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Salvadorans should be pleased that President Obama will be visiting their country. It puts them in good company. Brazil and Chile, Latin American’s most prominent success stories, are the other stops on the US president’s trip, his first to the region since 2009. In El Salvador, Obama will reaffirm and the close bilateral relationship and acknowledge the country’s democratic solid credentials. Though not to be exaggerated, El Salvador may also reap more concrete benefits from the visit.
It is important, however, to recognize that Obama’s stopover in El Salvador was motivated mostly by Washington’s growing concern about Central America’s deteriorated security situation and democratic setbacks in recent years. Indeed, these problems severely limited the president’s choice of a destination in the region.
Nicaragua was clearly out of bound. No US leader wants to shake hands with President Ortega, who has systematically manipulated his country’s democratic institutions to hold on to power and recently provoke a needless border confrontation with Costa Rica. Nearly two years after its 2009 coup d’état, Honduras remains too unsettled to be a comfortable host for the US president. If this year’s presidential elections had not kept Guatemala off the itinerary, its state of emergency or the first lady’s constitutionally questionable run for the presidency would probably have likely produced the same result. Costa Rica would be an attractive stopover, but its comparative prosperity and the quality of its democracy, make it highly unrepresentative of Central America. Good news from the region is scarce these days—even from El Salvador, which despite its economic and political advances in the 20 years since the end of its civil war, remains a poor country in a distressed neighborhood. And like its neighbors, it very much needs and wants US assistance to deal with multiple problems it cannot address on its own.
President Obama and Salvadoran President Funes have an agenda for the visit. They will announce new US support for Central America’s most urgent problem—the escalating lawlessness and violence that is threatening public safety across the region, undercutting the credibility of army, police, and justice systems, and in some places, putting fragile democratic governments at risk. Even Costa Rica, with region’s strongest public institutions and best quality governance, is fast being overwhelmed by criminal activity. The US has provided some anti-crime aid to Central America as an offshoot of the Merida program in Mexico. Plans are now for increased attention, resources, and technical assistance to the region.
Wisely, the two presidents are also calling for expanded support for social and economic development in El Salvador to complement the security funding. This is badly needed. The country’s economic performance (and that of Central America generally) is lagging behind most other Latin American countries. Central America was hit harder by the global economic crisis, and its recovery has been slower, a consequence of it ties to the US economy and it dependence on imports for the bulk of its fuel and food.
The proposals sound promising, but it is early to applaud. The specifics—including the amount of new resources that will be available to El Salvador and the rest of Central America—not yet been revealed. Moreover, the Latin America record is not very encouraging when it comes to confronting organized crime and drug trafficking or reforming judicial systems and police forces. To be sure, Colombia had made impressive gains in it anti-drug battles, but that is more the exception than the rule. After four years, there is not much evidence that US financial and technical support has significantly improved Mexico´s security forces or raised the quality of coordination between US and Mexican anti-crime agencies. Despite commitment to “shared responsibility,” Washington has not managed either to curtail US consumption of illicit drugs or curb the flow of American arms and money to Mexican crime syndicates.
With more than one and a half million Salvadorans resident in the US, many of them with temporary or no legal status, no issue on the bilateral agenda is more important or more frustrating for El Salvador than US immigration policy (and for Guatemala and Honduras as well). President Funes knows that there is virtually no prospect of needed comprehensive reform any time soon. But he can and should urge Obama to pursue more modest, less controversial legislative changes that, for example, could offer 220,000 Salvadorans, now temporarily protected from deportation, a path to permanent residence—or allow some several million children, brought to the US from across the world, to obtain legal standing.
But expectations for Obama’s visit should be kept modest. It may be enough that the visit provides El Salvador with the rare opportunity to showcase some of its accomplishments and gain Washington’s attention to some of its critical concerns. Not many countries get that chance.
