COMMENTARY It's Pan American Week — but there's not a whole lot to celebrate in the Americas these days. Can the Americas Act help rekindle the sense of hemispheric, New World purpose we've lost?
I’ll bet you didn’t know this is Pan American Week! Yep, a time to observe just how wonderfully the New World experiment has turned out, 532 years after Columbus brought smallpox to the Bahamas on his way to China.
So let’s sit back and marvel at what a model of progressive, rule-of-law democracy the Americas are today.
For starters, consider that the human rights nonprofit Prisoners Defenders is purposely marking the week by reminding people of the almost 1,500 political prisoners languishing behind bars in the left-wing dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Or that Haiti is all but under the dictatorship of violent street gangs at the moment.
Or that the Inter-American Development Bank reports Latin America still bears the world's worst economic inequality.
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Or that Ecuador’s conservative government just trashed 70 years of international law by storming Mexico’s sovereign embassy in Quito to nab an Ecuadorian politician convicted of multi-million-dollar corruption who’d taken refuge there. Or that Mexico’s liberal government was actually giving that appalling corrupto refuge.
Or, lest we forget America is part of the Americas, that the Arizona Supreme Court just handed down an abortion ban so complete and medieval it makes Saudi Arabia’s edicts on women feel like a screening of Barbie.
Think of those last lines of The Great Gatsby, which speak of the “transitory enchanted moment” five centuries ago, when “man must have held his breath in the presence” of this hemisphere, “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
The only wonder out there now is more likely: I wonder what the hell happened to what former President George W. Bush assured us would be “the Century of the Americas.”
Well, a lot of folks feel Washington has a chance right now to help steer our hemisphaerium horribilis, and the U.S.’s long broken relationship with it, back toward the wonder years. Namely: a bill called the Americas Act.
The Americas Act seems to champion an approach to Latin America and the Caribbean that does more than just scream, 'Don't do business with China!'
The Americas Trade and Investment Act was introduced in Congress last month by a bipartisan group of sponsors that includes Miami Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar. She’s a Republican — and that matters because the Americas Act has the potential to positively affect the hemisphere in ways the GOP constantly harps on but rarely acts on, like democracy, immigration and communist China’s unsettling incursions into Latin America.
In fact, the legislation’s main aim is to blunt that encroachment — which has seen Beijing’s bilateral trade with Latin American skyrocket from about $10 billion at the turn of the century to almost $500 billion today. China has also lavished loans, tech and infrastructure projects on the region — along with totalitarian propaganda and what economists call usurious debt traps, which can turn developing nations into takeover targets.
Ripple effects
In response, the Americas Act would resuscitate the idea of U.S.-led, hemisphere-wide trade partnership by bringing more Latin American and Caribbean countries into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement (USMCA).
It would also make us serious about “nearshoring” industrial production back into this hemisphere in critical sectors like electronics, renewable energy and business services.
In short, it champions more than “just screaming, ‘Don’t do business with China!’” as Latin American political economy expert Richard Feinberg once described the U.S. approach.
But the Americas Act could have other ripple effects.
By setting bars for democratic, rule-of-law governance to get a seat at the USMCA table, for example, it could help pull Latin American countries on both the left and right away from the siren song of populist authoritarianism seducing so much of the region today.
Just as important, by promoting not just trade but practices like nearshoring, it could help stimulate the growth Latin America’s economies desperately need after being strangled by the COVID pandemic.
That, in turn, would reduce the diluvial immigration from Latin America that’s overwhelming the U.S. southern border — which Republicans call America’s gravest crisis.
Problem is, Salazar and the Americas Act’s other GOP sponsors have to convince fellow Republicans to back a bill that could address that gravest crisis before the November presidential election — but their nominee, Donald Trump, wants to keep the emergency un-addressed until then to benefit his campaign.
That cynicism gives us something else to marvel at during Pan American Week.
