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Letter from Ambassador Alvarez to the InterAmerican Dialogue

August 4, 2005

To the Members of the Inter-American Dialogue:

It was with great interest that I read the recently published report from the Inter-American Dialogue entitled A Break in the Clouds: Latin America and the Caribbean in 2005. Though I was roundly disappointed, to say the least, in the negative and one might even say tendentious mischaracterization of the Government of Venezuela, this is not something that is wholly unexpected. There is, after all a well-known dynamic that so-called "experts" will always hew to the common ken, until reality breaks through the clouds and makes acceptable a more objective articulation of what they realize later was a paradigmatic moment, which they should have understood with greater intellectual acuity. Social scientists say that "One cannot replace a theory of how things are with the facts, only with another theory." The shepherd always guides the sheep; in this case the shepherd is conventional wisdom. Like sheep the report exhibits a poverty of imagination and a paucity of wisdom. One might have hoped for more from the Dialogue; so be it.

Yet, were that the only issue that this reader has with the report, it would not necessarily demand a reaction. Sadly, what is most telling, and I think even most discouraging, about the report, is its astonishing inadequacy reflected in several ways.

Firstly, on page 10, the report specifically calls attention to "the poor economic and social performance of many of Latin America’s democratic governments in the past two decades." This much is true. However, on page 6, the report actually calls for Congress to adopt a pact that would "firmly lock in the policy reforms that have been widely adopted across the region in the past 15 years." One is left to wonder what is referred to, given the report’s own characterization of the last two decades in the region as one of "poor economic and social performance", largely by U.S.-supported governments. The Dialogue’s report simply cannot make up its mind as to whether the reforms it endorses did or did not result in positive changes in the region in a manner that alleviates poverty, thus raising an interesting and relevant question: Should such reforms in fact be "lock[ed] in"? This is an internal philosophical contradiction never textually resolved in the report, despite a recommendation the Dialogue makes to Congress.

So far as I know, none of the major respected studies on the effect of the "Washington Consensus" or "neoliberal" model on Latin America actually recommend its unvarnished repetition. A reader is astonished at the report’s failure to mention that numerous academics, including Dr. Riordan Roett, the Director of the Western Hemisphere Program at the John’s Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, have actually called for Congress to reject this model. Dr. Roett writes:

"The most obvious failure of neoliberal reforms in Latin America over the last 25 years has been a drastic decline in the region’s rate of economic growth. . .Unfortunately, the Washington-centered orthodoxy. . .has a poor record that shows it cannot be expected to resolve fundamental problems. In fact, it has shown that the model may indeed have a tendency to exacerbate them."

The negative effects of the "Washington Consensus" are implicitly recognized in the Dialogue’s report; yet it is as if the authors simply could not help themselves but recommend a continuation of that failed and flawed model.



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