Dr. Kissinger's Pills for Latin America

Henry Kissinger has never paid very much attention to Latin America, at least not enough to please Latin leaders. Indeed, since the U.S. Secretary of State proclaimed a "new dialogue" in 1973, he has canceled three announced trips to the southern half of the hemisphere. Last week Kissinger finally got the new dialogue going with visits to Venezuela, Peru and Brazil. This week, to wind up his tour, he will stop in Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala.

Parity and Dignity. Kissinger's main objective was to persuade Latin Americans that the U.S. really does care, but not everyone was convinced. In Venezuela, one columnist noted sarcastically: "During the past few days, certain government officials have been very excited. We can't tell whether to attribute the excitement to the visit of Henry Kissinger or the visit of Raquel Welch." Colombia's left-wing weekly Alternativa, arguing that Kissinger was not coming to negotiate but to impose conditions, ran a full-page cartoon of the Secretary declaring, "The Guatemala earthquake was just a warning."

Nonetheless, State Department officials have been saying Kissinger has undergone a "change of perception" on Latin America since the days when he put the region at the bottom of his list of international priorities. He has apparently come to feel that Latin America's problems are an important part of the larger U.S. relationship with the Third World. Venezuela is a major oil exporter. Brazil and Mexico are experiencing rapid economic growth. As a whole, the continent has supported the Third World's clamorous demand that the industrialized countries provide more aid to the poorer countries.

The Kissinger trip, moreover, comes at a time of new irritations in Latin America. There is a feeling in the area, as in the rest of the world, that congressional-Executive Branch quarrels in Washington have set U.S. foreign policy adrift. Many Latin Americans are also wondering whether the U.S. will help if Fidel Castro's Cuban expeditionary forces try to repeat their Angola performance closer to home. Then too, last week's trip came just after disclosures of illegal payoffs in Latin America by such multinational giants as Lockheed, Gulf and Occidental Petroleum.

Arriving in Venezuela on the first stop of his tour, Kissinger lost no time outlining a detailed American program for dealing with these issues. Addressing a symposium of diplomats, academics and businessmen in the seaside resort of Caraballeda, Kissinger promised U.S. action in six areas. These include greater U.S. aid through the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank, help in stabilizing commodity prices, and cooperation with the Latin American Economic System (SELA), a plan for regional economic cooperation founded last year.

On noneconomic issues, Kissinger promised to negotiate with individual countries on a basis of "parity and dignity." That presumably includes one of the touchiest problems facing the U.S.: the Panama Canal (see box following page). Continuing his global effort to inspire confidence in America's reliability, Kissinger also pledged "to enforce our commitment to mutual security ... against those who would seek to threaten independence or export violence" --meaning the Cubans. In fact, it was Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez who, in his private talks with Kissinger, raised the new "hemispheric reality" of Cuba's Angolan intervention.

Kissinger's 39 hours in Venezuela included a tire-squealing 60-m.p.h. climb from the sea-level airport up to Caracas, where Kissinger placed a wreath at the Simon Bolivar shrine. "Your Secretary of State is a Yankee torbellino [whirlwind]," marveled one Caracas motorcycle cop. Near the end of the visit, a local journalist asked President Perez if Kissinger had broken the ice between the two countries. Perez's reply: "Ice doesn't grow in tropical countries."

Astride the Gap. The positive mood continued during the Secretary's 24-hour stopover in Peru, whose left-leaning military government espouses what it describes as "revolutionary socialist nationalism." Kissinger conferred for nearly an hour with Military Junta President General Francisco Morales Bermudez, gave a luncheon at the U.S. embassy, and attended a dinner in his honor at the Palacio Torre Tagle in Lima. His basic message: the U.S. does not object to Peru's pro-Third World policies and invites Lima to consult regularly with Washington "to discuss issues of common concern." In Brazil, the Secretary appraised the country as a relatively advanced society that still tends to support Third World demands against the rich nations. As he put it during a banquet in Brasilia, it "stands astride the great international challenge of our time: the gap between the developed and the developing worlds."

It would be logical, in Kissinger's view, for Brazil to become the southern anchor of stability in the Western Hemisphere. In acknowledgment of this potentially key international role, Kissinger and Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Francisco Azeredo da Silveira signed an agreement establishing twice-yearly talks on such matters as trade, technology exchange and aid.

In all, Kissinger's trip was an important boost to the Latin Americans' sense of their own growing importance. But, as some local observers were quick to point out, the favorable mood will have-to be followed by concrete action. They place emphasis on such difficult is sues as the behavior of U.S. multinationals, the unfavorable balance of trade that most hemisphere nations have with the U.S., and actual aid to the region for economic development. As one Peruvian newsman put it, "Kissinger's visit has been brief and hurried, like a doctor's call. But the real patient is the U.S.-Latin America relationship, the mending of which will take something more permanent and substantial than the few reassuring pills he has given us."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.