Who Will Attend the OAS Presidential Summit in Panama?

By Fulton Armstrong and Eric Hershberg

OAE-OAS & tgraham / Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Summit of the Americas isn’t until next April, but interest in how Panama as host handles near-unanimous pressure from Latin America to invite Cuban President Raúl Castro, and how the United States and Cuba will respond, is growing fast.  Speaking to reporters at the United Nations last week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson answered several questions on the U.S. position.  Key excerpts follow:

• Asked “if the United States is still opposed to Cuba attending.”  On the Summit of the Americas, I think we’ve been pretty clear in our position on the summit, which is that obviously Panama is the host country for the summit, and as the host country they will make the decisions on invitations to that summit.  …  And the fact of the matter is we have said from the start that we look forward to a summit that can include a democratic Cuba at the table.  We also have said that the summit process, ever since Quebec in 2001, has made a commitment to democracy, and we think that’s an important part of the summit process.  But the decision about invitations is not ours to make, and obviously there’s been no invitations formally issued to the United States and other countries. And so there is no acceptance or rejection yet called for or made. …
• Asked “is there a chance that the U.S. might refuse going.”  Again, I think you won’t be surprised to hear me say that we’re really not going to answer hypotheticals in the future yet.  Obviously, the Summit of the Americas is in April and that’s not a situation that we can answer, although I think we have made clear that we believe the summit process is committed to democratic governance and we think that the governments that are sitting at that table ought to be committed to the summit principles, which include democratic governance. And therefore that’s our position at this point.  Obviously, we have a position on Cuba which does not at this point see them as upholding those principles.

Panama’s likely invitation to Cuba – reflecting the consensus of 32 hemispheric nations at the last Summit – will draw protests from official quarters in Washington.  But it’s far from certain that the Obama Administration would risk blame for torpedoing the 20-year Summit process.  Obama survived a handshake with Raúl Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral last December, and being in the same room with him again as a President in the second half of his second term will have little political consequence.  A workshop in Mexico City in June, in which CLALS researchers participated, and another in Ottawa in September, sponsored by the Center and the University of Ottawa, explored likely outcomes.  Mexican international relations specialists speculated that a reasonable outcome was for the United States to show up like a polite guest, and thus avoid having the anachronism of U.S. antagonism toward Cuba overshadow its broader relations with Latin America.  Canadian experts were deeply concerned that Cuba’s inclusion might undermine the centrality to the OAS of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, but they agreed that failure to convene a Summit would constitute a serious blow to the OAS and to the regular summits that provide Canada a seat at the inter-governmental table.
The reality is that Cuba does not conform to the Democratic Charter or to the broader OAS criteria of democratic rule, but equally real is that Latin America sees Cuba as a full member of the hemisphere and has lost all patience with those in Washington who would deny that.  Either Washington — and Ottawa — set aside their objections to Cuba’s inclusion or they bid farewell to such fora and their constructive impact on regional relationships that ought to matter to them.  Moreover, if they acquiesce to Cuban participation but then try to commandeer the agenda and make the Summit a seminar on democracy and human rights, it will only reinforce the widespread sense in the region that Washington cannot move beyond its obsession with the trivial matter of Cuba and get on with a serious conversation among equal partners.  They would thus sacrifice an opportunity to discuss issues on which significant, substantive advances are possible through dialogue among leaders of countries throughout the hemisphere.  The value of the Summit rests with the capacity of all involved to act like grownups.  President Obama did so at Mandela’s funeral, and it will be telling whether he can do it again in Panama this coming April.
Source: aula blog

Historic August for LGBT Rights in Colombia

By Juliana Martínez

Colombia Diversa / Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Colombia has again shown itself to be a country of contrasts – a society ostensibly ruled by Catholic and conservative morals with one of the hemisphere’s most progressive Constitutional Courts – with two important legal decisions on LGBT rights.  The Court has defended the democratic, pluralistic, and inclusive spirit of the Colombian Constitution against powerful authoritarian and conservative forces for years.  In 2007 and 2008, it granted pension, social security, and property rights to registered same-sex couples, and it ruled that same-sex couples “constitute a family” in 2011.  In spite of some recent rulings tarnishing its liberal record, last month the Court made two decisions that, though limited, have historic implications.

• It ruled in favor of step-child adoptions by gay couples.  After much political, legal, and even religious debate, the Court broke a four-year silence on the highly contested issue, ruling 6 to 3 that Verónica Botero could legally adopt the biological children of her wife, Anna Leiderman.  The ruling does not explicitly allow joint adoption by gay couples, but the decision cites ample scientific evidence and declares that parental homosexuality cannot be considered a risk factor for children, thus leaving the door open for further LGBT-friendly jurisprudence in the matter.
• The court recognized the gender identity of trans women by declaring that they do not have to comply with the compulsory military service required of all Colombian males.  The case centered on Gracy Kelly Bermúdez, a transgender woman who filed a lawsuit against the mayor’s office in Bogotá when she was denied a job for failing to provide proof of her military service.  Bermudez had not entered the military because she identifies as a woman, and therefore did not have the Military Service Registration Certificate (libreta militar) required when applying for jobs, studying at the university level or accessing health care services.  She would have been exempted if she had undergone an official sex change – the right to change one’s sex has been protected in Colombia since 1993 – but this can only be legally done after undergoing sex realignment surgery, a procedure that most trans women do not have access to, cannot afford, or do not want.  Therefore, despite their gender identity and expression, the legal sex of the majority of trans women continues to be “male.”  The Court decided in favor of Bermúdez and ordered the mayor’s office to hire her immediately.

These decisions are far-reaching.  In the Bermúdez case, the Court was essentially prioritizing gender identity over assigned sex at birth.  It declared that asking trans women for the Military Service Registration Certificate when hiring them is unconstitutional because it violates their right to define their own gender.  Furthermore, the Court told Congress to draft a bill that regulates the rights of transgender people in Colombia, paving the way for a much-needed Gender Identity Law.  The ruling also has deep regional implications.  Since Argentina passed a groundbreaking Gender Identity Law in 2012, many countries have been struggling to achieve similar results – and the Colombian legal precedent can become a viable alternative for impact litigation.  Currently, at least ten countries in Latin America have compulsory military service with different levels of enforcement attached to non-compliance.  But as the Bermúdez case illustrates, military conscription mandates can turn into strange, yet effective platforms to denounce how the state routinely imposes gender identity on its citizens, often against their own will, and to catalyze legal reform that advances LGBT rights in the Americas.
* Dr. Juliana Martínez teaches gender and sexuality and Latin American Literature in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University.
Source: Aula Blog

Back Channel to Cuba

The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana

By William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh

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Challenging the conventional wisdom of perpetual hostility between the United States and Cuba--beyond invasions, covert operations, assassination plots using poison pens and exploding seashells, and a grinding economic embargo--this fascinating book chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation. Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. Now, William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh present a new and increasingly more relevant account. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a "new approach," LeoGrande and Kornbluh reveal a fifty-year record of dialogue and negotiations, both open and furtive, indicating a path toward better relations in the future.
LeoGrande and Kornbluh have uncovered hundreds of formerly secret U.S. documents and conducted interviews with dozens of negotiators, intermediaries, and policy makers, including Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter. The authors describe how, despite the political clamor surrounding any hint of better relations with Havana, serious negotiations have been conducted by every presidential administration since Eisenhower's through secret, back-channel diplomacy. Concluding with ten lessons for U.S. negotiators, the book offers an important perspective on current political debates, at a time when leaders of both nations have publicly declared the urgency of moving beyond the legacy of hostility.

About the Author

William M. LeoGrande, professor of government at American University, is the author of Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992, among other books.

Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., is the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, among other books.

Reviews

"An exceedingly well-written and well-documented account. . . . Essential for libraries that support research into the political and diplomatic history of America foreign relations with Cuba in the latter half of the 20th century."
--Library Journal Starred Review
"Told in clear prose, this richly detailed book underscores how diplomacy makes headlines, but many exchanges happen far from official negotiation tables."
--Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"LeoGrande and Kornbluh have analyzed thoroughly the history of dialogue between two countries locked in a contradictory relationship for five decades, with each side skeptical that the other truly wanted improved relations. With continual change in Washington, and continuity in Cuban leadership, the authors draw important lessons from the efforts of every administration since Eisenhower to negotiate with Cuba."
--President Jimmy Carter
"Back Channel to Cuba tells a dynamic, expansive, and anecdote-rich story drawn from compelling primary sources, interviews and declassified documents. Generational change in the ranks of Cuban leadership and transformation on the ground and in the Cuban diaspora in the United States make Back Channel to Cuba a particularly timely contribution: history can and should serve as a guide to present and future decisions about the art of the possible by Cuban and American leaders, policy makers, and citizens."
--Julia E. Sweig, author of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know
"A prodigious achievement--a truly exceptional examination of perhaps the most vexing relationship in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Based on vast numbers of documents, many rarely seen before, plus firsthand interviews with nearly every one of the important participants, including Jimmy Carter and Fidel Castro, Back Channel to Cuba is the equivalent of a 9' high jump when the world record is 8'04" (held since 1993, incidentally, by a Cuban). Nothing else even comes close."
--Lars Schoultz, author of That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
Source: UNC Press

The Hidden History of Dialogue with Cuba: What Obama Needs to Know about Talking to Havana

Monday, October 6, 2014, 9:00 – 10:30am
The Brookings Institution, Saul/Zilkha Room
1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC

For over 50 years, U.S. and Cuban diplomats have danced a minuet of diplomacy, meeting secretly in dingy cafeterias, elegant hotels and fancy French restaurants, from New York to Washington, Guadalajara, Paris, London, Luanda and Havana, to try and solve the myriad issues dividing these two perennial adversaries. Sometimes their talks succeeded and sometimes they failed, but from Eisenhower to Obama, every U.S. president has seen the wisdom of negotiating with Cuba. The lessons drawn from these negotiations are especially relevant at a time when leaders of both nations have publicly declared the urgency of moving beyond the legacy of perpetual hostility. On October 6, the Latin America Initiative in Foreign Policy at Brookings will host William M. LeoGrande, professor of government at American University, and Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, to present their new book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. They will discuss the findings of their research, and offer recommendations to guide present and future U.S. negotiators. They will be joined by Julia E. Sweig, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America Studies. Ted Piccone, senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings, will provide introductory remarks and moderate the discussion. After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Introduction and Moderator Ted Piccone Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Panelists Peter Kornbluh Director, Cuba Documentation Project William M. LeoGrande Professor of Government American University Julia E. Sweig Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies Council on Foreign Relations National Security Archive The Brookings Institution

Argentine Debt and the U.S. Dollar

By Leslie Elliott Armijo

Images Money / Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Multiple economic and political challenges have called into question the future status of the U.S. dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency, but backlash from Argentina’s recent spat with the United States over defaulted bonds appears to be fueling interest in reforms that may have beneficial implications.  According to the IMF, some 61 percent of the world’s known foreign exchange reserves held by central banks around the world remain in low-yielding dollar-denominated assets, mainly U.S. Treasury bonds.  The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), China, and heavyweights in the Global South, including Brazil, are calling for international trade agreements that would give emerging economies “policy space” – allowing national governments to impose capital controls, fund exports, subsidize local industry, and keep financial services national.  Private U.S. banks, however, claim that continued U.S. dominance of world capital markets – a crucial pillar of continued reserve currency status – requires ever more open trade in financial services.  The BRICS complain about the U.S. government’s “exorbitant privilege” as the reserve currency country, with some of the sharpest complaints coming from joint statements by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Chinese officials, though, worried about their own large dollar investments and ambivalent about the implications of renminbi internationalization, more than once have pulled the group toward a softer tone.
Argentina’s ongoing sovereign debt negotiations provide a different window onto the dollar’s reserve currency status.  Like most countries, Argentina has held a large chunk of its government’s savings in the U.S. and hired private U.S. financial institutions as its international bankers.  Today it is trying to extricate itself from U.S. markets and do its saving and financial intermediation elsewhere. Iran and Russia are doing the same, but Argentina has no foreign policy quarrel with the Obama Administration – and is not subject to U.S. financial sanctions over nuclear or military adventurism.  Buenos Aires is among those who chafe at U.S. power through the dollar, but it is primarily motivated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in July to let stand a lower court judgment in favor of investors holding bonds from Argentina’s $82 billion sovereign debt default in December 2001.  Although 92 percent of the original bondholders accepted the Argentine government’s restructured (lower value) bonds in 2005 and 2010, New York Federal District Court Judge Thomas P. Griesa ruled that Argentina’s failure to settle with the holdouts means that any U.S. financial institutions, or their international affiliates, that intermediate funds enabling Argentina to stay current on payments to the majority will themselves be in contempt of court.  This has sent Argentina into “technical default.” Argentina is suing the U.S. in the International Court of Justice (whose jurisdiction the U.S. refuses to recognize) and in the court of global public opinion – pushing, for example, a recent proposal for global financial reform before the U.N. General Assembly. It has also welcomed an $11 billion currency swap agreement with China, and Chinese state banks have since pledged $6.8 billion in new infrastructure loans.  Some observers speculate that the very first loan of the New Development Bank, newly organized by the BRICS countries, could go to Argentina.
The Argentine bond case harms the perceived fairness and credibility of U.S. financial markets and, by extension, the strength of the U.S. dollar because the recent legal judgments seem capricious to many.  Senior figures at the IMF have long supported the routine inclusion in all international sovereign bond issues of a so-called “collective action clause,” which would make any restructuring accepted by two-thirds of bondholders binding on all.  The European Union already has ruled that sovereign bonds issued within the EU, including many for troubled Eastern or Southern European governments, must contain such clauses.  Moreover, the International Capital Markets Association, representing more than 400 of the world’s largest private investment institutions, has just issued a position paper endorsing obligatory collective action clauses, placing it on the same side of this issue as non-governmental organizations advocating financial architecture reform such as the New Rules for Global Finance and the Jubilee Debt Campaign.  This would give taxpayers in emerging economies – the ultimate backstop of the creditworthiness of their governments – the same bankruptcy rights as firms and households.  It is not in the interest of Latin American and other emerging economies for U.S. currency and financial dominance to end anytime soon – a tripolar reserve currency system based on the dollar, euro, and reniminbi does not yet appear able to sustain the worldwide growth and prosperity of recent decades and may in fact entail significant risks – but fairer rules for sovereign financing would benefit everyone.
* Leslie Elliott Armijo is a Visiting Scholar at Portland State University and a Research Fellow at CLALS.  She is currently co-writing a book about international cooperation in the Western Hemisphere.
Source: Aula Blog

With Enemies Like Cuba, Who Needs Friends?

Obama designates Cuba a U.S. enemy; meanwhile, our militaries cooperate

By Marc Hanson
In an interview given to New Yorker editor David Remnick earlier this year, President Obama reflected on his place in history, saying “I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past.”
One measure of any presidency might well be how readily they reevaluate these historic antipathies, dissolve senseless antagonisms whenever possible, and construct more productive international relations for and on behalf of their citizens. This is, of course, easier said than done. Most foreign policy challenges—such as wars in the Middle East, terrorism, and the ongoing crisis in Ukraine—have continued to confound the President and his advisers, and understandably so. They are intractable; pose myriad threats; and require a great deal of time, energy, resources, and political maneuvering to address.
Other foreign policy issues are more straightforward; our interests are clear, and there is widespread domestic and worldwide support for the proposed course of action.  U.S. policy toward Cuba is one such issue, and by the measure mentioned above, President Obama is unwittingly falling short. 
On September 5, the anachronistic nature of the U.S. embargo against Cuba came into jarring relief as past and present collided. On a sleepy summer Friday afternoon, the White House announced that President Obama had signed a continuation for Cuba falling under the Trading with the Enemy Act, meaning that Cuba will remain on America’s enemies list and be subject to the U.S. embargo for yet another year. The Act, which was originally created to give the president control over trade during wartime, is one of the six statutes on which the embargo rests. By itself, the presidential declaration is unremarkable; it is more likely the result of policy inertia overwhelming an overextended White House than serious policy consideration. What is remarkable—bizarre, even—is the irony of what was unfolding at the very moment that the White House was making the announcement.
It turns out that as the president re-designated Cuba an American enemy, our military was closely cooperating with the Cuban military to monitor an unresponsive aircraft that cruised into Cuban airspace. (The timing of the declaration was so well-designed to go unnoticed that no reporters made mention of this curious case of incongruity in U.S. foreign policy; in fact, the only coverage the presidential determination received this year was in the Costa Rica News.)
Apparently unfazed by the enemy declaration, Cuba allowed the United States to fly a C-130 cargo plane and two F-15 fighter jets in its airspace to investigate the incident and made its own search and rescue resources available in case they were needed.
It is hard to imagine that ISIS or any other genuine enemy of the United States would coordinate so closely with the U.S. military and allow U.S. military aircraft into their airspace. The incident is just another manifestation of the absurdity of extending an old rivalry into an era when simple cooperation is in both countries’ interest.
In fact, for the first time perhaps in decades, this year the Obama administration actually had the domestic political space it needs to take Cuba off the enemies list. In June, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aired her recommendation to end the embargo. For months now, increasing numbers of foreign policy thinkers are making public their views that the embargo is outmoded and unworkable.
The political downside to not renewing Cuba’s ignominious designation has all but entirely disappeared. Poll after poll has shown that the American people no longer support travel and trade restrictions on Cuba and would prefer they no longer exist.
There is also a cost to inaction on improving relations with Cuba in the foreign policy sphere. In 2015, for the first time, Cuba will finally be invited to the Summit of the Americas. As policy expert Richard Feinberg assesses in his Americas Quarterly article Cuba and the Summit of the Americas, “In coming months, the United States is going to face a tough choice: either alter its policy toward Cuba or face the virtual collapse of its diplomacy toward Latin America.”
Clearly, not renewing Cuba’s listing would have been good policy and good politics. It would seem that it’s high time for President Obama to reappraise this particular inherited grudge and make a mark in history as a president willing to bury a hatred that belongs in the past.
Marc Hanson is WOLA's Senior Associate for Cuba. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7hZjNO3I-Q

Source: WOLA

Shifting Strategies on Drug Policy: A Comparative Approach

When: Monday, September 22, 2014, 9:30 - 11:00 AM
Where: The Brookings Institution, Saul/Zilkha Rooms
1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036

What:
After decades of orthodoxy and stringent enforcement of drug policies, the global counternarcotics regime is increasingly challenged. Some countries, particularly in the Americas and in Europe, are adopting liberalized approaches, and an array of drug policies are emerging. Policymakers are reviewing the effectiveness of existing policies and exploring alternatives, creating new directions for the global drug policy regime.
On September 22, the Latin America Initiative (LAI) at Brookings, the London School of Economics (LSE), and the Open Society Foundations will host a discussion on global drug policy trends and effectiveness. Experts will address among other issues the security and organized crime implications, the effectiveness of supply-side policies, as well as mass incarceration and the public health dimensions. Panelists will include John Collins, international drug policy coordinator at LSE IDEAS; Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings; Daniel Mejia, associate professor and director of the Research Center on Drugs and Security at Universidad de los Andes; and Jasmine Tyler, senior policy analyst at the Open Society Foundations. LAI Director and Senior Fellow Harold Trinkunas will provide introductory remarks and moderate the discussion.
After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Source: Borrkings Institution