Republican-controlled Congress unlikely to change US aid policy in Latin America

The Republican takeover of Congress will not likely prompt significant changes of U.S. development cooperation policy in Latin America, regional experts predict, while immigration specialists hope bilateral relations won’t decline following the results of the midterm election. Carl Meacham, a former congressional staffer for Republican Sen. Richard Lugar who now serves as director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Americas Program, underscored that the United States has “largely neglected” Latin America as a priority for development policy, with aid to the region falling to $1.5 billion from $2 billion over the past four years. Speaking on the sidelines of a CSIS panel discussion Wednesday in Washington, D.C., Meacham noted that although Republicans particularly support development banks, he does not anticipate any significant policy change. “I don’t think this will change anything; aid hasn’t been and won’t be on the agenda,” he said. Meacham and other panelists emphasized that the focus of U.S. policy toward the region has been military- and security-oriented — from drug trafficking in Mexico and crisis recovery in Haiti, to stabilization in Colombia. “It’s easier to get military funding. Development programs have had difficulty with funding,” political analyst Muni Jensen told Devex on the sidelines of the CSIS event. The speakers cited the United States’ emergence from its most recent recession, a shift in aid allocations toward Africa and the urgent need to address other hot button issues such as Syria, the threat of the Islamic State group and Ebola as reasons for the attention diverted away from Latin America. Jensen, however, did show some optimism for the future of development in the region, offering current discussions around Colombia as an example. “As Plan Colombia dies down, the conversation is now about building a new development status outside of the military,” she said, referring to U.S. support aimed at combating drug cartels and insurgent groups. “The main issues there now are education, technology, strengthening trade.” Jose Jaime Hernandez, Washington correspondent for Mexican daily El Universal, explained that despite U.S. policymakers recognizing issues such as education and health need more attention, the meager budget for Latin America presents a barrier to action. “[U.S. Secretary of State John] Kerry has increasingly emphasized fewer resources allocated for Latin American development, and said we need to do more with what exists,” he said. How long the U.S. can continue its current approach toward the region is uncertain, Hernandez said, given it has recently seen repercussions — most notably, the surge in unaccompanied children arriving at the border from Central America earlier this year. Other experts weigh in While the CSIS panel speakers agreed development in Latin America will continue to take a backseat to other priority regions and issues, other experts consulted by Devex in separate interviews Wednesday voiced fears that these issues will receive even less attention now. Andrea Koris, a Washington-based experts on refugees and U.S. immigration, warned a Republican-controlled Congress may lead to less dialogue around immigration reform and less protection for refugees. “Ninety-eight percent of unaccompanied minors are coming from Central America, and under [President Barack] Obama, these kids received a huge expansion of rights in the U.S. I fear there will be much less opportunity for their rights to be continued and more deportations given that the mainstream Republican agenda is anti-immigrant,” she said. Since services for refugees are federally funded, and the U.S. Agency for International Development has earmarked money for migration assistance, Koris is hoping there won’t be a decrease in funding for migrants from these countries, and pointed to the wider problem of what in her opinion is U.S. aloofness toward the region as a cause for insecurity. “Our lack of involvement with these countries is limited, even though we flood their markets and extract cheap labor. These kids are fleeing from massively underdeveloped countries, and if we don’t have aid money going into the problems on the ground, these kids will keep cycling through the refugee cycle,” she said. Manuel Orozco, an immigration expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, does not expect any changes to the agenda, so Latin American development will remain in his opinion an afterthought to the U.S. Congress — although we may see a bipartisan immigration reform bill surface in the coming months to give Republicans a leg-up on the 2016 presidential election. The upcoming Summit of the Americas taking place in April — and to which Cuba has been invited for the first time — will present an opportunity for more discussion on the topic. Until then, El Universal’s Hernandez suggested, “why not go for social programs before military?” “That’s the origin of the problem,” he said, “and until the U.S. sees the region as less military and more development, there will be more desperation.” Read more on U.S. aid reform online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.