The Summit of the Americas has presented the Caricom states and governments with two bites of the cherry, so to speak, as President Obama’s visit to Panama served as an inducement to visit Jamaica, so highlighting the current policy predicaments of many of the Region’s economies. Caricom governments will be pleased as much by the notice that he has taken of them as a special sub-grouping of the hemisphere, as by the initiatives that he announced relating to energy and climate change policies; and to Caricom’s concern with threats to the region’s security, this latter bringing forth a promise of United States attendance at, and support for a Caribbean Security Summit, tentatively set for June.
Caricom governments will also be satisfied with the initiatives taken by the President to begin a normalization of relations with Cuba, though they are well aware that this will involve the assent of what looks like an increasingly intransigent American Congress, as Obama’s tenure of office draws to a conclusion.
No doubt too, the general climate of the summit has produced what we can call a non-confrontational American attitude to Venezuela, even as President Maduro formally continued his now well-rehearsed verbal barrage against the United States. It is likely that Caricom governments, many of them grateful for the terms of the PetroCaribe arrangement, would hardly want the temperature between the two countries to increase much more; for it must be a fact that a continuing decline in Venezuela’s economy will hardly result in the sustenance of the agreements.
In a sense the results of the summit have probably been overshadowed by the state of domestic relations in certain major hemispheric countries. It has been held at a time when the rate of protests against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has been rising as a result of the country’s economy, indicating a continuing decline into the first quarter of this year. These demonstrations of continuing dissatisfaction have been taking place against a government already severely embarrassed and pressured to account for a recently revealed corruption scandal of the country’s state oil company Petrobras, much of which saw its origins at a time when the President herself headed the company.
President Obama’s invitation to the Brazilian president to visit the United States suggests American confidence in a renewal of relations with President Rousseff’s government following her refusal to follow up on a previous invitation following the indication of American intelligence operations in that country revealed by the agent Edward Snowden.
In much the same vein, the United States, as a government, will still be waiting to see results produced by the government of President Peña Nieto of Mexico, who ran a campaign in 2012 on the liberalization of an economy dominated for many years by state controls and ownership. While the President has indeed pursued this course, his government seems to have been severely challenged by criminality based on the narcotics trade, with little indication that it has been able to prevail.
In that sense, the Mexican government would appear to be domestically centred in that direction, as against what the United States had assumed before the last general elections there, this being that Mexico would be a positive demonstration case of a persistent liberalization of the economy. So while from a hemispheric perspective, though the economy did grow at a rate of 2.1 per cent in 2014 (an advance on 2013), the government’s focus in this year has been on fiscal discipline, in the light of the continuing decline in oil prices.
From a Caricom vantage point it would appear, then, that Mexico’s own perspective, apart from its relations with the US, has continued to focus on what might be called its own special sub-regional area, the Central American states.
From a Caricom perspective too, it would appear that the concern of the governments assembled was not so much on hemispheric relations, as with the United States own continuing concern with the menace of the narcotics trade and its effects on the Region. There appears to be little evidence that major Latin American states took, probably apart from the drug trade, a global view of the area, as one constituted of countries of diverse sizes and diverse current capabilities; and one therefore struggling to come to terms with an effort of regional economic integration. Though, on the other hand, it is not clear that our governments, collectively, went to Panama with that specific focus.
In that sense, President Obama succeeded in centering the summit on a pacification of the two key issues of lingering American strategic concern, these being relations with Cuba and Venezuela. In that sense too, Obama’s diplomacy succeeded, given other countries’ unwillingness to be unduly preoccupied with those issues.
For it has now appeared to them, first, that in spite of possible domestic foot-dragging by the American Congress, the Cuban question is already now ripe for resolution, or at least agreement on persistent steps to resolution; and secondly that, in spite of the temperamental nature of the Venezuelan leadership, there is no basis for new measures against a government now seeming to be bogged down by misplaced economic policies, reinforced by the continuing decline in oil prices.
Within Caricom itself, it appears that the US government, irrespective of which party next holds the presidency, recognizes the concern of Caricom governments that a persistent United States concern with, and substantial support for, coping with the connection between crime, narcotics and security, is necessary. Trinidad & Tobago Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar’s continuing focus on this, as lead Prime Minister on Crime and Security, would appear to have held some sway.
What remains is the question of the path to persistent growth of Caricom economies, and the role that help from the United States, in particular, can play. President Obama, on his visit to Jamaica, seemed to be concerned to emphasise support for the determination with which that country has stuck to the IMF’s advice on its economy. Yet, sentiment in that country would appear to be that something else is now needed to lift the economy on to a path of economic growth.
Whether the President’s fine words on his visit there will result in helping the economy on the next steps is left to be seen. For this must surely have been his last hurrah in our part of the world.
