U.S. foreign assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean had doubled from $860 million a year to $1.6 billion, and the United States had invested nearly $900 million through Millennium Challenge compacts with El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua and a threshold agreement with Paraguay. We enjoyed excellent relations with Colombia, Chile, Peru, Brazil, and most of Central America. But were we still undervaluing our friends through too much attention to our adversaries?
We decided that we were and that, more troubling, we were allowing the “bad boys” of the region to set the terms of the debate. While we talked about trade and foreign investment, they spoke of social justice. While we talked about economic growth, they spoke of health, welfare, and jobs. Why should we allow Chávez to appropriate the language of the people’s well-being when those words rang hollow?
The President set off for a six-day tour of Latin America to deliver this new message. It was a message that our friends had longed to hear from the United States. Hank Paulson developed an initiative to deliver loans to small businesses; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation provided additional funding to underwrite mortgages for working families in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Central America (an effort that had obviously started before the housing crisis in the United States); and we announced a $75 million partnership for English-language training for Latin American students. The trip was the culmination of a long interagency effort led by Dan Fisk of the NSC and Assistant Secretary Tom Shannon who was held in the highest regard in the region. We also enlisted the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, Luis Moreno, who had served as the Colombian ambassador to the United States, to support programs to strengthen some of the poorest countries in the region.
We did one other thing too. The President and I stopped talking about Hugo Chávez, who’d actually gone to Argentina to hold an anti-Bush rally during the trip. By the time we arrived in Uruguay after a stop in Brazil, Chávez began conjuring up theories about why the President wouldn’t mention him and protested publicly. Our tactic was working. He loved it when we would criticize him because he could then stand as the defender of the poor against the “gringo” to the north. Ignoring his provocations worked better.
The same held true the next year with the Russians. In “retaliation” for our response to the war in Georgia, Moscow flew Soviet-era “Blackjack” bombers along the coast of Venezuela. Bob Gates later joked that the United States would have been happy to carry out search-and-rescue missions if one of the old planes crashed. I simply pointed out to the press that unarmed Soviet-era bombers didn’t change the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere. We made light of those ridiculous actions.
But Chávez was dangerous nonetheless, accused of rigging elections in the region and even funding and arming FARC narco-terrorists against the Colombian government. We found it more effective to counter him quietly rather than with great fanfare. And building up your friends with aid and assistance is one way to diminish your enemies. That was the new course we set in Latin America.
We tried again to strengthen our relationship with Mexico, too. When I visited my counterpart, Patricia Espinosa, toward the end of my term, I was struck by questions in our press conference about the violence perpetrated by the drug cartels that roamed the U.S.-Mexican border region. When the newly inaugurated president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, met with President Bush for the first time in March 2007, he was very blunt about what he faced. “We need your help in training the army to do the work that the police can’t,” he said. It was shocking to hear the Mexican president ask for the help of the Americans in a matter of internal security, since Mexico’s stance for years had been to defend proudly its “sovereignty” from the “gringos” to the north. The Mérida Initiative, a $1.4 billion joint partnership to train and equip our Mexican and Central American neighbors’ militaries and law enforcement officers, was put into place, but not without congressional turbulence. It seems that Senator Patrick Leahy was concerned that the funding would fall into the hands of Mexican army officials guilty of past human rights abuses. When I couldn’t convince Pat to release the funding bill from committee for a vote, I called the senators of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas (states that bordered Mexico and suffered from spillover violence) and told them the problem. They had no trouble convincing their fellow legislator from Vermont that the Mérida Initiative was a national security priority.
I wish that we could have done more. There are parts of Mexico that are beginning to resemble a failed state. My counterpart Patricia had chosen for our meeting the relaxed setting of Puerto Vallarta. Sitting there by the beach, she related statistics to me that were shocking at the time: I was told that five thousand officials had been killed or kidnapped, and many thousands of civilians had been caught up in drug-related violence as well. Killings by drug cartels had spread beyond border cities such as Ciudad Juárez to the major economic centers such as Monterrey.
Sometimes an event is a powerful metaphor for a situation. In 1996, as Stanford’s provost, I’d accompanied the football team to the Sun Bowl in El Paso. It was a wonderful time with a grand gala dinner across the border in Ciudad Juárez, complete with a “bloodless” bullfight. When I returned to Stanford in 2009, the Cardinal won its way to the Sun Bowl again. This time our trip materials carried a warning that essentially told us, “Don’t cross the border into Ciudad Juárez. Your life is in danger there.”
I could never shake the feeling, born that day many years before at President Vicente Fox’s ranch, that we never reached our full potential with Mexico. But at least the relationship between the two democracies, which had faced so many challenges in the past, was clearly one of friendship.
THE MOST DEVASTATING FAILURE in our dealings with Mexico had less to do with foreign policy than with domestic affairs. The President had come to office wanting to push forward comprehensive immigration reform in the United States. He’d discussed it with Fox and then Calderón, and it would have been a wonderful achievement in the United States’ relationship with its southern neighbor. But that wasn’t the principal reason why George W. Bush wanted to fix immigration. As Texas governor he’d been a proponent of dealing with the deepening wound of undocumented immigrants living in the shadows—hardworking people without whom California grapes wouldn’t be picked and Texas roofing would come to a standstill. No fan of “amnesty,” he envisioned a “guest worker program” to allow people to stay in the country legally as long as they had a job. There would be a penalty for breaking the law, but eventually people might even achieve citizenship by paying a fine and learning English. In the Senate the bill had the notable support of Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl and Democrat Ted Kennedy.
I had rarely seen the President more disappointed than he was the day the bill failed. He was sitting slightly slumped in his chair in the Oval. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, me too,” he said. Publicly, he would say, “The American people understand the status quo is unacceptable when it comes to our immigration laws. A lot of us worked hard to see if we could find a common ground. It didn’t work.”
It didn’t work, and it still hasn’t. I’m convinced that fixing immigration is one of the critical tasks facing the United States today. I believe in upholding our laws, and I’m certainly one who believes in the “melting pot” and the need for everyone to learn English (though it wouldn’t be bad to learn Spanish too). But the grainy video on cable news of Mexicans crawling across the border does not enrich the dialogue about this hard problem. I don’t recognize my country when people talk of denying citizenship to the children born here of illegal-immigrant parents. I don’t see why we should continue to educate engineers and scientists and scholars from around the world—and then send them home.
The United States is a country of immigrants. For generations, the most ambitious people have come here from across the world to be a part of this great experiment. Immigrants keep us refreshed and immune from the sclerotic demographics
of Europe, Japan, and Russia. Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, once asked me if I knew why America would always be great.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you can tolerate difference,” he said. “And that makes every smart young person want to go there. An immigrant can never be German or Chinese or Japanese—but they can be American.” He was absolutely right.
I’ve been asked many times what I regret about my time in Washington. There were many disappointments but maybe none greater than the failure to get immigration reform when we had a chance. The United States has prospered by drawing on talented people from around the world to enrich us. My parents and grandparents believed in the transforming power of education to lift lives and break through racial and class barriers. Immigrants often hold those views, too, and the determination to act on them. I have always felt a deep kinship with them.
Unfortunately, by 2007 we were out of steam and out of ammunition—sapped by 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. After the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon we had to make trade-offs and pick our battles. Maybe the battle for immigration reform came too late.
Yet, despite some disappointment that we didn’t achieve more in the region, the real story in Latin America was the progress of democratic forces—not perfect and certainly fragile, but well under way. In Washington, I addressed a conference sponsored by the OAS and the African Union to draw lessons from one another on democratic transitions. It was a big step for the nations of the Western Hemisphere, which still talked in terms of “noninterference” in one another’s affairs.
And nowhere was the language of noninterference heard more often than in the case of Cuba. It wasn’t a secret that Fidel Castro was going to die—one day. But our Latin American friends did not want to advocate for democracy for the Cuban people even as they increasingly enjoyed it themselves. Only little Costa Rica and its Nobel Laureate president, Óscar Arias, dared to challenge the orthodoxy about Cuba.
Yet, when word came that Castro had fallen ill, we thought there might be an opening to engage the Latin Americans and the Europeans about Cuba’s future. The President had appointed a Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba to mobilize the U.S. government in building a foundation for the democratic transition when the time came. The commission undertook the most extensive U.S. government assessment of Cuba’s development needs and identified how we could help meet them. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and I cochaired the effort. Carlos was a Cuban American who had fled the island with his parents and brother a year after the 1959 revolution. Carlos was lucky to leave with his parents. Thousands of young refugees, known as the “Peter Pan” children, fled without their parents to avoid conscription and many never saw their families again. Not surprisingly, Carlos had a deep attachment to Cuba and to the desire of its people for freedom. Yet he was not an ideologue; he genuinely wanted to promote change and was prepared to support creative ideas. There was some jealousy at the State Department that the commerce secretary was clearly taking the lead in this diplomatic endeavor. I felt none of that, preferring to be Carlos’s “wingman” as we tried to push against the seemingly immovable force of the Castro brothers. That they remain in place is a tragedy for the Cuban people.
Despite our efforts, Cuba remains a lone outpost of oppression in our hemisphere. In 2002 President Bush said he would engage Congress to ease the embargo and begin to normalize our diplomatic relations if Cuba were to undertake a democratic political opening, commit to elections, and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. The Cuban response was the Black Spring of 2003, when Cuban authorities arrested and imprisoned seventy-five democratic activists.
The Bush administration took a number of other steps to reach out to the Cuban people. We used technology to overcome Castro’s efforts to block the free flow of information. For instance, we broadcasted TV and Radio Marti from aircraft to avoid Cuban signal-jamming efforts, and we authorized the shipment of cell phones, direct TV decoders, and computer equipment to help Cubans connect with the outside world. In an effort to promote safe migration, we increased the number of refugees we would take each year. And in response to the devastating hurricanes and tropical storms in 2008, we offered significant humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to Cuba, even indicating a willingness to work through the regime to ensure the Cuban people received what they needed to survive and rebuild their communities. Regrettably, the regime turned down several offers of such assistance.
Though there was a growing chorus of politicians calling for us to accommodate the Castro regime, we never wavered in our support for political freedom in Cuba and for a peaceful transition to democratic rule. Someday Cubans will have the same basic rights as the other peoples of the Americas. And when that day comes, after the Castro era, we will have left the Cuban people with no doubt that we were on their side.
Progress in the Six-Party Talks
NORTHEAST ASIA WAS again an active front in the early months of 2007. I was returning from a trip to the Middle East and stopped in Berlin to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel and my German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Shortly after landing, my chief of staff, Brian Gunderson, said that Chris Hill, the assistant secretary for East Asia, wanted to see me for a few minutes at the hotel. Chris had just concluded a secret meeting with the North Koreans. (Berlin was chosen for the meeting because North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, had diplomatic representation there dating back to its Soviet-era relations with East Germany.)
I arrived at the Adlon, a spectacularly beautiful prewar hotel across from the Brandenburg Gate, where the Wall once divided East from West. Overlooking the Bundestag, my suite was comfortable, with a grand piano in it that I often played to release the tensions of the day. The wonderful staff of the hotel made it easy, having acquired scores of some of my favorite Brahms pieces. The only discordant element was a frightening portrait of Kaiser Frederick the Great in the dining room. His piercing glare seemed directed at me, and I reflexively diverted my eyes when in his presence.
That night I arrived around six, and Chris was waiting for me. He was clearly excited about his encounter with Kim Kye Gwan, the North Korean negotiator for the Six-Party Talks. The North Koreans were prepared to shut down their reactor at Yongbyong and readmit IAEA inspectors. “What do they want? A light-water reactor?” I asked skeptically, referring to the type used theoretically for civilian energy purposes.
“No,” he replied. “They want their money back.”
Chris was referring to the $25 million in frozen North Korean assets that we were holding. The money had been frozen under the executive order that sanctioned North Korea for illicit activities, including counterfeiting our currency. “That’s going to be a tough sell with the President,” I said. Chris handed me a piece of paper that he’d drawn up with Kim. It was a step-by-step plan to move the Six-Party Talks forward, and it included unfreezing the assets. The North Koreans would be in town for one more day. Chris was guessing that Kim had acted somewhat beyond his instructions from Pyongyang. If he went back without our agreement, we might be back to square one. It looked like a reasonable approach, but I knew it would be a tough sell in the interagency process.
I decided to go directly to the President. I called Steve on the phone and told him what had happened. “I need you to take this to the President directly,” I said. As any good national security advisor will do, Steve protested that he needed to convene the Principals. “I don’t have time for that, Steve. I’d like to talk to the President.” Steve got the President on the phone. “Sir, we have a chance to get this thing off the ground but it won’t be there tomorrow,” I said.
“Send me the paper,” he answered.
I did and then waited until about 1:00 A.M. Berlin time (7:00 P.M. in Washington) before calling again. The President had approved the paper. He had, of course, consulted the Vice President, and Steve had talked to Bob Gates, who had no problem with the approach. Within a month the Six-Par
ty Talks generated an agreement based on the outline that Chris and Kim had prepared. Pyongyang would receive $400 million in aid and fuel oil in return for disabling the nuclear facilities in Yongbyong and allowing the return of nuclear inspectors. And the North Koreans would eventually get their $25 million.
It turned out that it was really hard to get around a Treasury 311 sanction once it had been levied. No financial institution wanted to touch the money, lest it be accused of money laundering. Hank Paulson called every finance minister who might be able to help. No one would. The most remarkable reaction came from the Bank of China. “We have an international board,” Hank was told. “They don’t want us dealing with frozen North Korean assets.” Hank tried to convince responsible officials that the United States wanted this transfer, so there would, of course, be no action against them. Still, no one wanted to be involved. Even the President intervened, calling me in Berlin while a gathering of people, including former chancellor Helmut Kohl, waited to give me an award for my role in German unification. “Is there something else that will satisfy the North Koreans?” he asked.
“No, sir, there isn’t,” I said.
“Are you tired?” he asked, perhaps hearing the strain in my voice
“No, just frustrated,” I said.
Finally Hank came up with an idea: he arranged for the New York Federal Reserve, working with a private bank in Russia, to accept the money from Banco Delta Asia, the bank that held the funds. That didn’t end the drama, though. It would take several more months before finally, in June, the money could actually be transferred to the North. Nothing was simple in dealing with the “Hermit Kingdom.”
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 68
