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Mishal Husain: In Bolivia, though, one of the solutions seems almost to be staring people in the face. This is a country with these tremendous reserves of natural gas. Is that the solution, for a country like Bolivia, to focus on an industry like that, which has the potential to transform the economy?
Jorge Castañeda: Well, my sense has always been -- but, of course, in this case, perhaps, I'm a very traditional Latin American developmentalist -- that you use your natural resources to get out of whatever you want to call it, a poverty trap, underdevelopment, etc. You get them out of the ground and you sell them as quickly and as best the price as you can, trying to control as much of it as you can, that there is no sense in keeping these resources under the ground. That's been my sense about México, it's been my sense about other countries, and certainly makes sense in the case of Bolivia. I've participated in negotiations when I was in government in México of having a deal between Bolivia and México where Bolivia would send liquefied natural gas up to Baja, California. We would de-liquefy it there, use it for some electrical power plants in México, and then export it also from the de-liquefying plants in México and Baja, California, to the United States. I think it's an excellent deal for Bolivia and probably a good deal for México also. I think they should use that gas to develop their country, absolutely.
Mishal Husain: Let's talk for a minute about the war on drugs, America's war on drugs, cause one of the things we see in the film is the reality of the cultivation of the coca crop in Bolivia. In purely financial terms it makes perfect sense, doesn't it, for farmers to chose coca over other crops?
Jorge Castañeda: Well, it makes perfect sense and that's what they have been doing since time immemorial in places like Chapare region and place like the upper Huallaga in Perú and other places in México, in Sinaloa, Durango, areas like that. It's not cocaine in México, it's poppy or marijuana, and in upper Huallaga and Chapare, it's coca leaf. It makes perfect economic sense unless you change the incentives. But changing the incentives is quite a task.
Mishal Husain: You mean changing the price that comes in the West?
Jorge Castañeda: You have to increase the price, the danger, the cost of growing coca leaf, and you have to increase the price of alternative crops. In other words, it has to be less and less attractive to grow coca and more and more attractive to grow bananas or something else. This is something that can be done; in fact, the area of cultivation in the Chapare region has dropped dramatically over the past years but it has grown exponentially in Colombia. This is a so-called balloon effect. You can push people out of growing coca leaf in some areas, but they will go out and grow it somewhere else.
Mishal Husain: Do you think, then, that the slash-and-burn tactics that the forcible eradication of the coca cropper is totally futile?
Jorge Castañeda: Well, it's not totally futile for specific regions and specific countries. You can be successful in one country. What clearly you can not be successful at is in diminishing the overall supply of drugs entering this enormous American market with this insatiable demand for drugs. Now that is a no-win proposition perhaps for the United States, but for any given country or one given region of a country, it can be an attractive proposition. And again the Chapare region in Bolivia is an example of that, where eradication actually worked and where cultivation has dropped enormously since the program began.
Mishal Husain: One of the things that Evo Morales has done is to portray the war on drugs as an assault on the indigenous culture. He's obviously been successful in terms of gathering support for that. Do you think there is a grain of truth in it, in that this is something that's been part of traditions for centuries?
Jorge Castañeda: I think that he certainly has a point in that this is a part of the Andean tradition, part of Andean culture, part of Andean health care, in the sense, that work at those high altitudes can be carried out in a more effective and less exhausting manner, thanks to chewing coca leaf. It's also true, of course, that these are not just small peasants always cultivating coca leaf, but the cartels move into cultivation in many occasions firstly. And, secondly, the huge prices that coca leaves fetch is not because the indigenous peoples chew them on their trek across the Andean passes only, but because this is the fundamental raw material for the production of coca paste and then of cocaine powder for the United States.
I don't think you can disassociate the two. I think the two are valid, the two are real, but just to accentuate one or the other is not entirely truthful. When the Americans say it's just for cocaine, I don't think it's true. But when others say it's just for the Andean culture in chewing coca leaf, quite honestly I don't think that's true either.
Mishal Husain: Can the U.S., then, be accused of double standards in terms of the war on drugs in the sense that there's this insatiable demand in the United States, and, yet, there's this major effort to get Latin America to stop producing coca?
Jorge Castañeda: A little more than a double standard, I think it's moving from the rhetoric to reality. Rhetorically, the United States for some time now -- and particularly under the Bush administration -- has acknowledged that the demand side of the equation is at least as important as the supply side and has acknowledged that the U.S. has to do much more in order to be able to say it is doing as much as Latin American countries are doing on the supply side, on the Latin American side.
Mishal Husain: But at the moment more of the effort seems to be going into the Latin American side?
Jorge Castañeda: But rhetorically the United States has accepted this. In fact, perhaps, one can wonder if the United States domestically, is doing as much as would be desirable either to pursue its war on drugs "domestically" with the same vigor, and at the same cost, as it asks Latin American countries to do. Or to search for more imaginative solutions domestically in the United States because the traditional ones don't seem to be working. So I think there is a certain disconnect between the rhetoric on the one hand and the reality of U.S. policy perhaps on the other.
Mishal Husain: And things like the forcible eradication of the crop, these aren't sustainable long-term solutions. I mean some of these crops as we saw in the film are just being replanted immediately.
Jorge Castañeda: Well, and if there not replanted in the same place, they are replanted elsewhere in the same country, or elsewhere in the same region, or elsewhere in Latin America. So, in that sense, there is this balloon effect that if you squeeze the balloon here, it inflates and grows somewhere else. It is very difficult to find countries or regions of the world and of Latin America that will not grow these crops as long as there is a market for them. This is the free market at work, and in this case certainly, it does work. The cartels are very effective entrepreneurial organizations. They are quick to adapt. They are flexible, they are open-minded, modern. These are some of Latin America's most dynamic and adventurous entrepreneurs working in this field. And as long as there is a market, there will be a lot of money to be made there.
Mishal Husain: You've been very vocal in the past about the U.S. forgetting Latin America since September 11th. Isn't this one issue, though, where the U.S. is still firmly engaged and why it's not going to forget about Latin America -- precisely the war on drugs?
Jorge Castañeda: It is. And in all fairness, for example, the Bush administration has had made the important step of convincing the U.S. Congress and working with the U.S. Congress to eliminate, for all practical purposes, the very irritative and counterproductive certification process -- whereby every year the U.S. Congress would certify what countries in Latin America were cooperating and which countries were not cooperating with the U.S. on drug enforcement. And this was a huge step forward and has allowed Latin American countries to make progress also in the war on drugs and drug enforcements.
So in that sense, they haven't forgotten that. The only important achievement, concrete, specific achievement, which I was able, I think, to accomplish during my term as foreign secretary under President Fox, precisely was to achieve the elimination of the certification process. So, it is true that the U.S. has not forgotten Latin America as far as drug enforcement is concerned. Part of that is positive, and part is the same disconnect between rhetoric and reality regarding the question of supply and demand.
Mishal Husain: But broader than that, you've cast this as the forgotten relationship, the United States and Latin America. Do you think that is a temporary phase or is it the reality as the United States priorities change, maybe even in the longer term?
Jorge Castañeda: Well I certainly hope it is a temporary phase. I hope, and I've written and stated that this is something that obviously came out of 9/11, continued with the war in Iraq, and the fact is that, even a superpower like the United States, or a hyper-power like the United States, cannot do too many things at the same time, which is a pity. It should, but it can't. And that means that clearly Latin America and México in particular, which was a high priority -- some say the highest priority in the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda up until 9/11 has, up to a point, fallen off the screen ever since.
That is beginning to change back a little bit. Slowly we are beginning to see the U.S. come back to some of the issues, to some of the countries, that it had, in a sense, neglected since 9/11. I think that's a positive development and I hope that as we move through this year we will see much greater engagement by the United States and Latin America than we've seen so far.
Mishal Husain: What are the implications, though, of that neglect? What's been lost already?
Jorge Castañeda: It's mainly opportunity costs. It's not so much the damage as the absence of progress. A lot could have been done, for example, with México on an immigration agreement. Whether it would have been the perfect, complete immigration agreement which I wanted, or something less than that, which is probably what we would have achieved, one could argue, but I think there was a lot of progress that could have been made there that wasn't made.
Clearly in the case of Argentina, American disengagement made Argentina suffer much more from its own mistakes -- many which were supported by the United States in the first place -- suffer more from its mistakes and from its crisis than would have been absolutely necessary. Clearly the situation in Venezuela has gone further than it would have gone in terms of polarization, economic collapse, etc. if the United States had been more engaged from the beginning and more willing to find ways with other countries in Latin America to try and help Venezuela not go as far toward the abyss as it has. And we can go on country by country in the same sense.
Mishal Husain: What would you say to the argument though that Latin America needs to look less to the United States and look more within itself to find the solutions to its problems at home?
Jorge Castañeda: Well, as a general rule I think that's true. And I think that is, in fact, what many Latin American countries had been doing over the past decade or so -- carrying out economic reforms, some of which were necessary and painful and some of which were painful but not so necessary. This is what Latin America has clearly been doing in terms of democracy, consolidating democratic rule throughout Latin America, with a couple of exceptions. So I think that has already happened. But the weight of the United States and Latin America is so great, and has been so great for so long, that to think you can really move forward on many Latin American challenges without engagement by the United States really is a bit naïve.
Mishal Husain: Not realistic.
Jorge Castañeda: Sometimes it sounds nice, it looks nice, it feels nice, to say so, but it's not realistic.
Mishal Husain: There's a difficult balance though between what we saw in the past, the interference of the United States in Latin America, and the constructive engagement you're calling for. Do you ever worry that if you have a conscious reengagement by the United States in a sense that you might lose that balance? You might go back to the meddling of the past?
Jorge Castañeda: Well, there is unquestionably a balance to be stuck between constructive engagement and egregious intervention. These are two different options, and you have to find the right balance between the two. My sense is that for a series of reasons today, the type of intervention that existed in the past is much more difficult. The cold war is over. There was very little ideological justification for it. Most Latin American countries today enjoy democratic rule and so the question of we're going to build democracy in whichever country simply doesn't hold water. And, in addition, I think opposition within the United States to traditional forms of U.S. intervention like in Central America in the '80s or against Cuba in the '60s or elsewhere, opposition within the U.S. would be very strong.
So I think that time is right for a growing convergence of values of interests and of cooperation between the United States and Latin America on a series of issues. It's there on issues such as human rights, the defense of democracy, the fight against corruption, transparency, terrorism, which is a real issue for the United States and for certain Latin American countries, unquestionably, immigration, which is a central issue for México, Central America, the Caribbean, and some South American countries like Ecuador, and increasingly Colombia. On all of these issues, there seems to be no reason why the United States and Latin America cannot cooperate constructively.
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Jorge Castañeda, México's Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003
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