This is cross-posted from the Latin America Working Group's blog, the LAWG Blog. It was written by Lisa Haugaard.

We charitably termed the Obama Administration’s first year of Latin America policy a “false start.”  After the year was kicked off with a promising beginning with a rousing speech at the Summit of the Americas, a promise to close Guantanamo, the lifting of the ban on travel to Cuba for Cuban Americans, and some principled words on human rights to Colombian President Uribe, we had some hope for a new, less ideological, more people-centered approach to the region. As the year progressed, those hopes were dashed. But now we dare to hope again.

We hoped for the United States to stand up for human rights and democratic principles, but in a fair-minded way, not based on whether or not a government was considered a close ally. We hoped for our country to uphold the same human rights standards we asked of others. We hoped for a reshaping of U.S. aid to focus generously on human needs, like health care and small-scale development for the poorest communities and humanitarian aid for those displaced by war and natural disaster—rather than military aid. We presented these ideas to the administration in letters, petitions, reports and meetings (and we give this administration credit for its open door for meetings). But our hopes were dashed by the administration’s failure to take a strong enough stance towards the coup in Honduras, the roll out of a major base agreement with Colombia, an aid budget that mirrored the Bush Administration’s, and the decision to give a free pass to Mexico and Colombia on the human rights requirements attached to military aid.

Now we are looking for signs that the Obama Administration—with its top officials finally in place for Latin America and human rights—is ready for a fresh start to the region.

The administration’s response to the Haitian earthquake and, to a lesser extent, its fiscal year 2011 budget may be signs of steps in the right direction. 

Haiti. The U.S. government responded in a committed fashion to the Haitian tragedy, mobilizing emergency aid, extending Temporary Protected Status to Haitians currently in the United States, and announcing that the U.S. Treasury will work to encourage cancellation of all of Haiti’s multilateral debts. There are and will be problems, but the effort so far has been swift and generous. Now the question is what next. We are calling for at least $3 billion in U.S. relief and reconstruction aid, for a Haitian-led recovery. The White House has not yet announced how much it will ask Congress to commit to Haitian reconstruction, and since it is not included in the budget, will have to ask for a “supplemental” bill to be approved. We expect the White House will do this soon.

Budget. In the FY2011 foreign operations budget the White House unveiled, we’re beginning to see the faint outline of the administration’s own stamp on a U.S. approach to the region. (The foreign operations budget funds most foreign aid, both military and economic, though increasing amounts of military aid now are included in the defense budget.) We’re not seeing a real departure, but there are certain glimmers of hope.

Glimmers of hope:

• U.S. military aid to the region declines. The administration has requested $742 million in military aid to the region in the foreign operations budget, compared to $1.1 billion the previous year. Watch out, though: We don’t yet know what’s in the defense budget for Latin America. We need to see if that increases.
• U.S. aid to Mexico no longer includes helicopters and planes for the army. Military aid to Mexico has declined as the big-ticket items promised as a part of the Merida Initiative have already been appropriated—the main reason for the overall decline in military spending for the region. Aid for the justice sector and police reform and oversight continues. Watch out, though: We need to know what’s in the defense budget, we need to be sure there’s not more helicopters in a supplemental bill, and we need to know how the $8 million in foreign military financing for Mexico included in the budget will be spent.
• There’s a sizeable cut for hard-side counternarcotics assistance to Colombia. The budget cuts this by $44 million, saying it’s time for Colombia to finance these programs by itself. We hope what is being cut is the controversial, inhumane, ineffective and environmentally damaging aerial spraying program.
• Economic assistance stays level and will increase with Haiti. The budget slightly increases economic aid for the region by $20 million, from $1.415 billion in the 2010 request to $1.435 billion in 2011. However, this total will go way up if a supplemental bill for Haiti is passed, changing dramatically, in numbers, the overall balance of military vs. economic aid to the region. We will need to see the more detailed documents that are released weeks after the sketchy overall budget to know more about how this is spent, but some positive developments in U.S. aid worldwide are a greater focus on programs for food security and climate change, and continued high priority for global health programs. Watch out, though:  We need to make sure that the already limited U.S. development and humanitarian aid for Latin America is not cut to make room for aid to Haiti.
  

Reasons not to be cheerful:

• Militarization of economic assistance, the Pentagon as the face of the United States in Latin America. The cuts in military aid mentioned above are not enough to change these trends. We’re also worried about the movement towards military-led economic assistance, most notably in Colombia (and a factor to watch in Haiti, though there is an appropriate role for the military in the immediate aftermath of a major disaster).
• Military aid to Colombia remains high despite human rights abuses. We were disappointed to see that the administration cut military aid to Colombia by only 3.5 million, to a still-massive $51.5 million in the foreign operations budget alone.
• The defense budget contains more military aid. We can’t judge the overall trends until we get more information about what’s in the defense budget, not just the foreign operations budget. And military aid in the defense budget is always far too untransparent and unaccountable to the public.
• The migration and refugee spending for Latin America declined. Why, oh why, did the Obama Administration do this? Spending for the refugee crisis from the Colombian conflict is never anywhere near adequate, and the administration has inexplicably cut the Western Hemisphere budget from $48.5 million to $37 million. Congress must fix this.
  

Check out Adam Isacson’s slideshow on the budget & Latin America on the joint CIP/LAWGEF/WOLA “Just the Facts” website which monitors trends on U.S. military aid & policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. See also his blog noting that the main change in the budget is Mexico and Colombia. “We need not lament that the tempo of helicopter-buying for Mexico and Colombia has slowed, and we note that economic and social assistance is holding remarkably steady despite the Millennium Challenge program’s decline in the region,” he concludes.

Let’s hope that these glimmers of change in the budget and the immediate, generous response to Haitian relief mean that we will see some real movement towards a more caring, just, and people-centered approach towards our neighbors. We are waiting!

ENTIRE REGION

• The Obama administration released its 2011 budget request to Congress this week, which includes its request for next year's foreign assistance. The new aid numbers for 2011 have been added to the "Just the Facts" database, and so far it looks like there will be a sharp decrease in military and police assistance to the region, especially for Mexico and Colombia, the region's two largest aid recipients. The FY2011 request also reflects the official launch of the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, a new counternarcotics and citizen security program focusing on the fifteen countries of the Caribbean Basin.

ARGENTINA

• President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner formally dismissed Central Bank president Martin Perez Redrado this week, after he resigned last Friday. Mercedes Marcó del Pont was named to replace Redrado as the new head of the Central Bank.

COLOMBIA

• Constitutional Court Judge Humberto Sierra has recommended that the country's highest court reject a proposal to allow President Alvaro Uribe to seek re-election due to legal irregularities.
• Human Rights Watch released its new report on Colombia this week, "Paramilitaries' Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia." The report documents the rise of "emerging" paramilitary groups throughout the country and is critical of the Colombian government's "weak and ineffective" response to this increasing phenomenon.
• More details on the mass grave in the town of La Macarena were released this week. Initial reports indicated that the gravesite contains as many as 2,000 bodies, though the mayor of La Macarena says the cemetery contains 1,000 human remains, of which 346 are unidentified combat dead buried since 2004. The Center for International Policy's Plan Colombia and Beyond blog has more details.

COSTA RICA

• Presidential elections will be held on Sunday in Costa Rica. A recent poll by Demoscopía places Laura Chinchilla, of the governing Liberal National Party, as the frontrunner, with 45.1%. Otto Guevara, of the Libertarian Movement, follows with 30.1% of the vote. If none of the candidates win more than 40% of the vote on Sunday, a run-off election will be held.

ECUADOR

• Ecuador's growing importance as a hub for narcotrafficking and organized crime operations made several news stories this week, after a Washington think tank, the International Assessment and Strategy Center, released a new report titled "Ecuador at Risk: Drugs, Thugs, Guerrillas and the Citizens Revolution". The country seized 63 tons of cocaine last year, twice as much as in 2008, though some experts estimate that as much as 200 tons of cocaine may be transiting through Ecuador, "four times the estimated percentage a decade ago."

HAITI

• Once again, this week's news on Haiti focused on bottlenecks affecting the distribution of aid. A new food distribution system that focuses on distributing food to women has proven successful, though Reuters reports that bags of rice from the United States are already appearing on the black market.
• Ten American missionaries who tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country last week have been charged with child abduction and criminal conspiracy by the Haitian government.

HONDURAS

• A representative from the Organization of American States arrived in Honduras on Wednesday to help set up a truth commission. This is the final step from the Tegucigalpa-San José Accord that must be completed before the OAS will consider the country's reinsertion into the international organization. Principal deputy assistant secretary of state Craig Kelly noted that the "country has taken steps to move ahead, and that is gratifying." However, former President Manuel Zelaya said, from his place of exile in the Dominican Republic, that President Lobo has done nothing to remove those who carried out the coup and an In These Times article reports that the human rights crisis is deepening under Lobo. "Despite Lobo's rhetoric, there seems to be little peace or freedom in Honduras these days."

MEXICO

• Sixteen teenagers were killed at a birthday party earlier this week in the country's most violent city, Ciudad Juárez. In response to public outcry, Mexican President Felipe Calderón admitted that the deployment of the army and federal police to Ciudad Juárez has not been sufficient in stopping crime and violence. President Calderón promised to put in place new social initiatives that will help prevent crime and decrease violence.
• Miguel Angel Caro Quintero, who led the Sonora Cartel in Mexico for over a decade, has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for trafficking drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border by a U.S. court.

PERU

• South Korea announced it will donate eight A-37 light attack planes to Peru that will be used to conduct counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations.
• The Christian Science Monitor reports on a story about some Peruvian farmers' decision to replace their coca crops with cacao.

VENEZUELA

• On his eleventh anniversary as President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez suggested that he hopes to lead the country for at least 11 more years: "I am 55 years old and have been president for 11 years. In the next 11 years, I promise to take care of myself a little more and if you all want it, within 11 years I will be 66 years, God willing, and have been president for 22."
• On Tuesday, the U.S. National Director of Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, presented the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The title of the report's Latin America section is "Latin America Stable, but Challenged by Crime and Populism," and a large chunk of this section is dedicated to Venezuela. The report classifies President Chávez as an "anti-U.S. leader," notes that Chávez continues "his covert support to the terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)," and states that he continues to "impose an authoritarian populist political model in Venezuela that undermines democratic institutions."

  The Venezuelan government responded to the United States, denouncing that again the country "attempts to criminalize our government and encourage sectors of the Venezuelan opposition who look for antidemocratic ways to take control."

Since we began the "Just the Facts" project in the 1990s, a constant theme has been the Defense Department's steadily growing role in assigning military aid. First for the "war on drugs," later for the "war on terror," the Pentagon has accrued ever greater authorities to use part of its $664 billion annual budget to aid foreign military forces.

This is undesirable for several reasons.

• It weakens the State Department's role in determining which militaries get how much aid. Because is designed to consider and protect all U.S. interests in a country — not just security but development, diplomatic relations, democracy, human rights, environmental protection and others — the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act placed the State Department in charge of foreign aid, including security assistance. Routing such aid through the Defense budget reduces the State Department's authority.
• It weakens congressional oversight, including human rights protections. The congressional committees that authorize and fund State Department-managed military assistance oversee a $50 billion annual budget that gets significant scrutiny, since foreign aid is not politically popular in the United States. Aid that goes through the regular foreign aid budget channel is subject to conditions — including important human rights protections — and must be reported to Congress and the public. This website's database depends heavily on these reports. By contrast, aid that goes through the enormous defense budget is an almost invisible fraction of the total, and receives little scrutiny from the relevant committees.
• It gives the Pentagon a greater diplomatic role. Giving the Defense Department significant autonomy over aid to foreign militaries can bring about situations in which military-to-military ties with a country are stronger than diplomatic ties.

The biggest leap forward in Defense budget military aid came in 2006, when Section 1206 of that year's National Defense Authorization Act created a new program authorizing the Pentagon to use $200 million of its budget to "train and equip" foreign militaries and police. This program, known simply as "Section 1206," closely resembled the State Department-run Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, and was supposed to expire at the end of 2007. It was extended through 2008 and raised to $300 million, then extended again through 2011 and raised to $350 million. The 2011 Defense budget request will reportedly include a proposal to increase the 1206 program budget to $500 million in 2011. Between 2006 and 2008 — the years for which we currently have data — Section 1206 was the fifth-largest source of U.S. military assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Now, as the Obama administration prepares to send Congress its 2011 budget request, the future of the Section 1206 program, which would expire at the end of that year, is a topic of much internal debate. 

This is evidenced by a letter (PDF) Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on December 15. The letter proposes that the two departments pool their funds for military and police aid — but also economic development assistance — in three areas: security capacity-building, stabilization and conflict prevention. These pools, which Gates calls "Shared Responsibility, Pooled Resources" or SRPR, would require "dual-key" approval for expenditure of funds. (The analogy refers to a door or vehicle that requires two people to turn keys in order to unlock or start it.)

Each pool would operate with joint formulation requirements in the field and dual-key concurrence in Washington, DC. Legislation would endow these funds with inherent authority to achieve their purposes. Each department would be able to add funds to the pool to meet a departmental imperative, although the use of these funds would be subject to the dual-key approval requirements.

A "dual key" process is preferable to the Pentagon having autonomy to carry out its own security assistance policy. However, if made permanent this proposal would be a defeat for the State Department, which until recently was the only "keyholder." Since at least the 1990s, though, the State Department has not been assigned the resources needed to do the job on its own, while the Defense Department has. This proposal would make that reality permanent, irreversibly solidifying the Defense Department's foreign assistance role.

The Bush administration's secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, consistently yielded to the Defense Department on the Section 1206 jurisdiction issue. Secretary Clinton's department, on the other hand, has sought to re-take some of the lost turf. However, a January 20 post to Foreign Policy magazine's diplomacy blog, "The Cable," indicates that the State Department already gave in to the Defense Department's request to increase the Section 1206 budget to $500 million in 2011.

"That literally is the result of vigorous arm wrestling within the administration," one source familiar with the discussions said. The battle had been waged primarily between the shops of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy and Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro, but finally Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew got involved.

"Eventually State backed off," the source said. "They're not sure they have the capacity to actually run the 1206 programs." …

Insiders working on the issue also suggested that State didn't match up bureaucratically inside the fight. The Pentagon just has so many more people and resources to bring to bear, and besides, the State Department's strategy review, the QDDR, isn't complete.

Meanwhile, "The Cable" says, the Gates proposal for a jointly administered SRPR pool does not, for now, appear to be going anywhere.

[Capitol] Hill staffers, who would be the ones appropriating the money, said there was no follow-through. Many saw the memo as a decoy and not really operative in any sense.

The security-assistance turf battle is heating up in ways that will affect future assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean. And it is taking place while the congressional foreign affairs committees consider a rewrite of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act that could change the picture still further. We can expect more flare-ups over the coming year. But given the Defense Department's larger budget, political capital and bargaining power, it will be difficult - not impossible, but difficult - to forestall an outcome that doesn't involve a greater U.S. military role in foreign aid.

This is cross-posted from the Center for International Policy's "Plan Colombia and Beyond" blog.

A small sampling of some of the Haiti coverage we’ve found worth linking to is here. There is much we’ve missed. The New York Times Haiti Twitter list is worth a follow as well.

• Twenty-nine Colombian soldiers and officers standing trial for the 2008 Soacha “false positives” murders have been freed from preventive detention in the past week. Meanwhile the mother of one of the victims tells El Espectador’s Cecilia Orozco about the threats, and the lack of government support, that she and other mothers are receiving.

• “My admiration is personal and institutional for the Honduran people, who stoically withstood international pressures, foreign meddling and every kind of assault against their sovereignty in order to keep an anachronistic model from implanting itself in their country.” – Colombia’s vice president, Francisco Santos

• Colombian President Álvaro Uribe received two delegations of U.S. visitors to his ranch in Córdoba department: a congressional delegation led by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-New York), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, and James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state and number-two official in the State Department.

• “I have received information about an extremely worrying situation of violence and other crimes against indigenous peoples.” – James Anaya, UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples, who issued a new report this week.

• The Associated Press published a long, gripping story about a bend in the Cauca river where the bodies of the murdered tend to wash up, and about a woman who for years has tried to retrieve them.

• The La Silla Vacía website presents an excellent list of twelve changes Colombia has gone through during the 16 months that the country’s political class has been distracted by the debate over whether President Uribe can run for reelection.

• Chileans vote in a presidential runoff election on Sunday. Polls give a razor-thin advantage to conservative businessman Sebastián Piñera over center-left former President Eduardo Frei.

• Chile is eliminating a constitutional provision, inherited from the Pinochet regime, that gave the armed forces a fixed percentage of copper profits to use for weapons purchases. Bolivia, on the other hand, is considering adding such a provision.

• Last May, days before he was murdered, Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg recorded a video stating that if he were to be killed, it would be the fault of Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom. This week, UN investigators announced a bizarre finding: Rosenberg in fact planned his own assassination. (See this PDF presentation.)

• Reuters published a lengthy piece about the aerial narcotrafficking route between South America and Africa, alleging that it is being plied by a rogue air fleet with links to Al Qaeda.

• The U.S. NGO Freedom House released its annual “Freedom in the World” report, contending that several countries in Latin America – Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic – were less free in 2009 than they were in 2008.

• Bolivian President Evo Morales, on his third-ever visit to a movie theater, saw Avatar and declared it to be “a profound example of resistance against capitalism and the struggle to defend nature.”

2009 marked the Obama administration's first year, and proved to be a very eventful year in Latin America. Below is a list of significant U.S. policy and security events in Latin America in 2009.

January: Barack Obama is inaugurated as the United States' first African-American president and hope for a new era of U.S.-Latin America relations is apparent throughout the region.

February: Colombia's newsweekly, Semana, revealed that the Administrative Security Department (DAS), the Colombian Presidency's internal intelligence agency, had been carrying out a campaign of wiretaps and surveillance of human rights defenders, Supreme Court justices, opposition politicians, and journalists. DAS agents also followed their targets' children, wives, and assistants. Over the course of 2009, new evidence continued to emerge.

April: Heads of state from the region came together in Trinidad and Tobago for the Summit of the Americas. President Obama addressed his counterparts and promised a new partnership between the United States and Latin America: "I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations; there is simply engagement based on mutual respect and common interests and shared values."

June: Mauricio Funes was sworn in as president of El Salvador, marking the historic end of the conservative ARENA party's two-decade rule and the historic beginning of the leftist Farabundo Marti Liberation Front's (FMLN) first attempt at the presidency.

June: After much speculation on where the United States planned to relocate the soon-to-be-closed Forward Operating Location at the Manta Air Base in Ecuador, the Colombian press announced the ongoing negotiation of a deal between the United States and Colombia, under which the United States would be granted use of seven Colombian military bases. The media speculation was confirmed in July when Colombia's defense, interior and foreign relations ministers gave a press conference about the military base deal with the United States. At the end of October, the final deal had been signed between the two countries, which was dubbed the "Defense Cooperation Agreement."

June: On the 28th of June, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was forcibly removed from his home by Honduran troops, following orders from the country's Supreme Court, and flown to Costa Rica in his pajamas. The world immediately spoke up to condemn the coup and called for the return of the democratically-elected president.

September: Ecuador officially closed the United States Forward Operating Location at the Manta Air Base.

November: Presidential elections were held in Honduras, and the National Party's Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo was victorious. At the time of the elections (and still today) the Western Hemisphere was split on whether to recognize the elections even though the de facto government, led by Roberto Micheletti, remained in power.

December:
Drug-related violence in Mexico reached record levels in 2009 - with an estimated 7,300 drug-related murders by the end of November. In 2008, there were approximately 5,600 such murders.

Other stories that took place throughout the year:

The Latinobarómetro, an annual public opinion survey, was recently released for 2009. Between September 21st and October 26th, 20,204 people were interviewed, who were "representative of 100% of the population" of 18 Latin American countries.

The 2009 report begins with a fairly detailed review of opinions about Honduras' recent political crisis. Since the survey was administered during the political crisis, it reflects how many Hondurans felt at the time. Responses, however, do not reflect the failure of the negotiated agreement (the Tegucigalpa-San José Accord) or the elections on November 29th.

The authors of the report write that the results of the 2009 Latinobarómetro indicate that "Despite the coup d'etat and despite the [economic] crisis, Latin America is more democratic after the 2009 crisis, is more tolerant, is more happy."

Below is a summary of some of the answers that stood out.

• A new report by Amnesty International "accuses the [Mexican] authorities of failing to fully probe allegations of abuses committed by the military, including enforced disappearances, extrajudicial and unlawful killings, torture, ill treatment and arbitrary detentions." You can download a PDF of the report, "Mexico: New Reports of Human Rights Violations by the Military" here.
• Human Rights Watch released a report that accuses Brazilian police officers of "routinely resorting to lethal force, often committing extrajudicial executions and exacerbating violence in both states [São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro]." The report, "Lethal Force: Police Violence and Public Security in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo," says the two police forces kill more than 1,000 people every year, and have killed 11,000 people since 2003.
• The Miami Herald continued the trend with an article on Venezuela. According to the article, "Police death squads are active in more than half of Venezuela's 24 states, and the practice of 'extra-judicial execution' is nationwide. While more than 7,000 people were killed by uniformed members of the security forces between 2000 and 2007, ... only 3% of 6,000 suspects were actually sentenced."

On Sunday, the Miami Herald's Andres Oppenheimer published an article headlined "Latin America's honeymoon with Obama may be over." This is the latest on a long list of commentaries on the year-old U.S. administration's faltering image throughout Latin America.

In the past week, U.S. relations with Latin America have been described as "gone south," "like Bush's," and "disingenuous," to name a few. These descriptions come mostly in response to the way the United States handled both the recent political crisis in Honduras and the military base deal with Colombia. Christopher Sabatini provides an interesting timeline of the deterioration of U.S. policy toward the region on the Americas Quarterly blog.

Oppenheimer's article starts: "Only a few months ago, Latin American leaders hailed the Obama administration as a new beginning in hemispheric relations. But now, the honeymoon is over." This high view of the United States under a new administration was evident in a Gallup poll released at the first of the month that found "regional median approval of U.S. leadership at 51%, up significantly from the previous three years." This poll, taken from July to September 2009, may have represented, unfortunately, the high point of the Obama administration's approval rating in the region, though time will tell if Latin American public opinion agrees with the various authors who have cited the demise of U.S.-Latin American relations. Obama won much approval in the region because he signaled a departure from former President George W. Bush, though as Oppenheimer writes, "not being Bush is no substitute for a proactive policy in Latin America."

Here are excerpts from other articles:

• William Finnegan, of The New Yorker, wrote on December 3rd that "the humiliation of the Obama Administration was complete" with the Honduran Congress's decision not to reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya. In trying to understand how this all happened, Finnegan writes "Basically, though, it looks like the Administration got rolled by the Republican right. ... Latin Americans who believed that Barack Obama represented a new era in U.S. policy in their region have had an unhappy surprise."
• Time magazine's Tim Padgett had harsh words for the Obama administration as well, writing that "when it comes to U.S. policy in Latin America - as events this week in Honduras suggest - it's often hard to tell if George W. Bush isn't still President." Padgett continues, "as he ends his first year in office, Obama seems to have ceded Latin America strategy to right-wing Cold Warriors whose thinking - including the idea that coups are still an acceptable means of regime change - is no more equipped to help bring the region into the 21st century than the ideology of left-wing Marxists is."

  In response to Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela's statement that "the status quo" in Honduras "remains unacceptable," Padgett writes "it's a status quo Obama let the Cold Warriors keep intact - and it's now up to Valenzuela to wrest Latin America policy back from them."

• On December 2nd, the Wall Street Journal published an article by José de Córdoba and David Luhnow, titled "U.S. Faces Rising Resistance to its Latin American Policy." The authors give the United States more credit than the previous articles, writing that "the U.S. remains the dominant player in Latin America." Though, they go on to say that the United States "is having an increasingly tough time calling the shots in a region where countries like Brazil and China are vying for influence, and where even tiny Honduras stands up to the "Colossus to the North." De Córdoba and Luhnow end the article with advice from former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda to Obama: "The crisis is a lesson for Mr. Obama in the limits of cooperation. 'You can't follow the Latin Americans given how polarized the region is,' says Mr. Castañeda. 'You have to take a stance, and hope that the others will follow you.'"

On Friday, November 27, defense and foreign ministers from the Union of South American Nations' Unasur member nations gathered in Quito, Ecuador to address growing regional tensions. Topics on the table included continuing concerns about the Colombia-U.S. military accord, which grants the United States access to seven Colombian military bases, growing tensions between Chile and Peru after Peru accused Chile of espionage, and deteriorating relations between Colombia and Venezuela.

One member nation was conspicuously absent from the meeting. Neither Colombian Defense Minister Gabriel Silva nor Foreign Relations Minister Jaime Bermúdez were in attendance, having cancelled at the last minute. In their place, Bermúdez sent a letter explaining that the agreement with the U.S. contains the principle of "non-intervention in the internal affairs of other States." While Colombian Defense Minister Silva told Radio Caracol the same day that "the number one obligation of a defense minister is to avoid war at all costs; the second obligation is if some makes war against us, Colombia must face it and win, but we are in the first stage. ... [F]or the first time in decades, the defense ministry must study how to prepare to face a foreign threat." In response, Venezuelan Minister Maduro described Silva as a "crazy and irresponsible renegade, warmonger, who has begun to fire at Venezuela from Bogotá." and called Colombia's absence "inexcusable, a huge mistake and an act of contempt towards Unasur."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also sent a letter to the members of Unasur, in an effort to assuage fears that the base agreement jeopardizes the sovereignty of countries in the region. The letter made it "absolutely clear" that the military deal between Bogotá and Washington would be carried out "with total respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the other countries."

Secretary Clinton's letter appeared to settle the fears of some member nations. The Brazilian minister, Celso Amorín, left the meeting at midday "optimistic. ... Above all there were advances on the issue that worried us the most, which was the formal guarantees," he said. While Ecuador's Foreign Minister Fander Falconí also expressed his satisfaction: "One of the best results of today's meeting has been to receive a text that plainly guarantees no extraterritorial intervention through this type of agreement."

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Maduro, however, was less satisfied, and underlined the need to turn "these written guarantees into realities, so that they do not become a joke, as happened in Honduras." Maduro said that the agreements resulting from the summit were indeed "a step forward, but still not sufficient."

Essentially no progress was made towards easing tensions between Colombia and Venezuela, or between Chile and Peru, though issues such as national sovereignty and nuclear power were discussed. Countries agreed to prohibit "the use or the threat of force, as well as any other type of military aggression or threats to the stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the other member states," according to the final document of the summit, which Ecuadoran officials are still finalizing. The Unasur members also agreed on the need to create a communications network, an "information bank," that would increase the transparency of weapons transfers; however the final declaration stipulates that "Such a mechanism, at the request of [any state], will respect the principle of confidentiality."