: from the Americas Initiative to APEP

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 14/11/2023

34 years have passed since President George Bush announced the Project Initiative for the Americas, whose pillars were: the Brady Plan to restructure the debt of Latin American countries; establishment of the world's largest free trade area in the hemisphere, the FTA, and a democracy promotion forum, the Inter-American Summit.

It was estimated at that time that by freeing the region's economies from the burden of debt and creating a free trade space that encouraged an explosion in investments, the region would continue its democratic development within a framework of economic boom and hopeful future.

These auspicious scenarios never materialized thanks to the concerted attack by the so-called left-wing and right-wing forces in the region. For the left that was beginning to leave the university cloisters and unions to ascend to the top of power in several nations in the region, free trade and prosperity achieved in partnership with the United States were paramount. In effect, the poorly learned Marxist creed defined free trade as a chain of exploitation and the United States as the nation that directs the exploitation. If reality demonstrated otherwise, the people of the region would realize that for centuries the lords of the left had deceived them. And that, of course, was unacceptable since it amounted to self-destruction.

The gentlemen of the also misnamed right, made up fundamentally of the business class, for their part, were also not sold on the idea of having to compete with American companies or a more efficient nation in Latin America. For its members, restricted trade was the best of all worlds because they could make the public who end up paying a premium for lower quality products pay the cost of their inefficiencies.

And there was a kind of diabolical pact between the left and the right that ruined the United States proposal, which, by the way, had been designed by several Nobel Prize winners in economics who aimed to accelerate the creation of middle classes south of the Rio Grande. .

Today the situation is a thousand times worse than that which marked the decade of the nineties of the last century. Most economies look exhausted and without vital force to continue growing; COVID 19 demonstrated the weakness of the institutional framework that manages health and education services in the region and revealed the rent-seeking behavior of the region's elites when, instead of cooperating in solving the crisis, they did as much business as they could with all the medical and pharmaceutical supplies necessary to combat evil. As a consequence, civil societies in several countries broke out in protests that were exploited and penetrated by radical elements and organized crime to paralyze Colombia; turn Santiago de Chile into an immense pyre and set Ecuador on fire.

With this backdrop, the Biden administration launches the APEP (Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity) proposal. This initiative is very reminiscent of one that failed miserably in terms of creating prosperity in Latin America. That was the Alliance for Progress in which the United States invested 18 billion dollars to see the region's economies collapse in the following decade. This time there will be no investment infusion and no free trade. Which makes us presume that the region will continue to see its development hijacked by the left and the right.

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