Proposals for Policy Alternatives

Here, we post links to selected reports from experts, officials and activists. All offer recommendations for a new U.S. approach to the Americas, or describe examples of initiatives that merit U.S. support. We divide these alternative proposals in 6 categories:

• Regional Defense and Conflict Prevention: This section links to documents that highlight alternatives for inter-state peace and security. This includes topics like hemispheric, sub-regional or bilateral defense relations, preparation for common or transnational threats, arms control, cooperative security, confidence building, and other means of preventing international conflict.
• Drug Policy: This section links to documents that explore alternatives for limiting the regional drug trade. These include means of confronting the problem's socioeconomic, governance and law-enforcement roots, as well as ways to reduce negative effects like addiction, violence, organized crime and corruption.
• Citizen Security and Organized Crime: This section links to documents that provide non-military alternatives for confronting common crime, organized crime, gangs, and other factors of citizen security. These include community policing, judicial reform, education and poverty-alleviation, among other solutions.
• Governance and `Nation-Building`: This section links to documents that discuss alternatives for constructing a state presence in \"ungoverned spaces\": sparsely populated rural zones and urban slums that have little state presence. U.S. defense doctrine is coming to view such spaces as threats to U.S. national security due to the possibility that terrorists and transnational criminals may use them as staging areas. The reports and analyses here explore ways to build a functional state presence in ungoverned territory, balancing security and development needs while avoiding militarization.
• Human Rights and Ending Impunity: This section links to documents that discuss alternatives for defending human rights, preventing violations, and ensuring justice for abuses. These include documentation of abuses, accompaniment of threatened groups or individuals, judicial and other institutional reforms necessary to combat impunity, and transitional justice in post-conflict environments.
• Civil-Military Relations and Democracy: This section links to documents that explore the role of military forces in a healthy democracy. These include discussions of military subordination to civilian rule, appropriate civilian and military roles, civilian involvement in security policymaking and defense resource management, and transparency and citizen oversight of the security sector. This section also includes recommendations for overcoming political crises without violence or military intervention.

We also maintain a list of links to organizations that (a) work on, or in, Latin America and the Caribbean, (b) issue policy recommendations, and (c) update their websites frequently.

Selections from the last 30 days starting with Tuesday, November 10, 2009. View results from 30 days earlier.

• Development First A More Humane and Promising Approach to Reducing Cultivation of Crops for Illicit Markets [PDF]
  Coletta A. Youngers, John M. Walsh
  Washington Office On Latin America (WOLA)
  Development First demonstrates why it is no coincidence that policies that worsen poverty and undermine governance cannot achieve their drug control aims. This newly-released WOLA report identifies ten lessons learned for promoting alternative livelihoods, based on decades of evidence in countries from Thailand and Burma to Afghanistan and the Andes. Among the lessons is that proper sequencing is crucial: development must come first. Also, development assistance should not be made contingent on the prior elimination of coca or poppy crops. As has been the case in Colombia, such policies deny aid to precisely those communities most dependent on growing crops for illicit markets and in greatest need of assistance.

• After Plan Colombia [PDF]
  Adam Isacson, Abigail Poe
  Center For International Policy
  This report independently evaluates "Integrated Action," a new approach to state-building and counterinsurgency that the U.S. government is supporting in Colombia. Ten years and $6.8 billion after the 2000 launch of "Plan Colombia," officials from both governments are billing Integrated Action as the future direction of U.S. assistance to Colombia. The term refers to a combination of military and development projects carried out in the same geographic areas. These have gone under many names in the past few years: Plan Colombia 2, Plan Colombia Consolidation Phase, Social Recovery of Territory (or Social Control of Territory), the National Consolidation Plan, the Center for the Coordination of Integrated Action (CCAI), and the Strategic Leap.

Results from 30 days starting with Tuesday, November 10, 2009. View results from 30 days earlier.