Workshop Report
“Latin America: New Security Configurations in a Strategic Emerging Region”
Rut Diamint, Mónica Herz and Andrea Oelsner
This report summarises the main findings and conclusions of the workshop “Latin America: New
Security Configurations in a Strategic Emerging Region”, which took place in London on 19 September
2014. This workshop is part of a research project of the same title. It has benefitted from the generous
financial support of the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust.
This report summarises the discussions held
at the second and final workshop organised
as part of this research project, and offers
some policy recommendations. The first of
these workshops took place in Rio (Brazil).
It was a closed meeting by invitation only
and aimed to renew and update the debate
on the security interests and concerns of the
Latin American states. The second workshop took place in London. It was open to
the public and aimed to raise awareness
among a European audience of the
configuration of new security parameters in
Latin America. In addition to the invited
speakers, the workshop benefitted from the
participation of diplomats, researchers,
journalists, and scholars.
The event began with a brief intervention by
the project conveners summarising the
findings and conclusions of the Rio workshop, and setting the context for the present
discussion, which centred on the potentiality, tensions, and reality of Latin America’s
regional security multilateralism and
integration. To this end, the workshop
panels focused on the region’s current multilateral organisations, and their impact on
regional security strategy as well as on the
strategy towards the region of extra-regional
actors. The experts’ presentations generated
animated and productive debate, which this
report aims to summarise below. For this,
the topics will be divided into three main
areas: 1. Latin American security multi-
lateralism and the international system; 2.
Intra-regional dynamics of Latin American
multilateralism; and 3. Potentialities and
limits of Latin American security cooperation. The final section will offer some policy
recommendations.
1. Latin American security multilateralism and the international system
There was agreement among participants
that since the startof the new millennium the
spectrum of Latin American multilateralism
has broadened. The latest trend has been
marked by an explicit emphasis on SouthSouth cooperation. This has often translated
in regional integration schemes that seek to
exclude the United States, such as Unasur
and the Community of Latin American and
Caribbean States (CELAC). In some other
cases, this has additionally resulted in clear
politico-ideological regional projects, such
as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of
Our Americas (ALBA) and Petrocaribe,
which openly adopt a radical antiimperialist, anti-hegemonic discourse.
It was argued that this constellation of multilateral regional organisations forms a
cooperative regional governance complex,
of which Unasur—and in what regards
security, Unasur’s South American Defence
Council (SADC)—have become the pivotal
organisation. As is frequently acknowledged, Brazil has been the main promoter
of Unasur’s creation and constitutes the
clearest case in the region of a so-called
‘emerging power’. This fact coupled with
the lack of US attention to Latin America,
consequently affording Brazil additional
space to pursue a more autonomous foreign
policy centred upon South-South and regional diplomacy, and thus placing itself at the
core of this South American cooperative
governance complex. However, specialists
pointed out that Brazil was a reluctant
hegemon, as will be further discussed below.
In this context, Brazil has sought to develop
a profile as regional mediator, and Unasur
and SADC have displaced the Organisation
of American States (OAS) as the preferred
forum by Latin American states for conflict
resolution.
In spite of Obama’s intended “collegial
cooperation” with Latin America and a proliferation of initiatives, cooperation between
the USA and the region has become fragmented within the vast US government
apparatus. Most schemes have focused on
trade and/or have been bilateral in nature,
such as navy-to-navy agreements in the context of the IV Fleet or between other sectors
of US bureaucracy and their Latin American
counterparts focusing on issues such as
narcotraffic.
Within the framework of the OAS a number
of Latin American initiatives to create commissions dealing with a broader range of socalled new threats and social issues have
received US support. By contrast, the USA
has no institutionalised relations with, or
participation in Unasur or ALBA.
Similarly, the European Union (EU) also
maintains no institutional interregional
relations with Unasur or ALBA, despite the
EU’s preferred policy of strengthening
regionalisms. It was speculated at the workshop that this could be explained by Latin
America’s turn to the left, which has
promoted models of national and regional
economic development not always in accordance to EU norms and the EU model of
integration favouring free trade. Furthermore, the EU tends to support initiatives of
democracy promotion via the strengthening
of institutions and the judiciary, rather than
the strengthening of leadership, as often the
case in Latin America’s pink tide.
2. Intra-regional dynamics of
American security multilateralism
Latin
Participants shared the view that Brazil’s
strategy to increase its regional—and
ultimately global—leadership capacity is
pursued via the search of regional consensus
through multilateral organisations. In
addition, Brazil seeks to build up a profile as
a mediator in regional crises as well as
dialogue promoter. This preference for
consensus-seeking rather than principled
positions, and for multilateralism over unilateral action often results in Brazil being
perceived as a hesitant leader, or at best a
‘gentle hegemon’, as one expert put it.
According to another presenter, Brazil’s
definition of national and regional security is
made up of three key interrelated elements:
Democracy, economic development, and
autonomy. To a large extent, this definition
is reflected in Unasur’s priorities, which
focus on political cooperation and coordination of joint economic projects in areas
such as infrastructure (like IIRSA), energy,
health industries and services, etc., as
opposed to many other regional integration
organisations, which concentrate on free
trade. The preferred approach has been one
of ‘selective cooperation’, implying that
states are not obliged to participate in all
areas of cooperation.
The issue of democracy, types and quality of
democracy in the region, its impact on the
security and regional cooperation agenda,
and the role of regional organisations
generated an extensive debate at the workshop. It was noted that the turn to the left of
the past 10-15 years and the further movement towards a more radical left in some
states in the region was symptomatic of
previously experienced serious democratic
distortions and deficiencies. ALBA’s
emphasis on dignity, solidarity, complementarity, reciprocity, and horizontal cooperation within and among societies signals the
rejection to neoliberal economic models of
cooperation and democracy.
In turn, Unasur (and Brazil) choose to
support an electoral and procedural
definition of democracy, as evidenced in
Unasur’s Additional Protocol on the
Democratic Commitment. This understanding of democracy ultimately prioritises a
status quo agenda of democracy aiming at
regime preservation over a more substantial
and qualitative one focusing on other
fundamental issues within democracy such
as human rights, freedom of speech, and so
on. Furthermore, this limited approach to
regime maintenance is in line with other
uncontested regional principles and values
sustained by Unasur, such as those of
sovereignty, non-intervention and non-interference in domestic affairs, and the rejection
of supranationality.
Finally, it was pointed out that as central as
regional organisations may be in the discourse of South American states and South
American regionalism, private investors
(often from outside the region) afford them
only a tangential role in improving the
security and safety in their investment destinations. Rather, investors tend to look to
government policy in order to assess the
effectiveness in controlling domestic and
transnational crime.
The issue of domestic crime is particularly
severe in the Andean region, especially
Venezuela. In the 2000s, ALBA’s focus on
deterring the potential invasion of an extraregional superpower (USA) and its regional
proxy (Colombia) and preparing for asymmetrical war against a military superior
enemy led countries, especially Venezuela,
to channel large amounts of resources into
conventional capabilities not tailored for
anti-crime operations. The domestic security
vacuum left and the relative success of
Colombia’s hybrid military-police antiguerrilla approach resulted in peripheral
migration of transnational non-state armed
groups to Venezuela, and to a lesser degree
also Ecuador and Bolivia. While rapprochement between late Venezuelan President
Chávez and then newly elected Colombian
President Santos in 2010 contributed to
enhancing regional stability, the lack of a
security cooperation strategy and information and intelligence exchange between them
puts severe limits to the effectiveness of
policy in this area.
3. Potentialities and limits of
American security cooperation
Latin
An interesting discussion arose about the
complementary or competitive nature of the
existing regional organisations. Those
organisations with a geographical focus on
South America (Unasur, Mercosur, CAN)
present more complementing than competing features, and there is little conflict
between them. This is not the case of Unasur
and OAS, the hemispheric organisation. The
latter two are frequently seen as in
competition over similar issue-areas, with
Latin American states increasingly lending
their support to groupings which exclude the
USA, such as Unasur and CELAC.
However, it was also noticed that neither
Unasur/SADC or CELAC (or indeed
ALBA) possesses institutional provisions to
tackle non-state threats. While ALBA has
concentrated on strategies to conduct an
asymmetrical war against a superpower,
SADC’s focus has been on conventional
military-to-military dialogue. By contrast,
the OAS is the only one of the multilateral
organisations in the region with some
institutional capacity to cooperate in areas of
intermestic security issues, such as
migration, health, non-proliferation, drugs,
money laundering, and so on.
An additional limitation of the Bolivarian
Alliance is its heavy dependence on the
international price of oil. The death of Hugo
Chávez combined with the fall in oil prices
(and the ensuing Venezuelan political and
economic crisis) resulted in a loss of
cohesion among the member of ALBA.
In more general terms, the proliferation of
regional organisations in Latin America
points towards increasing integration efforts,
although on closer examination it is also a
manifestation of significant regional political fragmentation. Such fragmentation is
explained by some fundamental political discrepancies among governments in the
region, and aggravated by mounting political
crises, not only in the Bolivarian states, but
also in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.
In this sense, the adoption of a procedural
definition of democracy seems to have been
functional to the maintenance of regime
stability during the three decades following
the democratic transitions. More recently,
however, such a limited definition of
democracy has proved to show its cracks
and shortcomings. Although the region
shares an understanding of security of which
democracy is key component, the normative
emphasis on sovereignty and national
autonomy sets the limits to the institutionalisation of a more substantive democratic
principle in the region’s organisations.
In a similar vein, the principle of intergovernmentalism and the practice of
presidential diplomacy certainly allow for
more flexibility and more informal mechanisms. In the long term, though, these features
may pose significant limitations to the continuity, stability, effectiveness, and relevance of the regional groupings, as was already seen in past integration initiatives.
In sum, an analysis of the structure and
political dynamics of the existing regional
organisations reveals the intent of Latin
American states to distance themselves from
the USA. Simultaneously, building an
effective and constructive relationship with
the United States remains one of the main
challenges for Unasur and CELAC. A
further challenge for the region’s security
organisations is to develop and deal with the
sensitive intermestic security agenda.
Policy recommendations
A number of proposals and recommendations, useful to both policy makers and
future research agendas, can be derived from
the discussions held at the workshop.
1. Policy coordination and resource
allocation.
Although
the
regional
organisations have helped Latin American
states to cooperate and coordinate security
policies, the area of transnational and
intermestic threats still appears especially
underdeveloped. Bureaucratic and financial
resources will have to be allocated to agree
on, coordinate, and implement more
aggressive regional cooperation against
transnational and intermestic armed groups.
2. Inter-organisational dialogue. In order
to enhance regional policy coordination, it
will be crucial to improve the level and
quality of dialogue between the OAS and the
regional multilateral organisations. Strong
political will and determination by the USA
and Brazil will be needed to guide this
process.
3. Reinforcement of complementarity.
Competition between regional organisations
results in inefficiency and duplication of
political, diplomatic and financial resources.
Specialisation and complementarity should
be sought via redefining the aims and
mandates of multilateral institutions.
4. Democracy. Being democracy central to
the region’s understanding of security, it
would be valuable to move beyond a
limited, procedural definition of democracy.
This will involve extensive conceptual
discussions at the domestic and regional
levels.
5. Core principles. Strict adherence to the
principles of national autonomy, sovereignty
and non-interference in domestic affairs
prove to set limits to the necessary
institutionalisation of Unasur, if it is to
increase its role as an effective and credible
political cooperation, policy coordination,
and conflict resolution mechanism in the
region.