True to form, in December 2009, the Castros created new problems by arresting a USAID contractor named Alan Gross for bringing computer equipment to the small, aging Jewish community in Havana. Cuban authorities subjected him to a rump trial and then sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. One of my regrets as Secretary was our failure to bring Alan home. The Department and I stayed in close touch with his wife, Judy, and his daughters. I spoke out publicly about Alan and asked numerous other countries to intervene with Cuba. But despite the direct engagement with Cuban officials and numerous efforts by third parties, the Cubans refused to release him unless the United States released five convicted Cuban spies serving time in prison. It is possible that hard-liners within the regime exploited the Gross case as an opportunity to put the brakes on any possible rapprochement with the United States and the domestic reforms that would require. If so, it is a double tragedy, consigning millions of Cubans to a kind of continued imprisonment as well.
In the face of a stone wall from the regime in Havana, President Obama and I proceeded to engage the Cuban people rather than the government. Based on lessons learned all over the world, we believed that the best way to bring change to Cuba would be to expose its people to the values, information, and material comforts of the outside world. Isolation had only strengthened the regime’s grip on power; inspiring and emboldening the Cuban people might have the opposite effect. In early 2011, we announced new rules to make it easier for American religious groups and students to visit Cuba and to allow U.S. airports to allow charter flights. We further raised the limit on remittances Cuban Americans could send back to family members. Hundreds of thousands of Americans now visit the island annually. They are walking advertisements for the United States and for the benefits of a more open society.
Every step of the way, we faced vocal opposition from some members of Congress who wanted to keep Cuba in a deep freeze. But I remained convinced that this kind of people-to-people engagement was the best way to encourage reform in Cuba and that it was profoundly in the interests of the United States and the region. So I was pleased when we started to see change slowly creeping into the country, no matter how hard the regime hard-liners tried to stop it. Bloggers and hunger-strikers added their voices and examples to the demands for freedom. I was particularly moved by the courage and determination of the Cuban women known as Damas de Blanco, “Ladies in White.” Starting in 2003, they marched every Sunday after Catholic mass to protest the continuing detention of political prisoners. They endured harassment, beatings, and arrests, but they kept marching.
Near the end of my tenure, I recommended to President Obama that he take another look at our embargo. It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America. After twenty years of observing and dealing with the U.S.-Cuba relationship, I thought we should shift the onus onto the Castros to explain why they remained undemocratic and abusive.
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The end of the summit in San Pedro Sula was not the end of the drama that June. Just a few weeks later the ghosts of Latin America’s troubled past resurfaced in Honduras. On Sunday, June 28, 2009, the Supreme Court of Honduras ordered the arrest of President Zelaya amid allegations of corruption and fears that he was preparing to circumvent the Constitution and extend his term in office. Zelaya was seized and, still in his pajamas, hustled onto a plane to Costa Rica. A temporary government headed by National Congress President Roberto Micheletti assumed power.
I was at home in Chappaqua enjoying a quiet Sunday morning when I received word of the crisis from Tom Shannon. He told me what we knew, which still wasn’t much, and we discussed how to respond. One immediate issue was Zelaya’s wife and daughters, who were asking to take refuge in the residence of our Ambassador to Honduras. I told Tom to make sure they were protected and well cared for until the crisis could be resolved. I also spoke with General Jones and Tom Donilon at the White House and called the Spanish Foreign Minister for a quick consultation.
The forced exile of Zelaya presented the United States with another dilemma. Micheletti and the Supreme Court claimed to be protecting Honduran democracy against Zelaya’s unlawful power grab and warned that he wanted to become another Chavez or Castro. Certainly the region did not need another dictator, and many knew Zelaya well enough to believe the charges against him. But Zelaya had been elected by the Honduran people, and exiling him under cover of darkness sent a chill through the region. No one wanted to see a return to the bad old days of frequent coups and unstable governments. I didn’t see any choice but to condemn Zelaya’s ouster. In a public statement I called on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law and to commit themselves to resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue. As required by our laws, our government began moving to suspend aid to Honduras until democracy was restored. Our view was shared by other countries in the region, including Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Soon it became the official position of the OAS as well.
In the subsequent days I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.
I began looking for a respected elder statesman who could act as a mediator. Óscar Arias, the President of Costa Rica, which has one of the highest per capita incomes and greenest economies in Central America, was a natural choice. He was a seasoned leader, having earned the respect of the entire world and the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end conflicts across Central America. After sixteen years out of office, he successfully ran for President again in 2006 and became an important voice for responsible governance and sustainable development. In early July, I called him. We discussed the need to ensure that elections occurred as scheduled in November. He was game to try to broker an agreement, but he was concerned that Zelaya would not accept him as a mediator and asked me to push the deposed President to take a leap of faith.
That afternoon I hosted Zelaya at the State Department. He arrived in better shape than when he first addressed the world from Costa Rica; the pajamas were gone and the cowboy hat was back. He even joked a bit about his forced flight. “What have Latin American presidents learned from Honduras?” he asked me. I smiled and shook my head. “To sleep with our clothes on and our bags packed,” he replied.
Jokes aside, Zelaya was frustrated and impatient. Reports from Honduras of clashes between protesters and security forces only heightened the tension. I told him that we should all do everything we could to avoid bloodshed and urged him to participate in the mediation process to be led by Arias. By the end of the conversation, Zelaya was on board. I knew that Micheletti would not accept the mediation if he thought Zelaya had the upper hand, so I wanted to announce the new diplomatic effort alone, without Zelaya by my side. As soon as we finished talking, I asked Tom to take Zelaya into an empty office and have the Operations Center place a call to Arias so the two of them could speak. Meanwhile I hurried down to the State Department press briefing room to make an official announcement.
The first few days brought no breakthroughs. Arias reported that Zelaya was insisting on being fully restored as President, while Micheletti maintained that Zelaya had violated the Constitution and refused to stand aside until the next scheduled elections. In other words, neither side showed any inclination to compromise.
I stressed to Arias, “Our bottom line is free, fair, and democratic elections with a peaceful transfer of power.” He agreed that firm talk was needed and expressed frustration at the intransigence he was encountering. “They are not willing to give concessions,” he explained. Then he echoed a sentiment I think many of us felt: “I’m doing this and am in favor of Zelaya to be restored because of principles, Mrs. Clinton, not because I like these people. . . . If we allow t
he de facto government to stay, the domino effect goes all around Latin America.” That was an interesting reformulation of the domino theory, the famous Cold War fear that if one small nation went Communist, its neighbors would soon follow.
Zelaya returned to the State Department in early September for additional negotiations. Then, on September 21, he secretly returned to Honduras and resurfaced at the Brazilian Embassy, a potentially explosive development.
The negotiations dragged on. By late October it was clear that Arias was making minimal progress in bringing the two sides to an agreement. I decided to send Tom to Honduras to make it clear that America’s patience had run out. On October 23, just after 9 P.M., I received a call from Micheletti. “There is a growing sense of frustration in Washington and elsewhere,” I warned him. Micheletti tried to rationalize that they were “doing everything in [their] power to reach an agreement with Mr. Zelaya.”
About an hour later I reached Zelaya, still holed up in the Brazilian Embassy. I informed him that Tom would be arriving soon to help resolve the matter. I promised that I would stay closely involved personally and that we were going to try to settle the crisis as soon as possible. We knew we had to develop a process that allowed the Hondurans themselves to resolve this problem in a way that both sides could accept—a tall order, but not, as it turned out, impossible. Finally, on October 29, Zelaya and Micheletti signed an agreement to set up a national unity government to run Honduras until the upcoming elections and establish a “truth and reconciliation” commission to investigate the events leading to Zelaya’s removal from office. They agreed to leave to the Honduran Congress the question of Zelaya’s return to office as part of the national unity government.
Almost immediately there were arguments about the structure and purpose of the unity government, and both sides threatened to pull out of the agreement. Then the Honduran Congress voted overwhelmingly not to restore Zelaya to office, dealing him a painful and unexpected setback. He had greatly overestimated the depth of support in the country for his cause. After the vote he flew to the Dominican Republic and spent the next year in exile. The elections, however, went ahead. In late November voters chose Porfirio Lobo, who had been runner-up to Zelaya in 2005, as the new President of Honduras. Many South American countries did not accept this outcome, and it took a year of additional diplomacy before Honduras was accepted back into the OAS.
This was the first time in Central American history that a country that suffered a coup and was on the verge of major civil conflict was able to restore its constitutional and democratic processes through negotiation, without imposition from the outside.
If ever there were a region where we need to look beyond the headlines to focus on the trendlines, it’s Latin America. Yes, there are still big problems that have to be solved. But on the whole, the trends are toward democracy, innovation, more broadly shared opportunities, and positive partnerships among the countries themselves and with the United States. That’s the future we want.
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Africa: Guns or Growth?
Will Africa’s future be defined more by guns and graft or growth and good governance? Across this vast continent, there is rising prosperity and terrible poverty, responsible governments and total lawlessness, lush fields and forests and drought-stricken states. That one region can encompass all these extremes prompts the question that guided our work at the State Department: How can we help support the tremendous progress happening in so many places across Africa, while also helping to turn the tide in those places where chaos and privation still dominate?
The legacy of history hangs heavy over this question. Many of the continent’s conflicts and challenges stem from colonial-era decisions that drew borders without regard for ethnic, tribal, or religious differences. Poor governance and faulty economic theories in the postcolonial era perpetuated divisions and promoted corruption. Rebel leaders, as is often the case everywhere, knew how to fight but not govern. The Cold War made much of Africa an ideological and sometimes real battleground between forces backed by the West and those backed by the Soviet Union.
The continent’s challenges remain acute, to be sure, but there is another side to Africa emerging in the 21st century. Several of the fastest-growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2000, trade between Africa and the rest of the world tripled. Private foreign investment surpassed official aid, and it is expected to continue growing. Between 2000 and 2010, nonpetroleum exports from across Africa to the United States quadrupled, from $1 billion to $4 billion, including clothing and crafts from Tanzania, cut flowers from Kenya, yams from Ghana, and high-end leather goods from Ethiopia. Over the same period, child mortality rates declined while primary school enrollment increased. More people gained access to clean water and fewer died in violent conflicts. Africa now boasts more cell phone users than either the United States or Europe. Economists expect consumer spending in sub-Saharan Africa to grow from $600 million in 2010 to $1 trillion by 2020. All of this means that a different kind of future is possible. In many places, that future has already arrived.
President Obama and I knew that helping Africa tip toward opportunity instead of conflict was not likely to make big headlines back home, but it could yield big benefits for the United States down the road. To that end, he visited sub-Saharan Africa earlier in his term than any American President before him, making a trip to Ghana in July 2009. In a speech at the Parliament in Accra describing a new vision for America’s support for democracy and expanded trade in Africa, the President memorably said, “Africa doesn’t need strongmen. It needs strong institutions.” He also acknowledged that historically Western powers had too often seen Africa as a source of resources to be exploited or as a charity cause in need of patronage. He issued a challenge to Africans and Westerners alike: Africa needs partnership, not patronage.
For all the progress being made, however, there were too many African nations where workers earned less than a dollar a day, mothers and fathers died of preventable diseases, children were schooled with guns instead of books, women and girls were raped as a tactic of war, and greed and graft were the dominant currency.
The Obama Administration’s engagement in Africa would be built around four pillars: promoting opportunity and development; spurring economic growth, trade, and investment; advancing peace and security; and strengthening democratic institutions.
Our approach was in sharp contrast to the way other nations engaged across Africa. Chinese companies, many of them state-owned, responding to their own immense domestic demand for natural resources, were buying up concessions for African mines and forests. Starting in 2005, their direct investment across the continent increased thirtyfold, and by 2009, China had replaced the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner. A pattern developed: Chinese companies would enter a market and sign lucrative contracts to extract resources and ship them back to Asia. In return they built eye-catching infrastructure projects like soccer stadiums and superhighways (often leading from a Chinese-owned mine to a Chinese-owned port). They even built a massive new headquarters for the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
There was no doubt that these projects were welcomed by many African leaders and that they were helping modernize infrastructure in a continent where just 30 percent of the roads were paved. But the Chinese brought their own laborers rather than hire local workers who needed jobs and sustainable incomes, and they paid little attention to the health and development challenges Western nations and international organizations worried about. They also turned a blind eye to human rights abuses and antidemocratic behavior. Strong Chinese support for the regime of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, for example, significantly reduced the effectiveness of international sanctions and pressure, which led some activists concerned with the genocide in Darfur to call for boycotting the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
I grew increasingly concerned about the negative effects of foreign investment in
Africa, and frequently raised the issue with Chinese and African leaders. On a visit to Zambia in 2011, I was asked by a TV journalist about the effects of this kind of investment. “Our view is that over the long run, investments in Africa should be sustainable and for the benefit of the African people,” I responded. We were sitting together in a U.S.-funded medical center focused on pediatric HIV/AIDS. I had just met a young mother who was HIV-positive, but because of the treatment she was able to receive at the center, her eleven-month-old daughter was HIV-negative. To me, it was a great example of the kind of investment in Africa that America was making. Were we doing that to make money? No. We were doing it because we wanted to see a healthy, prospering Zambian people, which would ultimately be in American interests. “The United States is investing in the people of Zambia, not just the elites, and we are investing for the long run,” I said.
The journalist followed up with a question about China in particular. Could the Chinese economic and political system serve as a model for African nations, he asked, “as opposed to the notion of good governance which is largely seen in Africa as being imposed by the West?” I would be the first to applaud the job China has done lifting millions of people out of poverty, but in terms of good governance and democracy, it leaves a lot to be desired. For example, the Chinese policy of noninterference in a nation’s internal affairs meant ignoring or abetting the corruption that was costing African economies an estimated $150 billion a year, scaring away investment, stifling innovation, and slowing trade. Accountable, transparent, and effective democratic governance was a better model. But to give the Chinese their due, they have the capacity to get big projects done, at home and abroad. If we wanted to do a better job of creating opportunity and reducing corruption, we had to do more to increase countries’ capacity to deliver results.
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