 We're very pleased to welcome you to this IIA webinar where the subject is US-Latin American relations under the Biden administration. My name is Justin Harmon. I'm a retired Irish diplomat who has worked in the region on various occasions. And I'm currently based in Argentina where I'm working with the Association de Studios Irlandese del Sur, developing Irish studies in Latin America. I'm also associated with Carrie, which is the IIA equivalent body in Buenos Aires. We're delighted to be joined today by Guillaume Long, former Minister for Affairs of Ecuador. Guillaume Long will speak to us for about 15 minutes or so. And then we will move into a Q&A with our audience, both of which are on the record. You'll be able to join in the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session. Please also feel free to join in the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIA. On relations with the US, I think it's fair to say there are high hopes in the region of the new administration, not least owing to the experience of Biden himself. The anticipated change from the Trump era, when the region felt itself relegated. A key question was how the new approach would compare with that of the Obama era, and that's something I know that Guillaume will be speaking to today. Since President Biden took office, COVID and domestic policy initiatives have been to the forefront, while more recently the withdrawal from Afghanistan has dominated the US international agenda. Latin America has therefore appeared somewhat of a secondary priority. Insofar as the region has figured it has been dominated by the migration crisis in Central America, which is of course of significant domestic political sensitivity. Some have argued that if a narrow domestic based agenda is sustained, it could thwart the opportunity to renew key partnerships in the region that have come under strain in recent years. There have also been delays in Senate approval of senior nominations in DC and to embassies in the region which have hampered policy implementation. In the meantime, the pandemic is proving particularly destructive with over 30% of deaths globally for the region with 8% of the world population. It is exacerbating economic stagnation, rising inequality and political turbulence. And indeed, some scholars have suggested the pandemic is contributing to the growth of a neoliberal authoritarianism. The US is providing vaccines, but this has been sluggish while Russia and particularly China have been notably active, countering China, Chinese influence and presence is clearly a priority concern for the administration. In outlining policy towards the region, questions have been raised as to whether there are irreconcilable differences or perhaps competing priorities in the approach, particularly given the overall climate agenda. Some have asked whether in current circumstances, one size really can fit all is a regional approach feasible, given the diversity of issues now facing countries in the region. The important signal of US intentions was the recent visit to selected countries of national security advisor Jake Sullivan. We can also I think look to the prospects for the ninth summit of the Americas which will be hosted by the US in the next year. Here to discuss these and other issues is Guillaume Long whom I'm very happy to formally introduce and to hand over to him. He is currently a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He's held several cabinet positions in the government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs Minister of Culture and Minister of Knowledge. More recently he served as permanent representative to the UN in Geneva. He trained as an historian and holds a PhD in international politics from the University of London. He teaches international relations and comparison Latin American politics at Johns Hopkins University at the Institute of International Relations and Sciences in Paris, and he joins us today from France. Bienvenido. Welcome. Thank you Guillaume. Thank you very much Ambassador for this very generous introduction. I'd like to thank of course the IIA for inviting me. Thank you Ambassador for chairing this meeting. And I'd also like to thank Ross Fitzpatrick for making this event possible. Now, I don't have much time so I'm going to go straight into it. And hopefully we can we can cover some more ground during the questions. So the overarching question we're posing here is, is the Biden administration, a new beginning for Latin America is there real change in the US policy towards the region towards Latin America. After what many of us considered to be a rather disastrous approach towards Latin America during the Trump administration. And I think the short answer to that is that not really. I mean, maybe we should be more patient, maybe six months isn't yet enough to see what the Biden administration really wants to do in Latin America. But so far, I think, sort of expectations have been rather dashed. There's a lot of disappointment, and a lot of the policies that were put in place by the Trump administration remain in place, and there's been very little change. This is there are a lot of gray areas and have been some positive advances in some fields. Maybe I should, I won't have time to cover all the countries maybe we can do them during question time but just to give a few examples. My own country Ecuador I think it was the US showed very important goodwill during the electoral process that happened there it was the first election presidential election, taking place after Biden came to power in Latin America so it was very symbolic very very important, and they was a very clear threat a very real threat of a coup in March, April 2021 this year. It was very seldom covered by the international press, but the leftist candidates for the air of Rafael Correa came in first place in the first round. I think the elite pack setup by then President Lenny Moreno did everything in its power to stop the second round the runoff if you like, from happening, trying to overturn the results cancel the elections, find all sorts of ways to boycott the second round elections and the polls said that the leftist candidates would win. Well I have to say that the US administration did not support these coup, this calls for a coup I mean I interacted personally with a number of people from the incoming administration diplomats from the State Department, and they themselves were very explicit in saying that they were being solicited by people who wanted to interrupt stop cancel the the elections in Ecuador. So it significantly discouraged this from happening and the second round actually happened with actually ironically a result which I think favored the world I mean would have probably the preferred results from the United States point of view with actually a surprise win by Guillermo Lasso so not the leftist candidate winning, but at the time when the leftist candidates was poised to win with the polls favored in the United States really slowed things down and called for respect for institutions of democracy and what was a positive development we don't know what the Trump administration would have done, but given past experiences during the Trump administration. I'm thinking of Bolivia but I'm thinking of a number of cases. I think that having Mike Pompeo in the State Department and having your Trump the Trump administration handed over US foreign policy towards Latin America to essentially what I would call the Florida caucus of the Republican Party so sort of people close to Marco Rubio. Bolton was in the administration for a while with very aggressive sort of hawkish approach to Latin America with a very backyard sort of approach to the region and indicating the Monroe doctrine and all these kinds of things so obviously from the point of view of Ecuador, having Trump in place. We don't know what would happen or whether the coup would have taken place but we were very happy to see Biden show some clear signs of change there, I would say the same thing happened in Peru, the Peruvian opposition, or the Peruvian opposition, or the Peruvian opposition were willing to see a conservative right wing candidacy of Pekka Fukimori, a cry for fraud, and wanted to the institutions, the electoral body and the authorities to disrespect the electoral result in the runoff against Pedro Casillo who was declared eventually declared winner of the long process. States called for respect for the electoral authorities. There was no sort of encouragement of Fuhi Modi's call for the annulment of the elections. And those were again clear signs of respect for democracy, respect for rule of law, institutions and so on. And again, we don't know what the Trump administration would have done, but we can suspect that it's kind of allegiances with the hard right in the region. And I think the Fuhi Morismo as a movement, Keiko Fuhi Mori as a candidate, kind of fits into that sort of fairly far right category, could lead us to think that anything could have happened. So those are the positives. For the negatives, you know, there are still a lot of things that remain unchanged from the Trump years. We just saw last week in the permanent counsel of the OAS, speech from sort of the, hopefully the temporary representative of the United States in the OAS, sort of a holdover from the Trump administration, sort of dabbled down on narrative of electoral fraud in Bolivia, which has now been completely debunked. And this is not an issue of he says, she says anymore. There is complete agreement across the board in the US academia, think tanks, prestigious universities, that there was no electoral fraud during the 2019 Bolivian elections, that the OAS observation was, and its reports was deeply flawed. It's got a statistics wrong. The OAS isn't even defending now the technicalities of its report anymore, because it's been so debunked by a number of scholars from various institutions, the MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Tulane, my own institution, my own institution where I work, CEPA, et cetera, et cetera. But yet you're seeing the US representative at the OAS under a Biden administration repeat the same sort of rhetoric that you were hearing during this sort of very anti-scientific and anti-fact based Trump administration. So this is worrying. And again, one hopes that it has to do with what Ambassador Harman was mentioning, slow transition, still a number of nominations to happen, a lot of people not in key positions. But on the other hand, this is the United States, it has strong institutional capacity. Things are not that ad hoc. It's the OAS, it's the permanent counsel. You're having a representative read from a piece of paper. It is worrying that there hasn't been a change of position on the issue of Bolivia and the protection of sort of so far the rhetoric, but you know, sort of strong protection of NES and positions against what actually is transpired in a number of human rights report, recent human rights report supported by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. And the other half of the OAS system, if you like, which calls on those responsible for human rights violations during 2019, including what it calls massacres to be held accountable and to be taken to justice, the US not commenting on that. And on the contrary, sort of defending some of the key people in the annual regime. This is also a little bit worrying because this was the Trump's approach to Bolivia. And we weren't expecting that from the Biden administration, which remind our listeners, it said from the campaign onwards that it would bring human rights and democracy back to the center of foreign policy and back to the fore in terms of its relationship with Latin America. I think the issue of Colombia is also very, the US Biden administration's approach to Colombia has been very disappointing. It is under the Biden administration that we saw the recent protests happening in Colombia and the brutal repression of those protests. Colombia being a country, I think, with one of the worst human rights records in Latin America. There are others, but it's certainly in terms of extrajudicial killings, the persecution of activists, of civil society, organization, so on and so forth. It's been historically a big problem. It's still a big problem. And Colombia has been, of course, historically a key ally of the United States in the region. So unsurprisingly, we saw the kind of neocon members of the Trump administration handling Latin America, very much warming to Uribe's successor to President Duque, particularly in the context of their attempt to succeed at having regime change in Venezuela. But we would have expected maybe not the end of that kind of strategic partnership between Colombia and the United States. This is not what was realistically to be expected, but certainly a more critical approach of the Biden administration towards gross human rights violations in Colombia, where it has been completely silent. Of course, in contrast with the Biden administration's ongoing accusations, in some cases with due reason against some of its sort of the typical ones that it points singles out as being undemocratic regimes, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and so on. So double standards there, which we would have hoped with the Biden administration would have been less salient, at least during the Trump administration. I think it's also important to bear in mind that there was a significant amount of unease in the ranks of Democrats, including now from conversations I've had with some people in the Biden administration. There was some unease of people in currently in administration with the Colombian president's party, Centro Democrático, basically the representative of the broad political current of Uribismo and its role in the Florida elections. Uribe campaigned aggressively in Florida and his party campaigned aggressively in Florida in favor of Trump. This is now transcribed. It's in the media. It's not quite the same. Hasn't got the same seniority in the media or visibility as the Russian accusations, but people close to Duki campaigned aggressively in Florida in favor of Trump. And yet you're seeing a Biden administration being absolutely silent, not sort of recaliating in any way, and not saying anything about human rights violations. Now maybe there are some stuff that's happening off the record. Maybe there are behind the scenes conversations, but certainly publicly there's nothing of what we might have expected in terms of sort of moving away from cozying up to some of the more sort of very, I won't use the word far right, but very, very right-wing regimes in Latin America. In contrast to this, on Cuba, we saw a very aggressive Biden administration. I can have a big debate on Cuba. There's lots of things to be said about Cuba, but there was one death as a result of the crackdown on the protests in Cuba, as opposed to dozens and dozens of deaths as a result of the crackdown on protests in Colombia. What we saw in Cuba is a very sort of aggressive Biden administration, which is now added to the list of sanctions on Cuba, new sanctions. In this case, they're less systemic sanctions than the Trump sanctions. They're sanctions on individuals. But ironically, we now have a situation whereby we have more sanctions on Latin American countries under the Biden administration than we had during the Trump administration. Just to remind our listeners that during the Trump administration, there were 250 new types of sanctions that were added to the list of already existing sanctions on Cuba. We now have more that have been added on by the Biden administration. Now, maybe it's a question of time. Maybe Biden will eventually go back to the approach that had been espoused by the Obama administration and trying to sort of create a climate of detente and move away from the historically flawed US policy towards Cuba. But so far, we're seeing more aggressiveness. Maybe it's a question of timing because of those protests in Cuba, and the US felt it couldn't remain silent. But the result is the result, more sanctions. And it's also true in terms of the new sanctions regime in Nicaragua, which is more and more aggressive. And the ongoing sanctions regime in Venezuela. And this despite the fact that there was an initial pledge on behalf of the Biden administration, including there was a big discussion and serious number of things that were said by the Treasury on doing a sort of review. I think the word is they used of US sanctions around the world, and in particular in Latin America. And this led to a lot of hopes of sanctions being used much less. Because as we know, they're very counterproductive. They're very unpopular. 70% of Venezuelans are clearly opposed to sanctions. If this is in the name of the Venezuelan people, then this is clearly problematic. They're also very unpopular with a key sort of political stakeholders, particularly obviously the political left in Latin America, which isn't as marginal as it was 30 years ago. It's kind of the main opposition to a lot of the right wing governments in power at the moment and maybe could come back to power in certain countries, which is something the Biden administration bear in mind. So all these sanctions regimes are so unpopular in Latin America, and yet that have remained largely unperturbed, unscathed. I mean, the good news on Venezuela, I suppose, and this maybe is light of beacon of hope, is that we're not seeing the Biden administration speak badly or sabotage the ongoing negotiations taking place in Mexico right now between the Venezuelan government and the opposition. And there is some noise in the US administration that this Guaido situation can't really go on for much longer. Guaido is being recognized by less and less countries in the world. The main Venezuelan opposition doesn't recognize Guaido as the leader of the opposition. Guaido is not even an elected member of parliament anymore. I mean, I would argue this is probably not the place for this to have this conversation, but I would argue that the Guaido self-proclaimed presidency was always problematic. In fact, there's no precedent for it in history of Latin America. There was certainly no parallel government or government in exile after the Cuban Revolution. There's certainly nothing like that during the Pinochet regime or other dictatorships in Latin America. This is unprecedented. And to think that the Guaido representative even holds a seat at the OAS, whereas it's the Maduro government that's recognized in the UN, all this is really quite remarkable and very telling of the chaos of the Trump administration's approach towards Latin America. And it would be a key step for the Biden administration to move away from those less serious policies in the region. Running out of time very quickly on Brazil, I think that it's going to be interesting to see what the Biden administration does there. I think it's unlikely that we see the Biden administration sort of forgiving Bolsonaro for his very, for his disrespect for Brazilian institutions and rule of law and so on. It's too close to home. It's too close to symbolically, even to some of the Trump approach to overthrowing or avoiding the results of elections. In the case of Bolsonaro is trying to avoid elections altogether. I don't think Biden will warm to Bolsonaro. I think there's some clear ideological differences there, but it will be interesting to see whether the signal sent to, well, to the PT and to the left and to Lula, who might be a year from now the new president of Brazil, or a little bit more than a year from now in elections in October 2022 in Brazil, where Lula is the favorite. I mean, there are clear issues there during the Trump administration. It's been denounced by the PT. It's been denounced by a number of Democrats on the Hill in Congress to do with the role of the FBI and the DOJ in the persecution of Lula. And this is something which is unlikely to go away. If Lula is the future president, I mean, he was in jail after for a year and a half, so it's a personal issue for him, too. This is something which one would hope the Biden administration comes to terms with, answer some of the questions that have remained unanswered, a way of moving away from the Trump administration and towards more democracy in human rights versus what he's promised. I've got a few more things to say on a few more countries. I'm running out of time, so I'll deal with those during question time, just to conclude four hypotheses why we might see too much continuity and not enough change. First, the transition has been very slow. Ambassador Harman was hinting in that. Still other people to be sworn in to key places. I'm not sure that explains everything, as I've just said. I think U.S. is an institutionalized enough place for the administration to do a few key things, even if you still don't have everybody in place. Second, it's domestic politics, the Florida explanation. And I think that's quite important because losing Florida was very bad news for Latin American democracy and the Latin American left and quite good news for the hard right because obviously the Biden administration thinks it's the socialism issue, it's the communism issue, it's the Cuba issues, the Venezuela issue that got Trump for it. Third, it's the Latin American balance of power, too many conservative governments, too many right-wing governments, and U.S. just has to be pragmatic. I've heard that argument. I don't really buy it. First, because when the left had a majority, it's not as if the U.S. aligned with the left in the region, so the U.S. doesn't tend to follow the majority. And secondly, because the Biden administration should have the foresight to see that this balance is gradually changing, there's still a majority of right-wing conservative governments in the region, but you've got an increasing number of progressive or leftists or post neoliberal, whatever you want to call them, governments that are taking power, the most recent case in Peru, but before that Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, so things are changing. And the left is the main opposition in a number of countries where the right wing is in power. So I don't think, I think that would be too short-sighted for the Biden administration. And finally, and it's my last point, it's the poll, what Ambassador Harmon also hinted at, it's the poll of the traditional security doctrine, which kind of supersedes and annals in a way this stress on human rights and democracy. And in the context, of course, of this new obsession with China, which is a big player in Latin American politics right now, and for the last 10, 15 years has been, I think, perceived as a threat in the hemisphere on behalf of the United States, this kind of context of a new Cold War, of new security doctrine resembling, in many ways, the old security doctrines of the past being imposed on the US reality and the US Biden administration, a relationship then still about hegemony and perhaps even domination with no major paradigm shift. And sorry, I spoke for too long.