Turmoil in the Andes
he particulars of their individual stories vary, but in recent years all five Andean nations of South America have suffered crippling bouts of political violence and instability. President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada's hasty escape from his presidential palace in Bolivia last month — he hid in an ambulance to flee a riot — was only the latest indication of just how tenuous democracy's hold is on the region.
Washington policy makers should approach the Andean region as a whole and work alongside other Latin American nations, like Brazil and Mexico, to strengthen democracy in the region. Too often in the past, America's approach has been scattershot.
Colombia, the third-largest recipient of American foreign assistance, is a case in point. Under Plan Colombia, the Bush and Clinton administrations have poured billions of dollars into fighting that nation's drug trafficking, which finances violent left-wing guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitaries. The effort is now starting to reduce coca cultivation, but there are signs that such farming is merely shifting to neighboring countries.
Meanwhile, Colombia's guerrillas recently killed one American contract employee and kidnapped three others involved in the antidrug effort. The Bush administration has sent in 150 more military personnel to assist in the search for them, raising the alarming possibility that Americans could become directly engaged in the conflict.
Colombia, a nation where democracy and brutal civil warfare have tenuously coexisted for decades, deserves our support. But Colombians must do their own fighting, and American aid must remained conditioned on the Colombian military's respect for human rights.
Elsewhere, the region is disillusioned with the last decade's free-market reforms. Too often twisted into a corrosive form of crony capitalism, the "Washington consensus" did little to improve living standards or alleviate poverty. The economic disillusionment has devalued the appeal of democracy as a form of governance and empowered once-marginalized political forces.
In Venezuela, a country of great strategic importance given its vast oil reserves, a demagogic president, Hugo Chávez, has shown that a populist backlash can be as destructive as corrupt political establishments that pay lip service to free markets. Encouragingly, Presidents Alejandro Toledo of Peru and Lucio Gutiérrez of Ecuador appear inclined to follow a more responsible middle course.
Their challenge is to please international capital markets and internal demands for a more equitable distribution of national wealth, and to do so simultaneously and at a difficult economic moment. America needs to be sympathetic, providing aid and promoting trade, but without being an overbearing pitchman for any one set of economic policies.