Cuban–Latin American Relations in the Context of a Changing Hemis ...

U.S. policy toward Mexico has also changed little. The Merida Initiative, also known as Plan Mexico, was begun in the Bush years with the goal of dramatically increasing U.S. military cooperation with Mexico under the guise of fighting the “drug war.” It moved to new levels of intensity in 2009. Under Obama’s watch, funding for the Mexican initiative almost doubled in 2009 to $830 million, making it the largest U.S. foreign aid program in the region. This occurred in spite of comments from the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy that the administration was making a historic shift in its drug policy by acknowledging that the emphasis on a “war on drugs” was “fundamentally flawed.”⁹ This rhetoric was contradicted by the fact that in 2010, the Obama administration fully supported Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s greater militarization of its antidrug efforts, a policy that served only to escalate drug-related violence in Mexico with no apparent impact on the flow of drugs to the United States. Further evidence of the continuity of the U.S.-Mexico policy with that of the Bush years has been the sustained treatment of the issue of Mexican migration to the United States as primarily a security issue. The Obama administration promised to move quickly to achieve broader immigration reform, but in reality it has not pushed the U.S. Congress hard on this issue, and it may not do so before a possible second term for Obama. In the meantime, the Bush administration’s approach of militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border and stepping up law enforcement operations to deport Mexicans back to their country of origin has been continued in full force. The policy included maintaining a force of twenty thousand border patrol agents in 2010, a dramatic increase from a force that in the 1970s numbered only two thousand.¹⁰

Relations between the Obama administration and its traditional allies, Argentina and Brazil—a relationship that was actually begun during the last year of the Bush administration—have been cordial, but even between these countries, tensions have been present. Basically, the United States has refused to accept the increasingly independent stance that Brazil and, to a lesser degree, Argentina have taken in world affairs. Brazil was expected to fall in line behind the U.S. policy to authorize