Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  I also made some trips across the border with my new friends for dinner and dancing. It was a whole lot easier to cross back and forth in those days. I ended up working alongside a guy from Yale whom I’d been dating named Bill Clinton. After McGovern lost the election in a landslide, Bill and I decided to decompress at a small resort on the Pacific Coast, and we discovered that we loved Mexico so much that we went back often over the years, including on a honeymoon trip to Acapulco in 1975.

  Because of the overheated rhetoric of our domestic immigration debate, many Americans still think of Mexico as an impoverished land that people are desperate to leave behind when they head north. But the truth is Mexico’s economy has thrived in recent years, its middle class has swelled, and its democracy has made significant strides. I was impressed that, to take one example, under President Felipe Calderón, Mexico built 140 tuition-free universities to meet the needs of its growing economy.

  At the start of the Obama Administration, one of the biggest hurdles standing in the way of Mexico’s continued democratic and economic development was an epidemic of drug-related violence. Rival cartels battled one another and the nation’s security forces, often catching entire communities in the crossfire. After assuming office in December 2006, President Calderón had deployed the army in a major offensive against the cartels. The violence escalated, and despite some successes by the government, the cartels continued to operate. By the time I became Secretary of State, drug gangs had metastasized into paramilitary organizations and thousands of people were dying every year. Though the crime rate was down in areas untouched by drug trafficking, where the cartels did operate, car bombings and kidnappings became commonplace. Border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez started to resemble war zones. And the violence threatened to spill into El Paso and other nearby American communities.

  In 2008, gunmen attacked the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey with small arms and a grenade. Thankfully no one was injured. In March 2010, however, three people connected to our consulate in Ciudad Juárez were murdered. An American employee of the consulate, Lesley Enriquez, was shot in her car along with her husband, Arthur Redelfs. At nearly the same time, across town, the Mexican husband of a locally employed staff member of the consulate, Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, was also shot. These murders were another reminder of the risks the men and women representing our country face all over the world, not just in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. The incidents also underscored the need to help Mexico restore order and security.

  The basic fact of the drug war was that the cartels were fighting one another for the right to export narcotics to the United States. An estimated 90 percent of all the drugs used in America flowed through Mexico, and roughly 90 percent of the weapons used by the cartels came from the United States. (The ban on assault weapons that Bill signed in 1994 expired ten years later and was not renewed, opening the door to increased arms trafficking across the border.) It was hard to look at these facts and not conclude that America shared responsibility for helping Mexico stop the violence. In March 2009, in one of my first trips as Secretary, I flew to Mexico City for consultations on how we might expand our cooperation amid the growing violence.

  I met with Calderón and his Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, a career diplomat who became one of my favorite colleagues and a good friend. They outlined their needs, including for more Black Hawk helicopters to respond to the increasingly well-armed cartels. Calderón was passionate about stopping the violence against his people, and he radiated the intensity of a man on a very personal mission. The brazenness of the drug cartels offended him and undermined his plans for jobs and education. He was also angry about the mixed messages he believed he received from the United States. How am I supposed to stop the well-armed drug traffickers, he would ask, when you won’t stop the weapons they buy across the border and you have states starting to legalize the use of marijuana? Why should my citizens, law enforcement, or military put their lives on the line under such circumstances? Those were uncomfortable but fair questions.

  I told Calderón and Espinosa that we would expand the Bush Administration’s Mérida Initiative to help law enforcement. We asked Congress to allocate more than $80 million for helicopters, night-vision goggles, body armor, and other equipment. We also requested funding to deploy hundreds of new border guards on our side to crack down on gunrunning and drug smuggling. This was an effort by the whole administration, including Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Attorney General Eric Holder, and John Brennan, the President’s Assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

  After our meeting Espinosa and I held a joint press conference. I explained that the Obama Administration viewed drug trafficking as a “shared problem” and that we recognized the challenge of reducing demand for illegal drugs in the United States and stopping the flow of illegal guns across the border into Mexico. The next day I flew north to Monterrey. In a speech at TecMilenio University, I reiterated this commitment. “The United States recognizes that drug trafficking is not only Mexico’s problem,” I told the students. “It is also an American problem. And we, in the United States, have a responsibility to help you address it.”

  I thought that was a pretty obvious thing to say. It was demonstrably true. It was also a key tenet of the new approach the Obama Administration intended to take in Latin America. But I knew that this kind of candor could come with a cost back home. Certain media outlets could be expected to react with hysteria and talk of “apologizing for America.” Political concerns are not irrelevant in foreign policy; the United States is strongest when we face the world united, so building and maintaining public support for our policies at home is important. But in this case I was prepared to absorb the criticism in order to do what was right and advance our agenda. Sure enough, the New York Post headline screamed, “Hillary’s Drug Shock.” I had long since stopped taking such criticism personally, and I felt strongly that if we wanted to improve our standing around the world and actually solve problems, we would have to tell some hard truths and face the world as it is.

  Soon our expanded cooperation began to produce dividends. Mexico extradited more than a hundred fugitives to the United States in 2009. Nearly two dozen high-level drug traffickers were captured or killed thanks to improved intelligence and targeting. The Obama Administration tripled funding to reduce demand for illegal drugs in the United States to more than $10 billion a year, and the FBI stepped up arrests of cartel members operating north of the border. We helped train thousands of Mexican police officers, judges, and prosecutors and formed new partnerships across Central America and the Caribbean to make citizen security a priority of our diplomacy in Latin America.

  Our relationship became strained in late 2010, when secret reports from our Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual were published as part of the WikiLeaks affair. When I returned for another visit in January 2011, Calderón was livid. The New York Times reported that he was particularly upset by one leaked report “that quoted Mr. Pascual questioning the Mexican Army’s reluctance to act on American intelligence about a drug cartel leader.” Calderón told the press that the leaks caused “severe damage” to Mexico’s relationship with the United States. He complained to the Washington Post, “It’s difficult if suddenly you are seeing the courage of the army [questioned]. For instance, they have lost probably 300 soldiers . . . and suddenly somebody in the American embassy, they [say] the Mexican soldiers aren’t brave enough.” Espinosa advised me to meet with the President to explain and apologize. When I did, Calderón told me that he no longer wanted to work with Carlos and insisted that he be replaced. It was one of the tougher meetings I’ve ever sat through. Afterward I told Carlos that I had no choice but to bring him home, but assured him I’d find a new assignment to utilize his skills and experience. He officially resigned from his post in March and shortly afterward took charge of our new bureau on global energy issues. Espinosa and I worked hard to repair the damage, and our cooperation
continued.

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  There was a good model for how an ambitious effort like Mexico’s could succeed: Colombia. This was a country that had captured my imagination ever since my brother Hugh served in the Peace Corps there in the early 1970s. He described it as the most rewarding experience of his life, and after he came home he used to regale us with stories of his adventures. Bill thought they sounded right out of his favorite novel, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but Hugh swore they were all true. Sadly, by the 1990s, Colombia was one of the most violent countries on earth, terrorized by drug traffickers and guerrillas who controlled vast swaths of territory and who could strike at will in any major city. Foreign policy experts routinely referred to it as a failed state.

  Bill worked with President Andrés Pastrana to provide more than $1 billion to fund Colombia’s campaign against the drug cartels and the leftist rebel faction known as the FARC. Over the following decade, Pastrana’s successor, President Álvaro Uribe, whose father was killed by FARC guerrillas in the 1980s, expanded Plan Colombia with strong support from the Bush Administration. But even as the government made progress, new concerns began to arise about human rights abuses, violence against labor organizers, targeted assassinations, and the atrocities of right-wing paramilitary groups. When the Obama Administration came into office, we made the choice to continue America’s bipartisan support for Plan Colombia, but we broadened our partnership with the government beyond security to work more on governance, education, and development.

  By the time I visited Bogotá in June 2010, violence was down dramatically, the insurgency was on the road to defeat, and citizens enjoyed an unprecedented measure of security and prosperity. By a happy coincidence in our hectic schedules, Bill was traveling through Colombia on Clinton Foundation business while I was there. We met in Bogotá and went out for dinner with friends and staff at a local steakhouse, and toasted Colombia’s progress. As we walked through the streets, we marveled at how far the country had come. A quiet evening stroll like this would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier.

  When I sat down with President Uribe, we discussed Colombia’s remaining security challenges, but they were only one part of the agenda. We spent time talking about how Colombia and the United States could work together at the UN Security Council on global issues, how to expand trade, and prepare for the upcoming Summit of the Americas. Uribe was a hard-nosed, hands-on leader. The end of his term was approaching, and he reminisced about the long road his country had traveled. “You know, when I was inaugurated eight years ago,” he told me, “we couldn’t even hold the ceremony outside because there were so many attacks, there were snipers and bombs. We’ve come such a long way.”

  Uribe’s successor, Juan Manuel Santos, who studied in the United States in 1980 on a Fulbright scholarship, moved to consolidate this progress and in 2012 began negotiations with what was left of the FARC. These talks offer the promise of bringing lasting peace to Colombia. I spoke by phone with President Santos and congratulated him. “It’s very important and symbolic and I hope we can achieve a good ending in this process,” he replied.

  The credit for Colombia’s progress goes to its courageous people. But I am proud of the role that the United States has played over three administrations to help to reverse the country’s disintegration, strengthen human rights and the rule of law, and promote economic development.

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  After my comments in Mexico in March 2009 about shared responsibility and President Obama’s speech in Trinidad and Tobago in April about equal partnership, it was starting to feel as though we had laid a foundation for the new chapter of engagement we sought in the hemisphere. Little did we know that the month of June would test our efforts and intentions in unexpected ways.

  For me, June began in the smallest country in Central America, El Salvador, where I attended the inauguration of the country’s new President and a regional conference on promoting broad-based economic growth and reducing economic inequality. Both events spoke to the promise and potential we hoped would come to define our relationship with Latin America.

  The combined economy of Latin America was nearly three times the size of India’s or Russia’s and not far behind China’s and Japan’s. The region was poised to accelerate out of the global recession with growth of nearly 6 percent in 2010, and unemployment would fall to its lowest rate in two decades by 2011. According to the World Bank, the middle class in Latin America had grown by 50 percent since 2000, including an increase of more than 40 percent in Brazil and 17 percent in Mexico. That translated to increased prosperity for them and more than 50 million new middle-class consumers eager to buy U.S. goods and services.

  So we worked hard to improve and ratify trade agreements with Colombia and Panama and encouraged Canada and the group of countries that became known as the Pacific Alliance—Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile—all open-market democracies driving toward a more prosperous future to join negotiations with Asian nations on TPP, the trans-Pacific trade agreement. The Alliance stood in stark contrast to Venezuela, with its more authoritarian policies and state-controlled economy.

  Yet for all this progress, economic inequality in Latin America was still among the worst in the world. Despite rapid development in many areas, parts of Latin America remained locked in persistent poverty. At the conference in El Salvador, which was organized under the banner of a regional initiative started by the Bush Administration called “Pathways to Prosperity,” I argued that a key challenge for Latin America in the years ahead would be to make sure that the benefits of economic growth were broadly shared and that the region’s democracies delivered concrete results for their citizens. “Rather than defining economic progress simply by profit margins and GDP, our yardstick must be the quality of human lives,” I suggested, so we should be measuring “whether families have enough food on the table, whether young people have access to schooling from early childhood through university, whether workers earn decent wages and have safe conditions at their jobs.”

  A number of Latin American countries, notably Brazil, Mexico, and Chile, had already found success in reducing inequality and lifting people out of poverty. Some of the most effective tools were “conditional cash transfer” programs. In the 1990s Brazil under President Fernando Cardoso began providing regular small payments to millions of poor families if they kept their children in school. Later, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expanded the program to include regular medical checkups and classes on nutrition and disease prevention. These incentives empowered women, increased school attendance, improved child health, and spurred economic growth. As the program expanded, so did the results. In Brazil the percentage of the population living below the poverty line fell from 22 percent in 2003 to just 7 percent in 2009, and similar programs spread across the hemisphere.

  One area of economic cooperation that I thought was particularly important was energy. The United States already sourced more than 50 percent of our imported energy from our own hemisphere. Further expanding cooperation on energy and climate change could serve as a vehicle for bridging divides between nations, creating economic opportunity, and improving the environment all at the same time. My team helped develop a proposal for an Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas to support innovation and build on the region’s strengths. There were many examples to learn from. Brazil was a leader on biofuels. Costa Rica generated nearly all of its electricity from hydropower. Colombia and Peru were developing clean energy mass-transit systems. Mexico was closing landfills, capturing the methane for power generation, and improving the air quality of Mexico City, greening the roofs and walls of its buildings, and planting a massive number of new trees in the area. Barbados was unlocking the potential of solar water heaters. And islands such as Saint Kitts and Nevis and Dominica were developing their geothermal resources.

  Over the coming years we would build on this foundation and put
special emphasis on linking different national and regional electrical grids from northern Canada all the way to the southern tip of Chile, as well as out to the Caribbean, which pays some of the highest electricity costs in the world. Because the costs are so high, the Caribbean could achieve access and independence through solar, wind, and biomass fuel production with zero subsidies if the governments have the will to shift their spending from imported oil to homegrown clean power. The same is true in Central America. All this was particularly important because 31 million people across the hemisphere still lacked access to reliable and affordable electricity. (Worldwide the number is 1.3 billion people.) That held back progress in so many ways. How can you run a successful business or school in the 21st century without power? The easier access people have to energy, the better their chances of climbing out of poverty, educating their children, and staying healthy. So we set a goal of seeing every community in the region gain access to electricity by the year 2022.

  The other highlight of my visit to El Salvador at the beginning of June 2009 was the inauguration of a new President, Mauricio Funes. It was an occasion to reflect on the profound political transformation that had swept Latin America since the end of the Cold War. Constitutional democracies had taken root where right-wing military dictatorships and left-wing demagogues had once dominated the political landscape. In 2013 the NGO Freedom House labeled the Americas, which includes the United States and Canada, “second only to Western Europe in levels of freedom and respect for human rights.”

  The region’s political and economic success (despite a few holdouts) made it a model for emerging democracies elsewhere, including in the Middle East. And, to my great satisfaction, Latin America was also showcasing the power of women leaders. In a part of the world often known for its machismo culture, powerful and accomplished women have led Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Guyana, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago and have served as interim leaders in Ecuador and Bolivia.