CHAPTER 21.  Case Study D -- New Dialogue With Latin America
 

"The best laid plans o' mice and men
    Gang aft a-gley;
An lea'e us nought but grief and pain,
    For promised joy."

Robert Burns

The Idea of a New Dialogue1
When Henry Kissinger became Secretary of State in September 1973 his inheritance in Latin American relations was first of all one of long-term United States arbitrariness, intervention, contempt, arrogance, indifference, ignorance and neglect only occasionally relieved by well-intentioned but short-lived programs like Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy and Kennedy's Alianza para el Progreso.   Secondly, however, it was the necessity of        renegotiating the Panama Canal Treaty, a document that long served as a focal point for all Latin Americans critical of U.S. foreign policy South of the Border.

At a luncheon for chiefs of Latin American delegations to the United Nations in October, Kissinger mentioned the term "new dialogue" between the United States and its friends in the Americas, even though the immediate pressing problem was Panama, a refrain from a very old dialogue.  A new dialogue that would embody science and technology became a U.S. initiative and proposition of good faith preparatory to negotiating a new Panama Canal Treaty.  Science and technology for development as an issue in U.S. relations with Latin America dated, however, at least from the meeting of the presidents of the Americas at Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 1967.

By February 7, 1974, Kissinger had negotiated a joint statement of principles for a new Panama Canal treaty with the Panamanian minister of foreign affairs.  Later that month in Tlatelolco, a favorite Mexican conference site outside Mexico City, Kissinger met with twenty-four other hemisphere foreign ministers, and in April he and President Nixon welcomed delegates to Atlanta for the first meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) outside of its Washington headquarters.  Besides Panama and improved hemispheric relations a key issue behind this series of meetings was no doubt energy, which had risen to crisis proportions with the OPEC volume and price levels put into place since 1973.  Only Venezuela and Ecuador (not Mexico) were Latin American OPEC members.  Yet one must remember the anxiety felt in Washington and other industrialized-country capitals that oil was simply the first in a series of commodities whose output and price developing countries could unite to control.

The oil cartel and the prospect of other commodity cartels strained economic relations between the United States and Latin America; so did the nationalization of overseas subsidiaries of U.S. firms.  In the 1970s several Latin American governments were military, undemocratic and repressive.  (The 1976 military coup in Argentina, for example, led to the disappearance and murder of ten thousand civilians by the military and was redressed only after the Falklands War debacle in 1982.)

Panama was a concrete issue that had to be settled.  In 1903 Panama had granted the United States right in perpetuity for the use of a zone for building and operating a canal.  Since 1964 negotiations to make the treaty more acceptable to Panama had been undertaken by both sides.  It was to these lagging negotiations that Kissinger gave impetus in February 1974 with agreement on principles of a settlement.  With this settlement, one perception of U.S. imperialism could be altered.

The Dialogue
Two weeks later at Tlatelolco the United States continued the new dialogue with an ambitious program of initiatives that also included what was becoming a Kissinger hallmark, science and technology.  After discussing trade, Kissinger went on to science and technology in his address to the conference of foreign ministers:

We want to improve our private and governmental efforts to make available needed technology suited to varying stages of development in such vital areas as education, housing and agriculture.He then gave the new dialogue form:
The United States therefore recommends that we establish an inter-American commission on technology.  It should be composed of leading scientists and experts from all the Americas and report to governments on the basis of regular meetings.2

The Foreign Ministers agreed that it would be desirable to establish an Inter-American Commission of Science and Technology.3

Before outlining how the working group should operate, the U.S. statement went on to say, "The transfer of science and technology may be an even more important bottleneck in the development effort than capital."  The United States recommended that the new dialogue should be broadened by more cultural and educational exchanges.

To prepare for the first meeting of the Committee on Science and the Transfer of Technology at Brasilia in June, the Department of State put together a team from its Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (ARA), AID and State's newly-organized science bureau (see Chapters 11, 12 and 15), Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES).  To participate in the CSTT State also formed a coordinating committee composed of representatives of U.S. agencies and private organizations that had an interest in science and in technology transfer.  This group was an early attempt to channel disparate U.S. efforts -- in both the government and the private sector -- into a coherent application of science and technology in U.S. foreign affairs.

In Brasília the CSTT set up four subgroups and scheduled their meetings from August to November 1974.  It planned to receive reports of the subgroups at a meeting of CSTT itself at Montevideo in February 1975 before reporting to foreign ministers at Buenos Aires the next month in their follow-up to the April 1974 meeting in Washington.  The four subgroups:

1) strengthening the internal S&T system,
2) utilization of the potential of the developed countries,
3) transfer of (commercial) technology and
4) creation of an institutional mechanism.

The subgroups met, respectively, in Bogotá, Guatemala City, Brasília, Caracas and Santiago; subgroup 3 met twice to discuss the knottiest problems connected with commercial technology transfer.

A United States Initiative
The U.S. had already gotten far ahead of subgroup 4 on an institutional mechanism.  Responding to the concept of making more technology available, the Department of State (OES) proposed a central office that would be the primary point of contact for Latin American queries on U.S. practice and regulation of technology transfer, export and patent law, availability of technology and information and availability of educational opportunities in the United States.  A great deal of thought and effort on the part of government and private sector representatives on the subgroup produced an innovative "focal point," officially called the U.S. coordination center.  Participants were from State (ARA, chair, and OES), AID, NAS, NSF, NBS, Agriculture and, from the private sector, the Council of the Americas.

With commendable haste the State Department set into motion a vast bureaucratic structure to prepare delegations for the four new dialogue subgroups.  Delegates came from State, AID, Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Academies of Science and Engineering (NAS and NAE, that had considerable experience in science and technology transfer and exchanges with Latin America) and the private sector groups Council of the Americas, Industrial Research Institute (IRI) and the Licensing Executive Society.6

Minimal progress in subgroup 3 considering technology transfer and the inevitable code of conduct for firms engaged in it, however, doomed in advance the meeting on institutional mechanisms at Santiago in November; thus that subgroup never adequately discussed the U.S. "focal point" plan.  The Santiago meeting was in fact the last meeting on the new dialogue.

As late as December 1974, however, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, William D. Rogers, told the Council of the Americas that "we have been participating vigorously in a working group on science and the transfer of technology...The returns on this effort are not in yet...So far, however, there has been a tendency on the part of the Latin American participants to criticize the United States for not going far enough fast enough."7

Such criticism was pronounced in subgroup 3 on technology transfer, bogged down on legal conditions binding on developed-company firms so engaged.  The whole new dialogue had also been haunted by the ghost of Castro's Cuba, ostracized from the rest of OAS members by two resolutions in the 1960s (because of its Soviet ties and its hemispheric intervention).  Despite these drawbacks Cuba's Spanishness brought it closer to other Latin American countries than the United States, forever gringo, could approach them, even with its concrete proposals for inter-American cooperation.  The United States did not make an issue of Cuba but cannot have viewed any pro-Cuba distraction with other than dismay.  Worse was yet to come, however.  The new dialogue was squelched by an issue having to do neither with Cuba nor technology transfer.

Oil Muffles Dialogue
In January 1975 Argentina notified the United States that it was indefinitely postponing the March meeting of ministers in Buenos Aires because Venezuela and Ecuador would boycott it in protest of the new U.S. Trade Act of 1974.  The act excluded members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), including Venezuela and Ecuador, from most-favored-nation trade status.  Congressional action again, as in the case of the Jackson-Vanik amendment on the same issue in 1972, whose purpose was to increase Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, again played a decisive role in the executive's conduct of foreign affairs.  On the other hand, where were Argentina's (and other countries') criticisms of the OPEC cartel's oil price rises that disadvantaged Latin America as much if not more than North America.8

On March 1, 1975, the U.S. was still calling for resumption of the Buenos Aires meeting but the meetings in Montevideo and Buenos Aires never took place and the new dialogue was stilled.9

By September 1975 the United States was proposing S&T initiatives anew at the seventh special session of the UN general assembly  (see Section II), and in 1976 Kissinger gamely mentioned technology as a major issue at a symposium in Venezuela.10  But dialogue had died out in Santiago in November 1974.  A key motivation for the new dialogue did, however, see a successful end in negotiation of a new Panama Canal Treaty ratified in 1978.