FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
06/18/2015 01:08 PM EDT
Latin America, Chile, and the Global Internet
Remarks
Ambassador Daniel A. Sepulveda
Deputy Assistant Secretary and U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs
Agelini Center of Innovation
Santiago, Chile
June 18, 2015
Thank you. I am honored to come to Chile and speak to you as an American Ambassador. It is to some degree a homecoming. This is where my parents are from, our extended family is here, and this country and its people hold a very special place in my heart.
I am here to extend the hand of friendship and to ask for your partnership in the international dialogue on how to best ensure that the Internet remains an open platform for global social and economic development for the region, the world, our children and grandchildren.
While Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina have played an active role in the international institutions and organizations that debate Internet related issues, Chile has been relatively quiet. Yet, according to an April 2015 report of the Boston Consulting Group titled, “Which Wheels to Grease? Reducing Friction in the Internet Economy”, Chile is outperforming almost all of the other nations in Latin America in its digital strategy. It clearly has been greasing the “right” wheels. This country can and should be playing a leadership role as a champion of democratic discourse and open markets in the international debate over Internet governance.
This year, at the United Nations General Assembly in December, we will meet to review the last ten years of progress in the global digital economy and how it is contributing to global development. Chile has the industry, civil society, and governmental talent and capacity to help lead this discussion. You have a great story to tell and the world needs to hear it.
As you know, more than three billion people and trillions of devices are connected to the Internet today. That connectivity is revolutionizing how we live, work, and govern ourselves. It has shrunk the world, made more information more accessible to more people, and disrupted incumbent power in politics and business alike.
As a matter of economic and social justice, the global Internet helps bridge the gap between talent and opportunity. In much of the world, men and women in rural communities are now able to receive microloans to start a small business using only their smartphones. There are applications for women to track their health and the health of their baby while they are pregnant and for men and women to be able to identify the location of clean water.
And today, the Internet’s economic benefits are actually increasingly shifting to the developing world. It is in developing markets of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia that the Internet economy is growing fastest, at a rate of 15 to 25 percent per year; compared with around 6% in developing countries. The Latin American Internet audience grew 23% in the past year and now represents 8% of the global Internet audience. Chile stands out in the region with over 66.5% of its population connected to the internet, however average penetration in Latin America still hovers around 30% and falls as low as 8% in some countries. A 10 percent increase in broadband penetration is estimated to result in a 1 to 1.5 percent increase in annual per-capita growth, so the potential for the region is huge, however, the growth and promise that we know the Internet can deliver is not a foregone conclusion. The future we desire depends on how the technology is used and how it is governed. This is why the United States considers the promotion of an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable Internet a key component of our foreign policy.
The Internet developed organically, as an experiment by academics and technologists, discovering a new way to facilitate an exchange of ideas and make new connections between people. As the Internet has evolved into the critical resource it is today, governments in particular are grappling with what in some cases boils down to an identity crisis—what is the role of government? And, how much power or control should government be able to exercise vis-à-vis other stakeholders?
The way we see it, governments around the world must make a choice: to enable the Internet’s growth or detract from it. To date, how governments make this choice and exercise it has proven inextricably linked to how they feel about freedom of expression and human rights. And where governments choose to reduce friction in the digital economy, the Boston Consulting Group study showed that compared to other similar markets, open markets experienced a real difference of 1% in GDP growth. Closed countries, those who deny their people the freedom to engage in commerce and discourse are falling behind.
Setting economics aside, the United States and Chile are both active champions of the exercise of human rights. As Secretary Kerry explained when he was in Seoul a few weeks ago, the United States particularly believes strongly in freedom of expression. We understand that we may not always agree with the views that some may choose to express and we know that some may abuse this right in order to harm others, but we believe that the benefits outweigh these challenges. Some governments believe the opposite and look for any excuse to silence their critics and have used the Internet to control what people read, see, write, and say.
We have a shared responsibility to be good stewards of the Internet and must not be complacent in pursuing our vision of the future. I see three critical issues ahead on which Chile and the United States can and should work together.
The first issue is access. The Internet can only be an engine for growth if it is available. Roughly three out of every five people in the world remain without Internet access, and in the poorest countries that figure can top 95 percent. That’s why two years ago the United States helped to create the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a broad coalition of governments, industry, and civil society that works with policy makers to expand access while keeping prices low. It is also why Secretary Kerry announced that the State Department will soon launch a new initiative, in partnership with partner countries, development banks, engineers, and industry leaders to increase connectivity around the world. At the Summit of the Americas that took place in April in Panama, President Obama announced our intention to work with partners to increase the adoption of fixed and mobile broadband, and the deployment of broadband infrastructure as necessary.
The second issue is governance. The Internet has flourished because of the bottom-up, consensus-based process that allows all stakeholders, including the private sector, civil society, academics, engineers and governments, to participate in its governance. This multistakeholder approach has served us well and is visible in many institutions that keep the Internet operating in a safe, secure, and reliable manner. There are those who claim this system is broken and should be replaced by a more centralized, top-down approach, where governments and inter-governmental institutions have more control. We believe that such claims are misguided and untrue, and would actually stunt the growth of the Internet and slow its delivery to the rest of the world. We are working steadfastly with our international partners and global stakeholders to preserve the multistakeholder approach wherever it is challenged but we need your help.
And the third issue is stability. Cyberattacks are a real and persistent threat for all states. At the policy level, we believe that our best defense is to promote international cyber stability. What that means is, we are seeking broad consensus on what constitutes responsible and irresponsible behavior in cyberspace, with the goal of creating a climate in which all states are able to enjoy the benefits of cyberspace.
In the United Nations, we have affirmed that the basic rules of international law apply in cyberspace, but we are also working on some additional principles that are gaining traction. First, no country should conduct or knowingly support online activity that intentionally damages or impedes the use of another country’s critical infrastructure. Second, no country should seek either to prevent emergency teams from responding to a cybersecurity incident, or allow its own teams to cause harm. Third, no country should conduct or support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, trade secrets, or other confidential business information for commercial gain. Fourth, every country should mitigate malicious cyber activity emanating from its soil. And fifth, every country should do what it can to help states that are victimized by a cyber-attack.
The Internet has served us well as a platform to provide anyone connected to it with an opportunity to contribute to political, economic, and social discourse, and we believe that is a very good and important thing, worthy of preserving. It is the kind of freedom that this country fought for and won. And that is why it is so important that you engage this global debate.
The issues raised at the global gatherings of leaders related to the Internet transcend any one policy area and include questions of ethics, the role of government in society, commercial issues, and democracy. Chile’s voice is critical in this conversation and to ensuring that this revolutionary tool is available for the Chilean children and grandchildren of my uncles and aunts to break down barriers in any field they wish to engage.
Thank you. I appreciate your time and look forward to answering any questions you might have.
Showing posts with label LATIN AMERICA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LATIN AMERICA. Show all posts
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
STATE DEPT.-SAN DIEGO PORT DISTRICT PARTNER TO ENHANCE MARITIME SECURITY ASSISTANCE TO ASIA, LATIN AMERICA
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Law Enforcement, Narcotics, Anti-corruption: U.S. Department of State Announces Partnership with the San Diego Unified Port District
05/06/2015 04:35 PM EDT
U.S. Department of State Announces Partnership with the San Diego Unified Port District
Media Note
Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
May 6, 2015
Ambassador William R. Brownfield, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding with the Port of San Diego to launch a partnership that will enhance the Department’s maritime security assistance to Asia and Latin America.
Under this partnership, the vast expertise and experience of the Port’s Harbor Police Department will be put to work helping partner nations improve border security in the face of increased criminal threats. The Harbor Police Department is the law enforcement agency that patrols San Diego Bay, surrounding waterfront areas, and San Diego International Airport. Its 120 sworn officers are highly trained, with a range of expertise in a variety of subjects including maritime firefighting, counter smuggling, human trafficking, K-9 detection of explosives/narcotics, aviation security, vessel operations, maritime tactical training and dive operations. By providing training and mentorship, the Harbor Police will assist in efforts to combat transnational crime and build partner nations’ capacity to establish effective port and maritime security. The Harbor Police will be a unique partner for INL in addressing those challenges in addition to providing partner nations a regional perspective on port and maritime security.
This new relationship with the Port of San Diego is INL’s second port partnership and builds on the Bureau’s existing work with PortMiami to provide security assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean.
Law Enforcement, Narcotics, Anti-corruption: U.S. Department of State Announces Partnership with the San Diego Unified Port District
05/06/2015 04:35 PM EDT
U.S. Department of State Announces Partnership with the San Diego Unified Port District
Media Note
Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
May 6, 2015
Ambassador William R. Brownfield, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding with the Port of San Diego to launch a partnership that will enhance the Department’s maritime security assistance to Asia and Latin America.
Under this partnership, the vast expertise and experience of the Port’s Harbor Police Department will be put to work helping partner nations improve border security in the face of increased criminal threats. The Harbor Police Department is the law enforcement agency that patrols San Diego Bay, surrounding waterfront areas, and San Diego International Airport. Its 120 sworn officers are highly trained, with a range of expertise in a variety of subjects including maritime firefighting, counter smuggling, human trafficking, K-9 detection of explosives/narcotics, aviation security, vessel operations, maritime tactical training and dive operations. By providing training and mentorship, the Harbor Police will assist in efforts to combat transnational crime and build partner nations’ capacity to establish effective port and maritime security. The Harbor Police will be a unique partner for INL in addressing those challenges in addition to providing partner nations a regional perspective on port and maritime security.
This new relationship with the Port of San Diego is INL’s second port partnership and builds on the Bureau’s existing work with PortMiami to provide security assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean.
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY, CHILEAN FOREIGN MINISTER MUNOZ MAKE REMARKS AT SIGNING CEREMONY
FROM: THE STATE DEPARTMENT
Remarks With Chilean Foreign Minister Munoz at a Signing Ceremony
Remarks
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Benjamin Franklin Room
Washington, DC
June 30, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, thank you very much for joining us. We’ve just come from a wonderful lunch with President Bachelet and her delegation, and we discussed the very strong relationship between the United States and Chile. And to that end, Foreign Minister Munoz and I are going to be signing memoranda of understanding on small business cooperation, on international development cooperation, and a declaration on the intent on trilateral cooperation in the Caribbean. Afterwards, my colleagues from the Department of Homeland Security will sign a joint statement to combat trafficking in persons, and with Finance Minister Arenas, an agreement on customs mutual assistance that will facilitate trade while at the same time keeping our countries secure.
The MOU on small business, on business cooperation, cements an already strong partnership with Chile, and it does so in a way that will advance economic opportunities for small businesses, and it will also promote access for women through the Women’s Entrepreneurship of the Americas initiative. We really look forward, as we talked about at lunch and we also talked about with President Obama today, to the opportunity to expand an already strong economic relationship and long-term both security and friendship relationship with Chile in order to develop other economies in the Pacific region as well as throughout Latin America.
Our declaration of intent on the cooperation on the trilateral effort is really a pledge to continue and upgrade our development in Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. So the United States and Chile come to this memorandum of understanding signing today with a clear intent to continue to grow our own relationship and to try to strengthen the relationships with other countries in Latin America, particularly with a view to trying to achieve our shared goals on a global basis. Chile is a great partner globally, and we appreciate enormously the cooperation that we have received and that we give each other.
Heraldo.
FOREIGN MINISTER MUNOZ: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Let me first say that we’re very pleased with the president, President Bachelet, to come to Washington for this bilateral meeting with President Obama with you to sign these agreements that I think underline the fact that we have a key bilateral relationship and that this is a mature and high-quality relationship that we highly value. And I think that the agreements that we’re signing today point towards sort of a new association. We already have a free trade agreement, we already have a high-quality relationship, but we’re signaling here that we want to go into new grounds.
And that new association has to do with cooperation, not only among ourselves but in third countries like in the Caribbean, like we’re signing today, with small and medium enterprises that are absolutely fundamental to create jobs. In our country, most of the jobs are created by small and medium enterprises, and we appreciate cooperation in that area. The fact that we are also singing agreements with regard to education, science and technology, innovation, energy, which are all the areas that I think point towards this new association between our two countries.
I want to also say that the customs agreement point towards the common interests in security, in securing our borders, but at the same time facilitating trade, because this is one of our interests. We value also your mentioning our projecting ourselves towards the Pacific and the Asia region. This is a horizon of the future. We are part of the Pacific. We’re both members of APEC. And Chile, within the Pacific Alliance, is making a further commitment to deepen our ties with our countries, our colleagues of the region to project ourselves together with the rest of the Latin American region so that Chile can aspire to be a bridge to the Pacific. It can be a port to the Pacific not only to the countries that face the Pacific but also those on the Atlantic side.
So this has been a very positive visit. President Bachelet is satisfied with the conversations that we had. And I think we have a road ahead of us to comply with the commitments, including those, Mr. Secretary, that both of us made at the Our Ocean Conference that you led that will be held in Chile next year, where I hope the countries that came with commitments will comply with what they promised. I think this will be not only for the benefit of our oceans, of our biodiversity, but the economic future of our countries. If we ecologically value what we have, I think we are making a commitment towards future generations.
So thank you very much for hosting us, and thank you to President Obama because President Bachelet has been very satisfied with this visit. Thank you.
SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you. Thank you, Heraldo.
STAFF: Secretary Kerry and Minister Munoz will now sign the Memorandum of Understanding for International Development Cooperation.
(The memorandum was signed.)
STAFF: The second signing will be the Memorandum of Understanding on Promoting Entrepreneurship and the Growth of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises. Witnessing the signing of the MOU are U.S. Small Business Administration Maria Contrares-Sweet and Chilean Minister of Economy, Development, and Tourism Luis Felipe Cespedes.
(The memorandum was signed.)
STAFF: The third signing will be the Joint Declaration of Intent for the Development of Trilateral Cooperation in Countries in the Caribbean. This declaration of intent on trilateral cooperation evidences our pledge to contribute to development in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.
(The memorandum was signed.)
SECRETARY KERRY: Whatever we signed is legally binding now. (Laughter.)
FOREIGN MINISTER MUNOZ: We cannot repent.
SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, sir. Well done.
(Applause.)
STAFF: Now Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Foreign Minister Munoz will sign the Joint Statement between the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Chilean Ministry of Interior and Public Security on Combating Trafficking in Persons. The joint statement will increase cooperation among enforcement agencies with an aim to target, disrupt, dismantle and deter human trafficking criminal enterprises, enhance bilateral exchanges of information related to human trafficking and share experiences regarding the protection of vulnerable populations.
(Applause.)
STAFF: Finally, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske and Minister of Finance Alberto Arenas will sign the Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Chile regarding Mutual Assistance between their Customs Administrations. This agreement provides the legal framework to assist countries in the prevention, detection and investigation of custom offenses. Chile is the seventieth country to sign a customs mutual assistance agreement with the United States. The signing of the agreement will build on bilateral efforts to cooperate on law enforcement and facilitate trade and travel.
(Applause.)
STAFF: Thank you. This concludes our signing ceremony. We look forward to working together closely on issues ranging from economic development to security.
The MOU on small business, on business cooperation, cements an already strong partnership with Chile, and it does so in a way that will advance economic opportunities for small businesses, and it will also promote access for women through the Women’s Entrepreneurship of the Americas initiative. We really look forward, as we talked about at lunch and we also talked about with President Obama today, to the opportunity to expand an already strong economic relationship and long-term both security and friendship relationship with Chile in order to develop other economies in the Pacific region as well as throughout Latin America.
Our declaration of intent on the cooperation on the trilateral effort is really a pledge to continue and upgrade our development in Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. So the United States and Chile come to this memorandum of understanding signing today with a clear intent to continue to grow our own relationship and to try to strengthen the relationships with other countries in Latin America, particularly with a view to trying to achieve our shared goals on a global basis. Chile is a great partner globally, and we appreciate enormously the cooperation that we have received and that we give each other.
Heraldo.
FOREIGN MINISTER MUNOZ: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Let me first say that we’re very pleased with the president, President Bachelet, to come to Washington for this bilateral meeting with President Obama with you to sign these agreements that I think underline the fact that we have a key bilateral relationship and that this is a mature and high-quality relationship that we highly value. And I think that the agreements that we’re signing today point towards sort of a new association. We already have a free trade agreement, we already have a high-quality relationship, but we’re signaling here that we want to go into new grounds.
And that new association has to do with cooperation, not only among ourselves but in third countries like in the Caribbean, like we’re signing today, with small and medium enterprises that are absolutely fundamental to create jobs. In our country, most of the jobs are created by small and medium enterprises, and we appreciate cooperation in that area. The fact that we are also singing agreements with regard to education, science and technology, innovation, energy, which are all the areas that I think point towards this new association between our two countries.
I want to also say that the customs agreement point towards the common interests in security, in securing our borders, but at the same time facilitating trade, because this is one of our interests. We value also your mentioning our projecting ourselves towards the Pacific and the Asia region. This is a horizon of the future. We are part of the Pacific. We’re both members of APEC. And Chile, within the Pacific Alliance, is making a further commitment to deepen our ties with our countries, our colleagues of the region to project ourselves together with the rest of the Latin American region so that Chile can aspire to be a bridge to the Pacific. It can be a port to the Pacific not only to the countries that face the Pacific but also those on the Atlantic side.
So this has been a very positive visit. President Bachelet is satisfied with the conversations that we had. And I think we have a road ahead of us to comply with the commitments, including those, Mr. Secretary, that both of us made at the Our Ocean Conference that you led that will be held in Chile next year, where I hope the countries that came with commitments will comply with what they promised. I think this will be not only for the benefit of our oceans, of our biodiversity, but the economic future of our countries. If we ecologically value what we have, I think we are making a commitment towards future generations.
So thank you very much for hosting us, and thank you to President Obama because President Bachelet has been very satisfied with this visit. Thank you.
SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you. Thank you, Heraldo.
STAFF: Secretary Kerry and Minister Munoz will now sign the Memorandum of Understanding for International Development Cooperation.
(The memorandum was signed.)
STAFF: The second signing will be the Memorandum of Understanding on Promoting Entrepreneurship and the Growth of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises. Witnessing the signing of the MOU are U.S. Small Business Administration Maria Contrares-Sweet and Chilean Minister of Economy, Development, and Tourism Luis Felipe Cespedes.
(The memorandum was signed.)
STAFF: The third signing will be the Joint Declaration of Intent for the Development of Trilateral Cooperation in Countries in the Caribbean. This declaration of intent on trilateral cooperation evidences our pledge to contribute to development in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.
(The memorandum was signed.)
SECRETARY KERRY: Whatever we signed is legally binding now. (Laughter.)
FOREIGN MINISTER MUNOZ: We cannot repent.
SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, sir. Well done.
(Applause.)
STAFF: Now Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Foreign Minister Munoz will sign the Joint Statement between the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Chilean Ministry of Interior and Public Security on Combating Trafficking in Persons. The joint statement will increase cooperation among enforcement agencies with an aim to target, disrupt, dismantle and deter human trafficking criminal enterprises, enhance bilateral exchanges of information related to human trafficking and share experiences regarding the protection of vulnerable populations.
(Applause.)
STAFF: Finally, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske and Minister of Finance Alberto Arenas will sign the Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Chile regarding Mutual Assistance between their Customs Administrations. This agreement provides the legal framework to assist countries in the prevention, detection and investigation of custom offenses. Chile is the seventieth country to sign a customs mutual assistance agreement with the United States. The signing of the agreement will build on bilateral efforts to cooperate on law enforcement and facilitate trade and travel.
(Applause.)
STAFF: Thank you. This concludes our signing ceremony. We look forward to working together closely on issues ranging from economic development to security.
PRESIDENT OBAMA, PRESIDENT BACHELET OF CHILE MAKE REMARKS BEFORE MEETING
FROM: THE WHITE HOUSE
Remarks by President Obama and President Michelle Bachelet of Chile Before Bilateral Meeting
Oval Office
11:05 A.M. EDT
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I want to welcome back to the Oval Office President Bachelet. She is my second favorite Michelle. (Laughter.) And I’m very much pleased to see her again. We had the opportunity to work together when I first came into office. Since that time, President Bachelet has been extraordinarily busy doing excellent work at the United Nations, particularly around women -- an issue that the United States has been very supportive of. And we’re very proud of the work that she did there.
She’s now back in office, and it gives us an opportunity to just strengthen further the outstanding relationship between the United States and Chile.
Let me say, first of all, congratulations to the Chilean National Football Team for an outstanding showing at the World Cup. I know it was a tough loss, but it also showed the incredible skill and talent of the Chilean team. This is as well, I think, as it’s ever done against a very tough Brazilian team on their home turf. And so congratulations to them. We play -- coming up, we’ve got a tough match as well. So I want to wish the U.S. team a lot of luck in the game to come.
The basis for Chile’s and the United States’ strong bilateral relationship includes the fact that we have a free trade agreement that has greatly expanded commerce in both countries and has created jobs in both countries.
We have excellent cooperation when it comes to a wide range of issues -- energy, education, people-to-people relations. Chile has been a model of democracy in Latin America. It’s been able to consistently transition from center-left governments to center-right governments, but always respectful of democratic traditions. Obviously, those traditions were hard-won, and President Bachelet knows as well as anybody how difficult it was to bring about democracy. And now, the fact that Chile across the political spectrum respects and fights for the democratic process makes it a great model for the entire hemisphere.
Today, we’re going to have an opportunity to discuss how we can deepen those relationships even further. I know that education, for example, is an issue that is at the top of President Bachelet’s agenda. It’s something that’s at the top of my agenda here in the United States. For us to be able to strengthen student exchanges and compare mechanisms and ideas for how we can build skills of young people in both countries is something that we’ll spend some time on.
We’re both very interested in energy and how we can transition to a clean energy economy. And we’ll be announcing some collaborations, including the facilitation of a construction of a major solar plant inside of Chile that can help meet their energy needs.
We’ll talk about regional issues. Obviously, we’ve seen great progress in democratization throughout the region, in part because of Chile’s leadership, but there are obviously still some hotspots that we have to try to address, as well as issues of security in areas like Central America and the Caribbean. And I’ll be very interested in hearing President Bachelet’s views.
And we’ll discuss international issues. Chile, with its seat on the United Nations Security Council, can serve as a leader on a wide range of issues, from peacekeeping to conflict resolution, to important issues like climate change. And we have great confidence that in that role Chile will continue to be a positive force for good around the world.
So I just want to say thank you for not only the friendship with President Bachelet, but more broadly, our friendship with the Chilean people. And President Bachelet’s predecessor, he and I had an excellent relationship; she and I have had an excellent relationship. I think that indicates that it really goes beyond any particular party. I’m confident that my replacement after I’m gone will have an excellent relationship, because it’s based on common values and a strong respect in both countries for the value of the U.S.-Chilean relationship.
So, welcome, and I look forward to an excellent conversation.
PRESIDENT BACHELET: Thank you, President Obama. I want to, first of all, thank you for the invitation to visit you and your country. And, of course, we are looking forward to enhance our cooperation in many different areas.
As you just mentioned, Chile and the U.S. have had a very strong and mature relation for so many years, and we want to make it deeper and to enhance them in different areas. Of course, this will be a great opportunity, as you said, to discuss some of the regional and international issues, given the fact that we’re also sitting at the Security Council. But also, we will be able to in the bilateral dimension be able to increase our cooperation in areas that are very sensible, and for the U.S. and for Chile, such as you mentioned, education, energy, science and technology, people-to-people relation.
We already have, as you know, a very good -- I mean, not only the bilateral way, we also have a very good Chile-California and Chile-Massachusetts programs. We have been working very strongly and we will continue on that path.
And we are really interested -- this year, I think we are commemorating 10 years of the free trade agreement from the U.S. and Chile. And the U.S. is our, I would say, our most important foreign investor. We want to continue that path, and of course, we will have also the possibility of having activities with the Chamber of Commerce and others because we really want to make our relations in all dimensions -- political, economical, social, et cetera -- stronger and stronger every day.
So I’m very happy to be here with you again, and I’m sure this will be a great meeting.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you.
END
11:12 A.M. EDT
11:12 A.M. EDT
Thursday, May 22, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY'S REMARKS AT CLEAN TECH CHALLENGE TAMAYO MUSEUM, MEXICO
THE STATE DEPARTMENT
Remarks at CleanTech Challenge
Remarks
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Tamayo Museum
Mexico City, Mexico
May 21, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY: (Applause.) Muy buenas noches a todos. (Inaudible.) (Laughter.) (Inaudible.) What an enormous pleasure for me to be here. I’m really delighted to be able to join you, and I hope everybody can hear me. Can you all hear? Okay?
AUDIENCE: (Off-mike.)
SECRETARY KERRY: (Inaudible) can hear? (Inaudible.)
Dr. Aguirre-Torres, thank you very, very much. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for bringing everybody together here. And I’m particularly happy to be able to be here as we launch the final round of the 2014 CleanTech Challenge. I’m very grateful to Dr. Torres for the visionary leadership that he has shown, and I’m grateful to all of you who are part of this incredibly important exercise, and I’ll talk a little more about that in a minute. But you all have turned the CleanTech Challenge into the top green business plan competition in all of Latin America, and I think you ought to be very, very proud of that. It’s a pleasure to be joining so many contestants, judges, mentors, innovators, and it’s clear that you are not only lifting Mexico’s economy, but with the successes that are achieved, you are designing things that have the ability to lift other people’s economies.
I had a chance just a little while ago to feast briefly – unfortunately, too briefly – on the historic central square with Diego Rivera’s remarkable murals. And I suppose from the prehistoric[1] palaces of the Aztecs to the Zocalo’s towering cathedral to this museum that we are gathered in today, Mexico has always had a very, very special sense of history, a very special commitment to culture and an extraordinary (inaudible). As much as we admire that past, I am not here to talk about the past, nor are you. Every single person here is fixated on the future, and that’s what we’re here to talk about.
And that’s appropriate. Because today, our global economy is more interconnected than it has ever been or than perhaps any of us might have imagined it might have become as fast as it has. I want to emphasize, the work of diplomacy is not just about our shared security and thinking about borders and terrorism and narcotics and all of those kinds of things. That’s not all that is at stake. It is about creating shared prosperity. And no society is going to survive unless it has a strong foundation of shared prosperity. There are many places in the world, including in my country, where the divide between people at the top and people struggling to get to the middle even is much too big. The way we’re going to deal with this is not through political speeches; it’s going to be through innovation, through hard work, through research, through education, and creating the kind of opportunity that creates the products of the future.
I want to emphasize to everybody here, from the day that I became Secretary of State, President Obama and I have been on a mission to emphasize to people that economics is not some separate component of policy. Foreign policy is economic policy and economic policy is foreign policy. And when you look at the world today, with millions of young people, whole countries where 60, 65 percent in a few cases, but many cases 55 and 60 percent of the young people are under the age of 30, 50 percent are under the age of 21, and 40 percent are under the age of 18. And if we don’t provide jobs and opportunity and education that is the entryway to those jobs and opportunity, we’re all going to have a much tougher time making the world safer. It’s just the bottom line.
So what we’re here to do is now us, together, through the green business design and the planning, is celebrate the idea that you can do things that are good for the broad society even as you do well for yourselves. You can make money and make life better.
I know people who only invest on that basis. They always make a judgment about their investment as to what it’s going to create in terms of community and society. So that’s why competitions like this are really so important. A few minutes ago, I had an opportunity with Aguirre to be able to go in and look at the table that had a few successes on it. And it’s incredible what people are able to do with their imagination in the context of today’s challenges.
So President Obama and I – and this is the part that I want to convey in coming here to Mexico City today – we are deeply committed to elevating our partnership with Mexico on innovation, entrepreneurship, and clean energy.
USAID is a very proud sponsor of the CleanTech Challenge, and our challenge is clear: in the past, we used to trade together. Today, due to trade relationships, we build together. In the future, we want to innovate and invent together. And we believe in the possibilities of a Mexico-U.S. strength with respect to that. If any nation has an ability to be able to drive towards that horizon, we believe it is Mexico. And if there’s one person – I mean, I’ll give you an example. Why do I believe that? Well, go look at the table that I just looked at up there. One of the inventions up there is made by a young man, or comes from the mind of a young man, by the name of Gerardo Patino.
Many of you know Gerardo. He won this competition last year, and his story should be an inspiration to everybody. He grew up in the small mountain town of Tepoztlan. But from an early age, he always had a big idea. And he was – Gerardo wanted to protect the environment. So he left the mountains just south of here and he worked really hard to get a first-class education. And when he graduated, he didn’t just cash in, he didn’t just take the easy path. He was prepared to take risks. He wanted to give back, even if that meant traveling a difficult road.
So he founded Terra Humana – Humans for the Earth. And his goal was to reinvent the way that we use water. Gerardo worked with engineers to develop a new technology that treats water so that plants can absorb it better for agricultural irrigation. And his device was really groundbreaking. But guess what? A lot of entrepreneurs will tell you, it’s not an easy thing to take it from a head to the shelf. It’s not easy always to get it out there into the marketplace. And Gerardo will tell you that, that getting farmers to adopt it was like asking them to believe in magic, he says. He literally had to go door to door, show each farmer, farm to farm, to sell his device. But guess what? Now he’s in the sixth year. His invention has moved from generation to generation, year to year. And it can cut agricultural water use by up to 30 percent.
Gerardo, his story, puts a human face on something that is pretty profound and pretty fundamental: The United States and Mexico are growing clean and growing green together. And never forget that what you’re doing is not hypothetical. It’s not a theory. It’s real. And it matters to the lives of real people.
It absolutely matters that the CleanTech Challenge in Mexico has produced nearly 200 clean technology businesses. It matters that the CleanTech Challenge has created more than 2,500 green jobs. It matters that the hundreds of companies that are engaged in this competition – entrepreneurs just like Gerardo – are on track to slash nearly 22 million metric tons of CO2, greenhouse gases, over the next five years.
Now, there’s an old saying in Mexico, and it’s not one that I know because I’ve been here a long time, but I know it. And I think it’s more appropriate for this occasion: “Aquel que no mira hacia adelante, se queda atras” – “If you don’t look ahead, you’re going to be looking behind.” And I look out at all of you and I think that’s accurate.
The question now is not just whether you’re looking ahead. It’s whether or not you can look ahead and translate what you see into something real that people will be able to use. And the secret to that is the meeting we had earlier this morning with your education leaders and our education leaders. The secret is three words: education, innovation, and conservation.
Now, this morning, we talked a lot about that and we are looking to you, the next generation, for the next big idea. But ideas alone are clearly not going to be enough to be able to get things to the market. You need to link the idea to the market and to a viable business plan, and ultimately find the capital, the finance to be able to go out and take it to the marketplace.
So I think that what we’re building between the U.S. and Mexican educational institutions, through the Bilateral Forum on Higher Education, Innovation and Research, is the foundation to be able to take this idea of green business planning and actually turn it into a bigger reality for all of us.
Now, let me just say to all of you, through the Mexico-U.S. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Council – MUSEIC – we are bringing together people from the private sector and the public sector in order to test new ideas. And we’re creating an environment where innovation hopefully can flourish. We’re going to create boot camps for young Mexican entrepreneurs and conferences that connect Latin diaspora communities in the United States with entrepreneurs in Mexico.
This is an important effort. And as part of this commitment, we are going to make a $400,000 grant to the University of Texas in Austin so that it can host four technology startup boot camps. And guess what? One of them is going to take place right here in Mexico. We’re also providing $100,000 to bring the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps model to Mexico. And this is going to help provide entrepreneurship training to Mexican scientists and support their efforts to build cutting-edge technology startups.
I’m also particularly proud of our Peace Corps program here in Mexico, which is focused on science, technology, and the environment. I think we have some of our volunteers here, do we? Raise your hands. Peace Corps volunteers, thank you very much for what you are doing. We deeply appreciate it. (Applause.)
So let me try to make this as real as I can. We are educating and innovating. But we really have an urgency about this. Just before I came down here, I caught about 10 minutes in my hotel room and happened to see CNN, and I saw the temperatures around the world right now – the flooding in Serbia, and the incredible storms that are taking place in France and elsewhere. Thirty-four degrees centigrade in Vietnam today, in May. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three in places all around Europe. Unprecedented. Breaks every record that’s ever been seen. What we are seeing around the world is what scientists have predicted. They’re not telling us that we may see global climate change. We are seeing it, and we’re seeing the impacts now. And we are closer and closer to a time where the tipping point that they’ve warned us about is going to be reached. It’s becoming more and more dangerous. All you have to do is look at the last two reports, and particularly the IPCC report of the United Nations, with 97 percent of the scientists of the world warning us about the devastating impact of global climate change if we don’t take action -- and take serious action – soon.
Now, I’d just say to all of you: What is the solution to climate change? It’s very simple. It’s energy policy. Energy policy is the solution to climate change. We have to stop providing energy to buildings, to automobiles, airplanes, houses, electricity plants, with fuel that we know is creating more and more of the problem in a compounded fashion. Fossil fuel coal-fired power plant, so forth.
And I ask you just to think about the possibilities. The marketplace that made America particularly wealthy in the 1990s – a lot of people don’t focus on this. The United States got wealthier in the 1990s than we got during the Gilded Age, during the Rockefellers, Morgans, Pierponts, Fricks, all of that period of no taxes. People got wealthier in the 1990s. And they did it with a $1 trillion market that served 1 billion users – one and one.
The energy market that we are staring at today is right now, today, a $6 trillion market with 4 to 5 billion users, and it’s going to grow to 9 billion users by about 2035, with about $17 trillion of expenditure and maybe more – who knows? So the bottom line is this: The countries, the people, the individuals who design the means of providing that clean, alternative, renewable, sustainable energy are the people who are going to help save the Earth, life itself, as well as help their countries to do enormously better.
And I would just close by saying to all of you, there’s still a debate in some places about why we ought to do it or whether it’s real – amazingly. But let me ask you something. If we do what you know you can do as entrepreneurs, as scientists, as innovators, if we do it, and if we were wrong about the science – which I don’t believe we are, but if we were – and we move to new and sustainable energy, what is the worst thing that could happen to us? The worst thing is we would create millions of new jobs; we would transition to cleaner energy, which hopefully would be homegrown, which makes every country much more secure; we would have cleaner air, which would mean we have less hospitalization for children for asthma and people with particulates causing cancer; and we would have greater energy security for everybody and independence as a result. That’s the worst that could happen.
What’s the worst that happens if the other guys are wrong, the people who don’t want to move in this direction? Catastrophe. Lack of water. Lack of capacity to grow food in many parts of the world. Refugees for climate. People fighting wars over water. Devastation in terms of sea-level rise. We’re already seeing it in the Pacific.
So I’d just close by saying to all of you, this is an important meeting. This is an important initiative. This is how we have a chance to define the future, and this is how Mexico and the United States can do it together – by innovating, conserving, and educating. This is one big challenge.
It was the great Mexican novelist Octavio Paz who said: “Deserve your dream.” Well, I think everybody here deserves it. The question is now: Are we going to go get it? Are we going to live it? That’s what this is about. And I hope, together, we’re going to redefine the future.
Thank you all very, very much.
AUDIENCE: (Off-mike.)
SECRETARY KERRY: (Inaudible) can hear? (Inaudible.)
Dr. Aguirre-Torres, thank you very, very much. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for bringing everybody together here. And I’m particularly happy to be able to be here as we launch the final round of the 2014 CleanTech Challenge. I’m very grateful to Dr. Torres for the visionary leadership that he has shown, and I’m grateful to all of you who are part of this incredibly important exercise, and I’ll talk a little more about that in a minute. But you all have turned the CleanTech Challenge into the top green business plan competition in all of Latin America, and I think you ought to be very, very proud of that. It’s a pleasure to be joining so many contestants, judges, mentors, innovators, and it’s clear that you are not only lifting Mexico’s economy, but with the successes that are achieved, you are designing things that have the ability to lift other people’s economies.
I had a chance just a little while ago to feast briefly – unfortunately, too briefly – on the historic central square with Diego Rivera’s remarkable murals. And I suppose from the prehistoric[1] palaces of the Aztecs to the Zocalo’s towering cathedral to this museum that we are gathered in today, Mexico has always had a very, very special sense of history, a very special commitment to culture and an extraordinary (inaudible). As much as we admire that past, I am not here to talk about the past, nor are you. Every single person here is fixated on the future, and that’s what we’re here to talk about.
And that’s appropriate. Because today, our global economy is more interconnected than it has ever been or than perhaps any of us might have imagined it might have become as fast as it has. I want to emphasize, the work of diplomacy is not just about our shared security and thinking about borders and terrorism and narcotics and all of those kinds of things. That’s not all that is at stake. It is about creating shared prosperity. And no society is going to survive unless it has a strong foundation of shared prosperity. There are many places in the world, including in my country, where the divide between people at the top and people struggling to get to the middle even is much too big. The way we’re going to deal with this is not through political speeches; it’s going to be through innovation, through hard work, through research, through education, and creating the kind of opportunity that creates the products of the future.
I want to emphasize to everybody here, from the day that I became Secretary of State, President Obama and I have been on a mission to emphasize to people that economics is not some separate component of policy. Foreign policy is economic policy and economic policy is foreign policy. And when you look at the world today, with millions of young people, whole countries where 60, 65 percent in a few cases, but many cases 55 and 60 percent of the young people are under the age of 30, 50 percent are under the age of 21, and 40 percent are under the age of 18. And if we don’t provide jobs and opportunity and education that is the entryway to those jobs and opportunity, we’re all going to have a much tougher time making the world safer. It’s just the bottom line.
So what we’re here to do is now us, together, through the green business design and the planning, is celebrate the idea that you can do things that are good for the broad society even as you do well for yourselves. You can make money and make life better.
I know people who only invest on that basis. They always make a judgment about their investment as to what it’s going to create in terms of community and society. So that’s why competitions like this are really so important. A few minutes ago, I had an opportunity with Aguirre to be able to go in and look at the table that had a few successes on it. And it’s incredible what people are able to do with their imagination in the context of today’s challenges.
So President Obama and I – and this is the part that I want to convey in coming here to Mexico City today – we are deeply committed to elevating our partnership with Mexico on innovation, entrepreneurship, and clean energy.
USAID is a very proud sponsor of the CleanTech Challenge, and our challenge is clear: in the past, we used to trade together. Today, due to trade relationships, we build together. In the future, we want to innovate and invent together. And we believe in the possibilities of a Mexico-U.S. strength with respect to that. If any nation has an ability to be able to drive towards that horizon, we believe it is Mexico. And if there’s one person – I mean, I’ll give you an example. Why do I believe that? Well, go look at the table that I just looked at up there. One of the inventions up there is made by a young man, or comes from the mind of a young man, by the name of Gerardo Patino.
Many of you know Gerardo. He won this competition last year, and his story should be an inspiration to everybody. He grew up in the small mountain town of Tepoztlan. But from an early age, he always had a big idea. And he was – Gerardo wanted to protect the environment. So he left the mountains just south of here and he worked really hard to get a first-class education. And when he graduated, he didn’t just cash in, he didn’t just take the easy path. He was prepared to take risks. He wanted to give back, even if that meant traveling a difficult road.
So he founded Terra Humana – Humans for the Earth. And his goal was to reinvent the way that we use water. Gerardo worked with engineers to develop a new technology that treats water so that plants can absorb it better for agricultural irrigation. And his device was really groundbreaking. But guess what? A lot of entrepreneurs will tell you, it’s not an easy thing to take it from a head to the shelf. It’s not easy always to get it out there into the marketplace. And Gerardo will tell you that, that getting farmers to adopt it was like asking them to believe in magic, he says. He literally had to go door to door, show each farmer, farm to farm, to sell his device. But guess what? Now he’s in the sixth year. His invention has moved from generation to generation, year to year. And it can cut agricultural water use by up to 30 percent.
Gerardo, his story, puts a human face on something that is pretty profound and pretty fundamental: The United States and Mexico are growing clean and growing green together. And never forget that what you’re doing is not hypothetical. It’s not a theory. It’s real. And it matters to the lives of real people.
It absolutely matters that the CleanTech Challenge in Mexico has produced nearly 200 clean technology businesses. It matters that the CleanTech Challenge has created more than 2,500 green jobs. It matters that the hundreds of companies that are engaged in this competition – entrepreneurs just like Gerardo – are on track to slash nearly 22 million metric tons of CO2, greenhouse gases, over the next five years.
Now, there’s an old saying in Mexico, and it’s not one that I know because I’ve been here a long time, but I know it. And I think it’s more appropriate for this occasion: “Aquel que no mira hacia adelante, se queda atras” – “If you don’t look ahead, you’re going to be looking behind.” And I look out at all of you and I think that’s accurate.
The question now is not just whether you’re looking ahead. It’s whether or not you can look ahead and translate what you see into something real that people will be able to use. And the secret to that is the meeting we had earlier this morning with your education leaders and our education leaders. The secret is three words: education, innovation, and conservation.
Now, this morning, we talked a lot about that and we are looking to you, the next generation, for the next big idea. But ideas alone are clearly not going to be enough to be able to get things to the market. You need to link the idea to the market and to a viable business plan, and ultimately find the capital, the finance to be able to go out and take it to the marketplace.
So I think that what we’re building between the U.S. and Mexican educational institutions, through the Bilateral Forum on Higher Education, Innovation and Research, is the foundation to be able to take this idea of green business planning and actually turn it into a bigger reality for all of us.
Now, let me just say to all of you, through the Mexico-U.S. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Council – MUSEIC – we are bringing together people from the private sector and the public sector in order to test new ideas. And we’re creating an environment where innovation hopefully can flourish. We’re going to create boot camps for young Mexican entrepreneurs and conferences that connect Latin diaspora communities in the United States with entrepreneurs in Mexico.
This is an important effort. And as part of this commitment, we are going to make a $400,000 grant to the University of Texas in Austin so that it can host four technology startup boot camps. And guess what? One of them is going to take place right here in Mexico. We’re also providing $100,000 to bring the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps model to Mexico. And this is going to help provide entrepreneurship training to Mexican scientists and support their efforts to build cutting-edge technology startups.
I’m also particularly proud of our Peace Corps program here in Mexico, which is focused on science, technology, and the environment. I think we have some of our volunteers here, do we? Raise your hands. Peace Corps volunteers, thank you very much for what you are doing. We deeply appreciate it. (Applause.)
So let me try to make this as real as I can. We are educating and innovating. But we really have an urgency about this. Just before I came down here, I caught about 10 minutes in my hotel room and happened to see CNN, and I saw the temperatures around the world right now – the flooding in Serbia, and the incredible storms that are taking place in France and elsewhere. Thirty-four degrees centigrade in Vietnam today, in May. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three in places all around Europe. Unprecedented. Breaks every record that’s ever been seen. What we are seeing around the world is what scientists have predicted. They’re not telling us that we may see global climate change. We are seeing it, and we’re seeing the impacts now. And we are closer and closer to a time where the tipping point that they’ve warned us about is going to be reached. It’s becoming more and more dangerous. All you have to do is look at the last two reports, and particularly the IPCC report of the United Nations, with 97 percent of the scientists of the world warning us about the devastating impact of global climate change if we don’t take action -- and take serious action – soon.
Now, I’d just say to all of you: What is the solution to climate change? It’s very simple. It’s energy policy. Energy policy is the solution to climate change. We have to stop providing energy to buildings, to automobiles, airplanes, houses, electricity plants, with fuel that we know is creating more and more of the problem in a compounded fashion. Fossil fuel coal-fired power plant, so forth.
And I ask you just to think about the possibilities. The marketplace that made America particularly wealthy in the 1990s – a lot of people don’t focus on this. The United States got wealthier in the 1990s than we got during the Gilded Age, during the Rockefellers, Morgans, Pierponts, Fricks, all of that period of no taxes. People got wealthier in the 1990s. And they did it with a $1 trillion market that served 1 billion users – one and one.
The energy market that we are staring at today is right now, today, a $6 trillion market with 4 to 5 billion users, and it’s going to grow to 9 billion users by about 2035, with about $17 trillion of expenditure and maybe more – who knows? So the bottom line is this: The countries, the people, the individuals who design the means of providing that clean, alternative, renewable, sustainable energy are the people who are going to help save the Earth, life itself, as well as help their countries to do enormously better.
And I would just close by saying to all of you, there’s still a debate in some places about why we ought to do it or whether it’s real – amazingly. But let me ask you something. If we do what you know you can do as entrepreneurs, as scientists, as innovators, if we do it, and if we were wrong about the science – which I don’t believe we are, but if we were – and we move to new and sustainable energy, what is the worst thing that could happen to us? The worst thing is we would create millions of new jobs; we would transition to cleaner energy, which hopefully would be homegrown, which makes every country much more secure; we would have cleaner air, which would mean we have less hospitalization for children for asthma and people with particulates causing cancer; and we would have greater energy security for everybody and independence as a result. That’s the worst that could happen.
What’s the worst that happens if the other guys are wrong, the people who don’t want to move in this direction? Catastrophe. Lack of water. Lack of capacity to grow food in many parts of the world. Refugees for climate. People fighting wars over water. Devastation in terms of sea-level rise. We’re already seeing it in the Pacific.
So I’d just close by saying to all of you, this is an important meeting. This is an important initiative. This is how we have a chance to define the future, and this is how Mexico and the United States can do it together – by innovating, conserving, and educating. This is one big challenge.
It was the great Mexican novelist Octavio Paz who said: “Deserve your dream.” Well, I think everybody here deserves it. The question is now: Are we going to go get it? Are we going to live it? That’s what this is about. And I hope, together, we’re going to redefine the future.
Thank you all very, very much.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
REMARKS BY WILLIAM BROWNFIELD ON "DRUGS, SECURITY, AND LATIN AMERICA"
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Drugs, Security, and Latin America: The New Normal?
William R. Brownfield
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas
Austin, Texas
March 27, 2014
Ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed a pleasure to be back in Austin. As the Dean has suggested, I spent three years of my life at that fine academic institution, just across the street in that direction, and in fact it was my nearly three years at the law school that brought me into the Foreign Service and the Department of State. Trust me when I tell you that the first year of law school was so decidedly unpleasant that when I saw the advertisement on the bulletin board, which said Foreign Service exam and included the magic word, “free,” I said, “Right. Maybe I want to be a Foreign Service Officer.”
And for those of you who actually are still trying to determine your own profession or career choice for the next 30 or 35 years of your lives, let me assure you: sometimes you just enter a profession, if you will, by the back door, through no more systematic or intellectually driven process than that the entry exam is free. And that, ladies and gents, was 35-plus years ago. And at least for me it worked out just fine.
Ladies and gentlemen, the title of today’s little talk is “Drugs, Security, and Latin America: The New Normal?” I’m actually going to talk about anything that you want me to talk about, because that is the purpose of a dialogue. However, there is some logic to the title. I have spent virtually my entire professional career doing Latin America, so logically I might have at least some observations of value that are related to Latin America. Drugs are part of what I now deal with for a living. I am the Assistant Secretary of State for Drugs and Law Enforcement, and to be clear, I officially oppose the former and support the second. I want there to be no confusion on that particular point, although I have a broader responsibility as the Assistant Secretary for INL.
We started life 40 years ago as the part of the State Department that does international drug programs. Beginning about 20 years ago, we expanded to broader crime issues, realizing perhaps that there is more crime out there of an international nature than just drug trafficking. Within about the last 15 years, we expanded more broadly into law enforcement writ large – police training, exchanges, equipment, support, academics, etc. And within the last 10 years or so, driven, believe it or not, by our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve expanded our portfolio and our writ to cover what we would call all of rule of law, which is not just police, but is also prosecutors, courts, judges, corrections systems. If it is part of the criminal justice system in essence, we will now work with and support it in some way, shape, or form.
And the last two or three words of the title of this talk – The New Normal? – is just a way to tease you into wondering if this is the direction we are heading in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century.
Let me start with a little bit of history. I’ll offer some observations, and then I will stop and let you all actually guide me in the direction you would prefer to hear from me in terms of your own thoughts and your own interests.
A little bit of history: In the 1970s, the United States of America, or at least its government, discovered the drug issue. Richard Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs,’ a very unfortunate selection of terms, by the way, since in fact it’s not a war. It’s certainly not a war against our own population that in some way, shape, or form is part of the drug issue. And for that reason, ever so wisely, in the year 1993, the then newly-inaugurated president of the United States Bill Clinton said, and I quote, “It’s not a war, and we’re going to stop calling it a war on drugs.” Things move slowly in the federal government and the media, but don’t you all come at me in 15 minutes and start condemning me for the war on drugs, because I have already told you in advance it is not a war on drugs, it has not been a war on drugs for 21 years, and what we are doing goes a bit beyond the classical, typical definition of the term war, combined with the word drugs.
Having, however, declared a war on drugs in 1972, the Nixon Administration then proceeded to attempt to win it. They did it by what I would call single-issue approach to the drug abuse problem. First it was eradication. We will go down to Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, eradicate it at the source, and the problem will be solved. Now, they had some success in eradicating. At the end of the day, however, for every hectare or acre eradicated, another acre or two or three would come under production and cultivation. Obviously, eradication alone was not the answer or the solution.
Solution number two, we will dismantle. We will go after the criminal organizations and arrest or remove their leadership from operation. Once we have removed the leadership of the criminal organizations, the cartels, the entire structure that drives the drug trafficking industry, will then collapse. Once again, there were the occasional successes. Those of you – and some of you are actually not old enough to remember when this happened – in 1993, in a particularly effective operation, the Colombian National Police took down, literally removed – perforated about 125 times – Mr. Pablo Escobar, who had been for the preceding 10-15 years the head of the largest, most vicious, most violent drug trafficking cartel in the history of the human race, called the Medellin Cartel, a cartel that might quite conceivably have been responsible for up to 10,000 murders in the preceding decade.
Impact? Well, 1994 came along and drugs continued to flow. Taking down or decapitating organizational leadership, in and of itself, obviously was not the solution.
Next proposal, in the 1980s, was interdiction. “Okay,” they said. “We can’t seem to stop it by eradicating at the source, we can’t seem to stop it by eliminating the leadership of the trafficking organizations. Let us build a picket line down below the U.S. southern borders, both on the ground and at sea, stop the ships, the boats, the planes that are bringing this stuff into the United States, andvoila, problem is solved.
Once again, there were some successes. The truth of the matter is the Caribbean in the 1980s was a region that was at risk of losing control. Fourteen different governments were at risk of losing control of their sovereign national territory to multi-billion dollar drug trafficking industries. And in their defense, that generation of the 1980s actually did effectively interdict the flow of drugs through the Caribbean toward the United – the southeastern United States of America.
But did that solve the problem? No. Where are we today? We’re in central Texas. Where do the drugs now flow into the United States? They come up straight through the land corridor, starting in Colombia, working their way through Central America, processing up through Mexico, and entering through the southwest border of the United States of America. In other words, yes, you can plug your finger in one hole of the dam, but in all likelihood – one might almost say with complete certainty – another hole is going to open up. And at the end of the day you have a finite number of fingers to plug with, defined by how much money the United States Congress and the taxpayers that send them to office are prepared to dedicate to this particular exercise.
Finally, and with somewhat greater coherence and success, the government began to develop an approach in the 1990s which I would call sustainable economic development. And that is accepting the reality that campesinos – or if you’re in Afghanistan and dealing with opium poppy, subsistence-level farmers, actually are not inherently criminal; they do not plant coca or opium poppy because they wish to be part of criminal enterprises. They do it because they are trying to provide a basic living to their families, and coca or opium poppy actually gives them better income and more secure income than corn or frijoles or wheat or whatever it might be that is otherwise being grown in that region.
Now this approach actually made some degree of sense, and I would suggest to you that where it is applied, it does produce long-term results. Problem: It is amazingly expensive. It costs a good bit of money to actually manage on a nationwide basis an alternative development program. It’s not just giving them a barrel of corn seed so that they will plant corn rather than coca. It’s also giving the tools and the training. It’s also giving them the infrastructure, the road system that allows them to get their product to market once they have harvested it, because remember: the drug traffickers will come to them, buy their product, and take it away at no cost to the farmer. The farmer who has instead two tons of corn somehow has to get it to market, or within a month or two he has more or less two tons of mulch that is gradually deteriorating and rotting in his back yard.
On top of that, if you want the campesino to remain committed to this, you have to give him or her some stake in the community. That means maybe schools, maybe clinics. That means electricity, running water, sewage, the sort of thing that makes a family say, one, I do have an interest in staying here, and two, I have a future here over and above whether I can grow an acre of coca or an acre of opium poppy.
Okay. Eradication, dismantling, interdiction, economic development – none of them in and of themselves solved the drug problem. So the question is, since the drugs are still an issue, what is the correct response? Are you ready? Bill Brownfield says the correct response is all of the above and then a little bit more as well.
Let us flash-forward to 1999, when the United States Government, jointly with the Government of Colombia, actually did this the right way. But I will prejudge the conclusion by letting you know the right way cost $8.5 billion over roughly a 12-year period of time. But we launched – the Colombian government launched what came to be called Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia was a comprehensive, structured approach designed to address the economic issue, the security issue, and the drugs and law enforcement issue. And when I said economic, I should also have said social, to include health impact, education, as well as job generation and economic activity.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would suggest that that worked for Colombia. The huge cartels that in the 1990s were actually threatening the very existence of the Colombian government have been atomized, admittedly to still annoying criminal activities, but are not anywhere remotely as powerful, as strong, or as threatening as Mr. Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cartel at the start of the 1990s, or the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and the Cali cartel at that same timeframe.
Cocaine production in Colombia, we estimate, is down 60 percent or so from its heyday, as recently as 10 years ago. The tourism industry in Colombia today is booming. There are probably 20 times as many tourists going to Colombia today as 10 years ago. And if you will, tourists vote with their feet. If tourists are going to Colombia, you assume the security situation obviously has reached a point where people are prepared voluntarily to spend their own money to go visit a country that 10 or 15 years ago they would not have dreamed of doing so without a battalion of the United States Army or Marine Corps joining them and providing them security at every step.
And may I note as well that there is some correlation between the fact that production of cocaine in Colombia has dropped by some 60 percent, and consumption of cocaine in the United States of America has dropped by some estimates between 40 and 50 percent? I’m not giving you the Pollyanna story here. I freely acknowledge other sorts of drug consumption have grown in this same time period. But the two things that have most driven the Latin America to North America drug trafficking crisis – cocaine and methamphetamines – have both gone down dramatically in terms of demand in the United States.
Heroin is moving at a much smaller level – I mean, the simple truth, the quantity of heroin that moves. Marijuana, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals: apparently we’re quite capable of producing our own domestically in the United States of America. What has been driving the crisis of violence, of homicide, of crime in the Central America-Mexico corridor is cocaine and methamphetamines. The extent to which that product and the trafficking in that product is going down is actually good news for those seven Central American and Mexican countries and governments.
That said, I do not mean to suggest to you that by addressing the problem in Colombia the problem was resolved. On the contrary – and I’m not going to walk you through each of these in the same degree of detail, but the balloon theory – they were squeezed, the bad guys were squeezed in Colombia. What did they do? Largely they moved to Mexico, where, as those of you who could remember where we were about seven or eight years ago, Mexico was confronting a crisis of large cartels that actually represented a threat to the sovereignty of the government itself. And we launched what came to be known as the Merida Initiative, a joint effort in which the Mexican Government offered roughly $13 to every $1 offered by the United States to address this problem.
We squeezed them in Mexico, and what happened? Many of them moved to Central America. The crisis of the last five years has been the surge in violence, in homicides, in crime, in gang activities in Central America. Response? CARSI, the Central America Regional Security Initiative. Much smaller than that for Mexico, but the truth of the matter is there’s a finite number of dollars that are available to be applied to this problem. We squeeze them in Central America and what do we see increasingly happening? You will be stunned to learn that the statistics of drug flows through the Caribbean, that same region that was in fact successfully shut down in the 1980s, has been growing from a factor of roughly 4 percent of U.S. drug consumption three years ago to 8 percent two years to 9 or 10 percent over the last year, and now an estimated 14 percent.
If you’re tracking the trend line, even if we don’t know precisely how much is moving, the fact of the matter is what I have described for you is a tripling of drug flow through the Caribbean over the last three years. Watch this space. If in the course of the next two or three years you see the occasional headline saying, “Drug crisis in the Caribbean,” you will be able to say, yeah, Brownfield at least was prescient enough to predict that would be happening.
Each of the initiatives that I have laid out – Plan Colombia, Colombia; Merida Initiative, Mexico; CARSI, Central America; CBSI, Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, for the Caribbean – had, I would suggest – while each was different, each had its own particular characteristics – they had several common principles.
One, there was an attempt and still is an attempt to link together all the elements of the problem: law enforcement, security, rule of law institutions, economic and social development. Second, they are sustainable. Sustainable means the host government – whether it’s Colombian, Mexican, Central American, Caribbean – sees enough of their own interest at stake that they’re prepared to put their own resources into the problem and the solution. Third, they accept as a principle that the host government makes the decision. If we want a particular program and they don’t, at the end of the day, their view is what determines what will be done. Fourth, they try to focus on institutions and institution-building rather than equipment, rather than hard stuff, rather even than operations, the thinking being if you build an institution, you get value for a generation. If you do a successful takedown operation, you get a headline and value that might last you for a day or two.
Fifth, they are regional in nature – by the way, even the bilateral programs, Colombia and Mexico, are regional to the extent that they link into other countries in the region. Today, for example, Colombian police are training more police in Central America than is the United States. And some of it is actually being done with our assistance, which is another way of saying we actually pay for it. But the quality of the training and the ability of the trainers from Colombia is actually greater than what we ourselves can offer, partly because of their experience, partly because, of course, it’s a lot easier for a Spanish-speaking national police officer from Colombia to do training in Central America than it is even for a Spanish-language-trained U.S. law enforcement officer.
And the sixth principle that we have – I think linking all of these together – is the concept of partners. With each initiative, we have drawn in more and more international partners to play into this effort. Why? One reason I suggest to you is that even as consumption of cocaine in the United States has been dropping steadily since 2007, consumption of cocaine in Western Europe or in East Asia has been growing dramatically, without even mentioning the largest country in South America – Brazil – which is today confronting what could almost be called a crack cocaine crisis. And obviously, as their populations and communities are increasingly victims – or participants, depending upon your perspective – in this process, there is obviously greater interest in joining in efforts as partners to address the problem either at its source or in the midpoint, in short, before it arrives on the shores of France or Italy or Spain or the United Kingdom.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I suggest to you that it is a little bit early, perhaps a century or two, perhaps a millennium or so, to declare success on this particular issue? May I suggest to you it is not too early to say the year 2014 and the next five or ten years will offer a different problem set, a different set of realities from what we were dealing with in the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, or even the last decade? First, you have one nation that has emerged, if you will, from the hell of the 1990s, and is now able to export its experience and its talent set. That nation is Colombia. And let us not forget that having a model out there that other nations in the region can look at has an impact. That is different from where we were 10 or 15 years ago.
Second, let us accept that you now have two new – not so new, but two much more major players in this drama in the region. They are named Bolivia and Peru, and their production level is moving in a sharply upward direction. What is also new, however, is that they are not feeding the North American market; they are feeding the Brazilian and Western European market. It’s an east-west problem as much as a north-south problem. I don’t say one is better than the other; I say it is a different problem set, which is going to require a different set of solutions.
Third, as I have mentioned several times, we are dealing with a consumption matter, a consumption issue, that is changing. As the American taste, if you will, shifts from cocaine and methamphetamines to other sorts of drugs, whether it is heroin or opium-based drugs, other synthetics, diverted pharmaceuticals or marijuana, it is a different problem set and presumably requires a different set of solutions.
Fourth – if you wondered if I was going to mention it, and I’m going to mention it right now – nations are experimenting with alternative approaches to drug control. Uruguay, a small nation located in between Brazil and Argentina, has recently, as a matter of national law, legalized the consumption of marijuana throughout the country. Some of you who have been asleep for the last 12 months may be unaware that two states of the union in the United States of America have done exactly the same thing. One of them is wrapping up its third month of this experiment, that’s Colorado, and the other goes online sometime, I think, about the first of July as they work their way through their rules and procedures. And I am not yet in a position to draw any firm conclusions from any of these experiences. I am in a position to say this is a 2014 reality, and let’s take it into account as we figure: How are we going to work this issue over the next five to ten years?
And fifth, and finally – and I do emphasize this point, because I do believe we haven’t – this Administration, the Administration of Barack Obama has not gotten credit or at least as much credit for this as it should – there is a strong realization in this country, your country, the United States of America, that drugs, drug abuse, and the overall total drug issue is far more a matter of public health than it is a matter of criminal justice. It is both unfair to the criminal justice system as well as to many of those who are caught up in the criminal justice system to try to address drug abuse solely in the criminal justice system. It is not just a matter of criminal justice. It is obviously a matter of health, of the medical care and medical profession, and of how you deal with the health and medical aspects of the use of drugs.
Now, I am not saying that the one excludes the other, but I am very definitely saying that trying to address the issue from only one side is pretty much condemned to failure. Those, I submit, are four new elements available as of the 27th of March, 2014, that were different from what we would’ve discussed if we had been sitting here 20 years ago, 10 years ago, quite frankly even as recently as five years ago. We’ve got to figure how to incorporate them into our own thinking.
These are, ladies and gentlemen – those of you who are – it’s about 75 percent of you who I predict are at least below the age of 40 if not below the age of 30 – these are going to be your challenges. Why? Because, I got to tell you, old Brownfield’s going to be checking out of this business in another three or four years, and it’s going to be you and your generation who have to figure out how to deal with these issues. I will offer you only five suggestions as you move proudly into the future on this issue on how to do it.
One, think long term. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it overnight. Don’t even think in terms of years, maybe not even decades. Think in terms of generations. Don’t come up with some program that is supposed to solve the problem by 2015. It’s not going to happen.
Second, flexible and adaptable. Tastes change, conduct and behavior changes. The bad guys, the large, transnational criminal organizations who are involved in this, are constantly adapting and adjusting their approach. You had better have your own strategy and policy that can be adjustable and adaptable as well.
Third, be comprehensive. We tried the single-issue approach, ladies and gentlemen. It doesn’t work. We cannot just eradicate ourselves out of this problem. We cannot just interdict our way out of this problem. We also cannot just economic develop our way out of this problem. We have got to address all aspects of the problem. Otherwise we will not succeed.
Fourth principle, build institutions. No one loves a cool operation more than I do. No one loves some snappy new equipment as much as I do. But at the end of the day, your long-term value comes from building better law enforcement capabilities, building more competent prosecutors and investigators, building more effective, efficient, and honest courts and judicial systems, and don’t forget, building a corrections system that actually provides correction as opposed to a graduate course on how to advance from Criminal Activity 101 to the advanced Ph.D. course during three months of incarceration in a detention facility.
And finally, if I might, there is and always will be a criminal justice aspect to this, but principle number five: focus on the big organizations. It’s fine to pump up your numbers, I guess, in terms of how many you can arrest, but if you’re not going after the multibillion dollar organizations who engage not just in drug trafficking, but in trafficking in firearms, trafficking in people, trafficking in general contraband, money laundering that actually corrupts and undercuts and hollows out entire financial institutions, if you’re not focused on them, you’re missing the entire picture.
Okay, back to the title. So what is the new normal? Are you ready? The new normal is constant change. That, ladies and gents, is what we had better wrap our heads around. And we never have for the last 40 years. We’ve always taken the snapshot and said here is what we’re dealing with; now let us develop a strategy that will solve that problem. Wrong-o. That is not what we are going to be dealing with. What we’re looking at today on the 27th of March, I absolutely assure you, is going to be completely different by the time we get into 2015. That’s the new normal. And we had better be ready and able to address that, domestically and internationally, as a criminal justice matter and as a public healthcare matter.
The truth of the matter is we have to have a policy and approach that allows us to move in whatever direction our societies and those who are trying to take advantage of them will be moving in. And ladies and gentlemen, if that’s the new normal, I at least think we’ve got an approach that we can work with in a realistic way and that at least would take us one step beyond where we were 30 or 35 years ago when we started down this road.
And for those of you who actually are still trying to determine your own profession or career choice for the next 30 or 35 years of your lives, let me assure you: sometimes you just enter a profession, if you will, by the back door, through no more systematic or intellectually driven process than that the entry exam is free. And that, ladies and gents, was 35-plus years ago. And at least for me it worked out just fine.
Ladies and gentlemen, the title of today’s little talk is “Drugs, Security, and Latin America: The New Normal?” I’m actually going to talk about anything that you want me to talk about, because that is the purpose of a dialogue. However, there is some logic to the title. I have spent virtually my entire professional career doing Latin America, so logically I might have at least some observations of value that are related to Latin America. Drugs are part of what I now deal with for a living. I am the Assistant Secretary of State for Drugs and Law Enforcement, and to be clear, I officially oppose the former and support the second. I want there to be no confusion on that particular point, although I have a broader responsibility as the Assistant Secretary for INL.
We started life 40 years ago as the part of the State Department that does international drug programs. Beginning about 20 years ago, we expanded to broader crime issues, realizing perhaps that there is more crime out there of an international nature than just drug trafficking. Within about the last 15 years, we expanded more broadly into law enforcement writ large – police training, exchanges, equipment, support, academics, etc. And within the last 10 years or so, driven, believe it or not, by our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve expanded our portfolio and our writ to cover what we would call all of rule of law, which is not just police, but is also prosecutors, courts, judges, corrections systems. If it is part of the criminal justice system in essence, we will now work with and support it in some way, shape, or form.
And the last two or three words of the title of this talk – The New Normal? – is just a way to tease you into wondering if this is the direction we are heading in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century.
Let me start with a little bit of history. I’ll offer some observations, and then I will stop and let you all actually guide me in the direction you would prefer to hear from me in terms of your own thoughts and your own interests.
A little bit of history: In the 1970s, the United States of America, or at least its government, discovered the drug issue. Richard Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs,’ a very unfortunate selection of terms, by the way, since in fact it’s not a war. It’s certainly not a war against our own population that in some way, shape, or form is part of the drug issue. And for that reason, ever so wisely, in the year 1993, the then newly-inaugurated president of the United States Bill Clinton said, and I quote, “It’s not a war, and we’re going to stop calling it a war on drugs.” Things move slowly in the federal government and the media, but don’t you all come at me in 15 minutes and start condemning me for the war on drugs, because I have already told you in advance it is not a war on drugs, it has not been a war on drugs for 21 years, and what we are doing goes a bit beyond the classical, typical definition of the term war, combined with the word drugs.
Having, however, declared a war on drugs in 1972, the Nixon Administration then proceeded to attempt to win it. They did it by what I would call single-issue approach to the drug abuse problem. First it was eradication. We will go down to Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, eradicate it at the source, and the problem will be solved. Now, they had some success in eradicating. At the end of the day, however, for every hectare or acre eradicated, another acre or two or three would come under production and cultivation. Obviously, eradication alone was not the answer or the solution.
Solution number two, we will dismantle. We will go after the criminal organizations and arrest or remove their leadership from operation. Once we have removed the leadership of the criminal organizations, the cartels, the entire structure that drives the drug trafficking industry, will then collapse. Once again, there were the occasional successes. Those of you – and some of you are actually not old enough to remember when this happened – in 1993, in a particularly effective operation, the Colombian National Police took down, literally removed – perforated about 125 times – Mr. Pablo Escobar, who had been for the preceding 10-15 years the head of the largest, most vicious, most violent drug trafficking cartel in the history of the human race, called the Medellin Cartel, a cartel that might quite conceivably have been responsible for up to 10,000 murders in the preceding decade.
Impact? Well, 1994 came along and drugs continued to flow. Taking down or decapitating organizational leadership, in and of itself, obviously was not the solution.
Next proposal, in the 1980s, was interdiction. “Okay,” they said. “We can’t seem to stop it by eradicating at the source, we can’t seem to stop it by eliminating the leadership of the trafficking organizations. Let us build a picket line down below the U.S. southern borders, both on the ground and at sea, stop the ships, the boats, the planes that are bringing this stuff into the United States, andvoila, problem is solved.
Once again, there were some successes. The truth of the matter is the Caribbean in the 1980s was a region that was at risk of losing control. Fourteen different governments were at risk of losing control of their sovereign national territory to multi-billion dollar drug trafficking industries. And in their defense, that generation of the 1980s actually did effectively interdict the flow of drugs through the Caribbean toward the United – the southeastern United States of America.
But did that solve the problem? No. Where are we today? We’re in central Texas. Where do the drugs now flow into the United States? They come up straight through the land corridor, starting in Colombia, working their way through Central America, processing up through Mexico, and entering through the southwest border of the United States of America. In other words, yes, you can plug your finger in one hole of the dam, but in all likelihood – one might almost say with complete certainty – another hole is going to open up. And at the end of the day you have a finite number of fingers to plug with, defined by how much money the United States Congress and the taxpayers that send them to office are prepared to dedicate to this particular exercise.
Finally, and with somewhat greater coherence and success, the government began to develop an approach in the 1990s which I would call sustainable economic development. And that is accepting the reality that campesinos – or if you’re in Afghanistan and dealing with opium poppy, subsistence-level farmers, actually are not inherently criminal; they do not plant coca or opium poppy because they wish to be part of criminal enterprises. They do it because they are trying to provide a basic living to their families, and coca or opium poppy actually gives them better income and more secure income than corn or frijoles or wheat or whatever it might be that is otherwise being grown in that region.
Now this approach actually made some degree of sense, and I would suggest to you that where it is applied, it does produce long-term results. Problem: It is amazingly expensive. It costs a good bit of money to actually manage on a nationwide basis an alternative development program. It’s not just giving them a barrel of corn seed so that they will plant corn rather than coca. It’s also giving the tools and the training. It’s also giving them the infrastructure, the road system that allows them to get their product to market once they have harvested it, because remember: the drug traffickers will come to them, buy their product, and take it away at no cost to the farmer. The farmer who has instead two tons of corn somehow has to get it to market, or within a month or two he has more or less two tons of mulch that is gradually deteriorating and rotting in his back yard.
On top of that, if you want the campesino to remain committed to this, you have to give him or her some stake in the community. That means maybe schools, maybe clinics. That means electricity, running water, sewage, the sort of thing that makes a family say, one, I do have an interest in staying here, and two, I have a future here over and above whether I can grow an acre of coca or an acre of opium poppy.
Okay. Eradication, dismantling, interdiction, economic development – none of them in and of themselves solved the drug problem. So the question is, since the drugs are still an issue, what is the correct response? Are you ready? Bill Brownfield says the correct response is all of the above and then a little bit more as well.
Let us flash-forward to 1999, when the United States Government, jointly with the Government of Colombia, actually did this the right way. But I will prejudge the conclusion by letting you know the right way cost $8.5 billion over roughly a 12-year period of time. But we launched – the Colombian government launched what came to be called Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia was a comprehensive, structured approach designed to address the economic issue, the security issue, and the drugs and law enforcement issue. And when I said economic, I should also have said social, to include health impact, education, as well as job generation and economic activity.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would suggest that that worked for Colombia. The huge cartels that in the 1990s were actually threatening the very existence of the Colombian government have been atomized, admittedly to still annoying criminal activities, but are not anywhere remotely as powerful, as strong, or as threatening as Mr. Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cartel at the start of the 1990s, or the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and the Cali cartel at that same timeframe.
Cocaine production in Colombia, we estimate, is down 60 percent or so from its heyday, as recently as 10 years ago. The tourism industry in Colombia today is booming. There are probably 20 times as many tourists going to Colombia today as 10 years ago. And if you will, tourists vote with their feet. If tourists are going to Colombia, you assume the security situation obviously has reached a point where people are prepared voluntarily to spend their own money to go visit a country that 10 or 15 years ago they would not have dreamed of doing so without a battalion of the United States Army or Marine Corps joining them and providing them security at every step.
And may I note as well that there is some correlation between the fact that production of cocaine in Colombia has dropped by some 60 percent, and consumption of cocaine in the United States of America has dropped by some estimates between 40 and 50 percent? I’m not giving you the Pollyanna story here. I freely acknowledge other sorts of drug consumption have grown in this same time period. But the two things that have most driven the Latin America to North America drug trafficking crisis – cocaine and methamphetamines – have both gone down dramatically in terms of demand in the United States.
Heroin is moving at a much smaller level – I mean, the simple truth, the quantity of heroin that moves. Marijuana, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals: apparently we’re quite capable of producing our own domestically in the United States of America. What has been driving the crisis of violence, of homicide, of crime in the Central America-Mexico corridor is cocaine and methamphetamines. The extent to which that product and the trafficking in that product is going down is actually good news for those seven Central American and Mexican countries and governments.
That said, I do not mean to suggest to you that by addressing the problem in Colombia the problem was resolved. On the contrary – and I’m not going to walk you through each of these in the same degree of detail, but the balloon theory – they were squeezed, the bad guys were squeezed in Colombia. What did they do? Largely they moved to Mexico, where, as those of you who could remember where we were about seven or eight years ago, Mexico was confronting a crisis of large cartels that actually represented a threat to the sovereignty of the government itself. And we launched what came to be known as the Merida Initiative, a joint effort in which the Mexican Government offered roughly $13 to every $1 offered by the United States to address this problem.
We squeezed them in Mexico, and what happened? Many of them moved to Central America. The crisis of the last five years has been the surge in violence, in homicides, in crime, in gang activities in Central America. Response? CARSI, the Central America Regional Security Initiative. Much smaller than that for Mexico, but the truth of the matter is there’s a finite number of dollars that are available to be applied to this problem. We squeeze them in Central America and what do we see increasingly happening? You will be stunned to learn that the statistics of drug flows through the Caribbean, that same region that was in fact successfully shut down in the 1980s, has been growing from a factor of roughly 4 percent of U.S. drug consumption three years ago to 8 percent two years to 9 or 10 percent over the last year, and now an estimated 14 percent.
If you’re tracking the trend line, even if we don’t know precisely how much is moving, the fact of the matter is what I have described for you is a tripling of drug flow through the Caribbean over the last three years. Watch this space. If in the course of the next two or three years you see the occasional headline saying, “Drug crisis in the Caribbean,” you will be able to say, yeah, Brownfield at least was prescient enough to predict that would be happening.
Each of the initiatives that I have laid out – Plan Colombia, Colombia; Merida Initiative, Mexico; CARSI, Central America; CBSI, Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, for the Caribbean – had, I would suggest – while each was different, each had its own particular characteristics – they had several common principles.
One, there was an attempt and still is an attempt to link together all the elements of the problem: law enforcement, security, rule of law institutions, economic and social development. Second, they are sustainable. Sustainable means the host government – whether it’s Colombian, Mexican, Central American, Caribbean – sees enough of their own interest at stake that they’re prepared to put their own resources into the problem and the solution. Third, they accept as a principle that the host government makes the decision. If we want a particular program and they don’t, at the end of the day, their view is what determines what will be done. Fourth, they try to focus on institutions and institution-building rather than equipment, rather than hard stuff, rather even than operations, the thinking being if you build an institution, you get value for a generation. If you do a successful takedown operation, you get a headline and value that might last you for a day or two.
Fifth, they are regional in nature – by the way, even the bilateral programs, Colombia and Mexico, are regional to the extent that they link into other countries in the region. Today, for example, Colombian police are training more police in Central America than is the United States. And some of it is actually being done with our assistance, which is another way of saying we actually pay for it. But the quality of the training and the ability of the trainers from Colombia is actually greater than what we ourselves can offer, partly because of their experience, partly because, of course, it’s a lot easier for a Spanish-speaking national police officer from Colombia to do training in Central America than it is even for a Spanish-language-trained U.S. law enforcement officer.
And the sixth principle that we have – I think linking all of these together – is the concept of partners. With each initiative, we have drawn in more and more international partners to play into this effort. Why? One reason I suggest to you is that even as consumption of cocaine in the United States has been dropping steadily since 2007, consumption of cocaine in Western Europe or in East Asia has been growing dramatically, without even mentioning the largest country in South America – Brazil – which is today confronting what could almost be called a crack cocaine crisis. And obviously, as their populations and communities are increasingly victims – or participants, depending upon your perspective – in this process, there is obviously greater interest in joining in efforts as partners to address the problem either at its source or in the midpoint, in short, before it arrives on the shores of France or Italy or Spain or the United Kingdom.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I suggest to you that it is a little bit early, perhaps a century or two, perhaps a millennium or so, to declare success on this particular issue? May I suggest to you it is not too early to say the year 2014 and the next five or ten years will offer a different problem set, a different set of realities from what we were dealing with in the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, or even the last decade? First, you have one nation that has emerged, if you will, from the hell of the 1990s, and is now able to export its experience and its talent set. That nation is Colombia. And let us not forget that having a model out there that other nations in the region can look at has an impact. That is different from where we were 10 or 15 years ago.
Second, let us accept that you now have two new – not so new, but two much more major players in this drama in the region. They are named Bolivia and Peru, and their production level is moving in a sharply upward direction. What is also new, however, is that they are not feeding the North American market; they are feeding the Brazilian and Western European market. It’s an east-west problem as much as a north-south problem. I don’t say one is better than the other; I say it is a different problem set, which is going to require a different set of solutions.
Third, as I have mentioned several times, we are dealing with a consumption matter, a consumption issue, that is changing. As the American taste, if you will, shifts from cocaine and methamphetamines to other sorts of drugs, whether it is heroin or opium-based drugs, other synthetics, diverted pharmaceuticals or marijuana, it is a different problem set and presumably requires a different set of solutions.
Fourth – if you wondered if I was going to mention it, and I’m going to mention it right now – nations are experimenting with alternative approaches to drug control. Uruguay, a small nation located in between Brazil and Argentina, has recently, as a matter of national law, legalized the consumption of marijuana throughout the country. Some of you who have been asleep for the last 12 months may be unaware that two states of the union in the United States of America have done exactly the same thing. One of them is wrapping up its third month of this experiment, that’s Colorado, and the other goes online sometime, I think, about the first of July as they work their way through their rules and procedures. And I am not yet in a position to draw any firm conclusions from any of these experiences. I am in a position to say this is a 2014 reality, and let’s take it into account as we figure: How are we going to work this issue over the next five to ten years?
And fifth, and finally – and I do emphasize this point, because I do believe we haven’t – this Administration, the Administration of Barack Obama has not gotten credit or at least as much credit for this as it should – there is a strong realization in this country, your country, the United States of America, that drugs, drug abuse, and the overall total drug issue is far more a matter of public health than it is a matter of criminal justice. It is both unfair to the criminal justice system as well as to many of those who are caught up in the criminal justice system to try to address drug abuse solely in the criminal justice system. It is not just a matter of criminal justice. It is obviously a matter of health, of the medical care and medical profession, and of how you deal with the health and medical aspects of the use of drugs.
Now, I am not saying that the one excludes the other, but I am very definitely saying that trying to address the issue from only one side is pretty much condemned to failure. Those, I submit, are four new elements available as of the 27th of March, 2014, that were different from what we would’ve discussed if we had been sitting here 20 years ago, 10 years ago, quite frankly even as recently as five years ago. We’ve got to figure how to incorporate them into our own thinking.
These are, ladies and gentlemen – those of you who are – it’s about 75 percent of you who I predict are at least below the age of 40 if not below the age of 30 – these are going to be your challenges. Why? Because, I got to tell you, old Brownfield’s going to be checking out of this business in another three or four years, and it’s going to be you and your generation who have to figure out how to deal with these issues. I will offer you only five suggestions as you move proudly into the future on this issue on how to do it.
One, think long term. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it overnight. Don’t even think in terms of years, maybe not even decades. Think in terms of generations. Don’t come up with some program that is supposed to solve the problem by 2015. It’s not going to happen.
Second, flexible and adaptable. Tastes change, conduct and behavior changes. The bad guys, the large, transnational criminal organizations who are involved in this, are constantly adapting and adjusting their approach. You had better have your own strategy and policy that can be adjustable and adaptable as well.
Third, be comprehensive. We tried the single-issue approach, ladies and gentlemen. It doesn’t work. We cannot just eradicate ourselves out of this problem. We cannot just interdict our way out of this problem. We also cannot just economic develop our way out of this problem. We have got to address all aspects of the problem. Otherwise we will not succeed.
Fourth principle, build institutions. No one loves a cool operation more than I do. No one loves some snappy new equipment as much as I do. But at the end of the day, your long-term value comes from building better law enforcement capabilities, building more competent prosecutors and investigators, building more effective, efficient, and honest courts and judicial systems, and don’t forget, building a corrections system that actually provides correction as opposed to a graduate course on how to advance from Criminal Activity 101 to the advanced Ph.D. course during three months of incarceration in a detention facility.
And finally, if I might, there is and always will be a criminal justice aspect to this, but principle number five: focus on the big organizations. It’s fine to pump up your numbers, I guess, in terms of how many you can arrest, but if you’re not going after the multibillion dollar organizations who engage not just in drug trafficking, but in trafficking in firearms, trafficking in people, trafficking in general contraband, money laundering that actually corrupts and undercuts and hollows out entire financial institutions, if you’re not focused on them, you’re missing the entire picture.
Okay, back to the title. So what is the new normal? Are you ready? The new normal is constant change. That, ladies and gents, is what we had better wrap our heads around. And we never have for the last 40 years. We’ve always taken the snapshot and said here is what we’re dealing with; now let us develop a strategy that will solve that problem. Wrong-o. That is not what we are going to be dealing with. What we’re looking at today on the 27th of March, I absolutely assure you, is going to be completely different by the time we get into 2015. That’s the new normal. And we had better be ready and able to address that, domestically and internationally, as a criminal justice matter and as a public healthcare matter.
The truth of the matter is we have to have a policy and approach that allows us to move in whatever direction our societies and those who are trying to take advantage of them will be moving in. And ladies and gentlemen, if that’s the new normal, I at least think we’ve got an approach that we can work with in a realistic way and that at least would take us one step beyond where we were 30 or 35 years ago when we started down this road.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
U.S. SOUTHERN COMMANDER WARNS OF CONNECTION BETWEEN CRIME AND TERRORISM
FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Kelly Warns of Potential Crime-Terrorism Nexus in Latin America
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, March 20, 2013 - A potential connection between crime syndicates and terrorists in Latin America would constitute a clear danger to the region, U.S. Southern Command's senior leader told reporters at the Pentagon today.
Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly said the increase in Iranian influence in Latin America is worrisome, and an example of the peril that the combination of criminal networks and states that sponsor terrorism, like Iran, could pose.
Kelly, who took over U.S. Southern Command in November, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference that in the past six years Iran has tried to increase its influence in Central and South America. The Iranian government, he said, has built embassies and cultural centers in the region.
"The concern is that ... they're looking ... for influence -- say for votes in the U.N. on sanctions," he said. "But also, and I've ... made mention to some of our friends in the region that these guys are very, very good at what they do, and very, very skilled at what they do, and that people should just be careful as to who they're dealing with."
The general stressed he is not accusing Iran of sponsoring terrorism in Latin America, but he noted that Iran is involved in terrorism in other areas of the world.
"We do know that some terrorist organizations are able to skim off fairly substantial sums of money from the drug profits," Kelly said. "And so there has to be kind of a network for that to happen."
The criminal networks in Latin America are very sophisticated and very well financed, he said.
Drugs are the basis for this wealth and the drug-related money coming out of the United States "is astronomical," Kelly said.
"I mean palettes of money," he said. "For a buck, anything can get on the [drug transport] network."
That network, Kelly said, transports tons of drugs into the United States and Europe and moves bales of money back out.
"The point of it all is the network is a very dangerous thing to have working as effectively as it does, because anything can get on it," he said.
Kelly said his command is working to build military-to-military contacts throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
"The good news about Latin America and my part of the world is that there are no wars," he said.
And most Latin American countries, including Brazil -- the world's fifth-largest economy -- want the United States as a partner, Kelly said.
The countries of the region don't ask for much, the general said.
"When I go down and visit, they're not asking for an awful [lot] -- they're not asking for money," Kelly said. "They're willing to pay their own way."
What the Latin American countries need is expertise, the general said. For example, Peru is asking for help in getting its separate military services to work together better. Colombia needs help in countering improvised explosive devices that the terror group FARC and criminal syndicates use to protect coca fields and factories. Other nations need medical expertise.
Turning to another topic, Kelly noted that sequestration will hit his command hard. He said there will be fewer vessels to interdict cocaine shipments, and fewer troops to operate with partner militaries
 |
| Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command, holds a news conference with reporters at the Pentagon, March 20, 2013. DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley |
FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Kelly Warns of Potential Crime-Terrorism Nexus in Latin America
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, March 20, 2013 - A potential connection between crime syndicates and terrorists in Latin America would constitute a clear danger to the region, U.S. Southern Command's senior leader told reporters at the Pentagon today.
Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly said the increase in Iranian influence in Latin America is worrisome, and an example of the peril that the combination of criminal networks and states that sponsor terrorism, like Iran, could pose.
Kelly, who took over U.S. Southern Command in November, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference that in the past six years Iran has tried to increase its influence in Central and South America. The Iranian government, he said, has built embassies and cultural centers in the region.
"The concern is that ... they're looking ... for influence -- say for votes in the U.N. on sanctions," he said. "But also, and I've ... made mention to some of our friends in the region that these guys are very, very good at what they do, and very, very skilled at what they do, and that people should just be careful as to who they're dealing with."
The general stressed he is not accusing Iran of sponsoring terrorism in Latin America, but he noted that Iran is involved in terrorism in other areas of the world.
"We do know that some terrorist organizations are able to skim off fairly substantial sums of money from the drug profits," Kelly said. "And so there has to be kind of a network for that to happen."
The criminal networks in Latin America are very sophisticated and very well financed, he said.
Drugs are the basis for this wealth and the drug-related money coming out of the United States "is astronomical," Kelly said.
"I mean palettes of money," he said. "For a buck, anything can get on the [drug transport] network."
That network, Kelly said, transports tons of drugs into the United States and Europe and moves bales of money back out.
"The point of it all is the network is a very dangerous thing to have working as effectively as it does, because anything can get on it," he said.
Kelly said his command is working to build military-to-military contacts throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
"The good news about Latin America and my part of the world is that there are no wars," he said.
And most Latin American countries, including Brazil -- the world's fifth-largest economy -- want the United States as a partner, Kelly said.
The countries of the region don't ask for much, the general said.
"When I go down and visit, they're not asking for an awful [lot] -- they're not asking for money," Kelly said. "They're willing to pay their own way."
What the Latin American countries need is expertise, the general said. For example, Peru is asking for help in getting its separate military services to work together better. Colombia needs help in countering improvised explosive devices that the terror group FARC and criminal syndicates use to protect coca fields and factories. Other nations need medical expertise.
Turning to another topic, Kelly noted that sequestration will hit his command hard. He said there will be fewer vessels to interdict cocaine shipments, and fewer troops to operate with partner militaries
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FEARS SPREAD OF EXTREMISM IN LATIN AMERICA
Panetta: Violent Extremism Threatens Latin America
By Cheryl Pellerin
RIO DE JANEIRO, April 24, 2012 - Even in a region where some of the United States' closest military partners are steadily improving national stability and security, the threat of violent extremism is spreading, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said here yesterday.
During a weeklong trip that includes stops in Bogota, Colombia; Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Santiago, Chile, the secretary is meeting with military and political leaders to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to help with common defense challenges.
Increasingly, one of those challenges involves violent extremist organizations and the growing engagement of Iran in the region.
"We always have a concern about, in particular, the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and efforts by the IRGC to expand their influence, not only throughout the Middle East but also into this region," Panetta said during a briefing en route to Colombia.
"In my book," he added, "that relates to expanding terrorism."
Last month, in written testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Air Force Gen. Douglas M. Fraser, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, detailed the regional activities of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shi'a Muslim militant group and political party, and Iran.
Southcom's area of responsibility includes Central America, South America and the Caribbean.
"We do see evidence of international terrorist groups benefitting from the intertwined systems of illicit trafficking and money laundering in our AOR," Fraser said.
In South America, funding for Hezbollah is raised through charitable donations as well as through drug trafficking and dealing in counterfeit and pirated goods, he said.
In 2011, the U.S. Treasury Department identified the Lebanese Canadian Bank as a "primary money laundering concern" for its role in facilitating money laundering activities of Ayman Joumaa and his Lebanon-based drug trafficking network, which also channeled financial support to Hezbollah.
Joumaa also is accused of smuggling U.S.-bound cocaine through Central America and Mexico and laundering money for a group called Los Zetas, and many Colombian and Venezuelan suppliers.
"In addition to Hezbollah supporters throughout South America, the region is home to a small number of violent extremist organizations, Fraser said.
"We remain vigilant for the potential radicalization of homegrown extremists," the general added.
For example, a small number of Sunni extremists are involved in the radicalization of converts and other Muslims, Fraser told the panel.
"These efforts can be seen through the influence of public personalities like Jamaica's Shaykh Abdullah al-Faisal, who was convicted in the United Kingdom for inciting terrorism," the general said.
Al-Qaida senior operative Adnan el-Shukrijumah has held valid passports for the United States, as well as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, where he has family and associates, Fraser added.
Despite recent convictions in a 2007 plot to attack the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, one alleged co-conspirator remains at large in Guyana, he said.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has visited the region six times in six years, and Iran continues its overtures to countries there to try to circumvent international sanctions, Fraser said.
Iran has established modest economic, cultural and security ties, the general added, mostly with nations aligned with a group known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of our Americas, called ALBA. These include Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Iran also has established 36 Shi'a cultural centers in the region, Fraser said.
The Fundacion Cultural Oriente is an Iranian outreach center dedicated to strengthening Iran's ties to Latin America, Fraser said.
The center is run by radical cleric Moshen Rabbani, who is on the Interpol Red List for involvement in the 1994 bombings of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, the general said, adding that Rabbani oversees several media outlets and has recruited students from the region to study in Iran.
"We take Iranian activity in the hemisphere seriously and we monitor its activities closely," Fraser said.
"The U.S. government's successful detection and thwarting of the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States," he added, "reinforces the importance of that monitoring and the effectiveness of U.S. countermeasures."
The expansion of terrorism is an area of concern for the region and its partners, Panetta said.
"I hope we can work together," the secretary added, "to make sure that all the steps are taken to ensure that anything that encourages terrorism can be fought against."
Thursday, February 23, 2012
U.S. GOVERNMENT WANTS TO HAVE 100,000 U.S. STUDENTS STUDYING IN LATIN AMERICA
The following excerpt is from a U.S. Department of State e-mail:
"100,000 Strong in the Americas
Fact Sheet
Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs
February 21, 2012
"…the United States will work with partners in this region, including the private sector, to increase the number of U.S. students studying in Latin America to 100,000, and the number of Latin American students studying in the United States to 100,000."
—President Barack Obama
La Moneda, Santiago, Chile, March 21, 2011
In March 2011, President Barack Obama launched "100,000 Strong in the Americas," an initiative to increase international study in the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of 100,000 Strong is to foster region-wide prosperity through greater international exchange of students, who are our future leaders and innovators. Increasing understanding in the Western Hemisphere and building closer people-to-people ties will help the State Department work together with the people of the Western Hemisphere to address common challenges including citizen security, economic opportunity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability.—President Barack Obama
La Moneda, Santiago, Chile, March 21, 2011
Partnerships
The Department of State is working to implement 100,000 Strong in the Americas through partnerships – with foreign governments, with universities and colleges, and with the private sector. EducationUSA (educationusa.state.gov), a network of more than 100 U.S.-Government-supported advising centers throughout the Hemisphere, is a centerpiece of our partnership and outreach efforts.
Universities and Colleges
We are working with institutions in the United States and throughout the Hemisphere to encourage expanded exchanges and closer partnerships between U.S. and Latin American universities and colleges.
Private Sector
The U.S. Government, in partnership with governments in the region, strongly supports exchanges through Fulbright, Gilman, and other scholarship programs. Reaching beyond these programs, we seek contributions from the private sector to support scholarships. Any such funding will go directly to the organization administering the program the donor wishes to support.
Foreign Governments
Most governments in the region provide scholarships to enable top students to study abroad. Brazil’s "Science without Borders" scholarship program plans to send 75,000 Brazilians to study abroad over the next four years, with up to half coming to the United States. The United States has worked closely with Brazil to coordinate the U.S. portion of this program. We seek opportunities to cooperate with other governments on student advising, assistance with placement, and coordination to ensure timely access to educational and visa services.
Diversity
We are promoting a more diverse profile of students who participate in educational exchanges and their destinations. The Department of State is reaching out to diverse institutions throughout the United States including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, Native American Tribal colleges, and community colleges. We are working with Latin American and Caribbean governments, universities, and the private sector to provide international study opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds
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