washington | President Barack Obama’s wooing of Latin America this week is a long time coming, according to many supporters of Israel.
During the years the United States has neglected the relationship, closer ties have been built between Latin America and Iran — resulting in gains for the Palestinians.
The shift comes amid Iran’s deepening influence in the region, as well as gains from a Palestinian diplomatic offensive that has seen eight Latin American nations agree in recent months to recognize a Palestinian state.
Obama’s visits to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador follow on the heels of a trip to Israel this month by Chilean President Sebastián Piñera.
Israeli Foreign Ministry officials and U.S. Jewish groups that focus on Latin America say the West’s attention to the area should have happened sooner.
“Latin America has suffered benign neglect both from the United States and Israel,” said Dina Siegel Vann, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Latin American Institute.
“When you have a vacuum it will be filled,” she said, referring to Iran’s courting of Latin American countries that chafe under U.S. domination of the hemisphere — chief among them Venezuela. “This is the point of view of many Latin American Jewish communities who feel that they have not been treated as a priority.”
An Israeli Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the neglect and said it primarily was a function of resources diverted to peacemaking in the region since the launch of the Oslo process in 1993.
That has been redressed in recent months with several high-profile visits to the continent, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Brazil visit in July 2009, and then–President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return visit to Israel a year ago.
The outreach is coordinated with the local Jewish communities, and Vann noted a number of successes, including Piñera’s recent visit to Israel and Panama President Ricardo Martinelli’s visit last year.
Jewish lobbying helped moderate Chile’s recognition of Palestine with enough qualifications that the recognition was almost a moot point, Vann said.
“They spoke about Israel’s right to exist within secure borders, they said negotiations have to continue and that an agreement has to be part of bilateral negotiations,” she said. “In the end, the Israelis were happier with it than the Palestinians.”
Vann and her boss, AJC director David Harris, just returned from a tour of Argentina, Brazil and Chile to address issues of concern to Jewish communities.
But the highest-profile effort is Obama’s tour. He did not publicly address the Middle East when he met over the weekend with Dilma Rousseff, his Brazilian counterpart. The visit focused on free trade with Latin American nations, many of which are showing economic growth while much of the West struggles with recession.
Nonetheless, the joint Obama-Rousseff statement pointed to an effort to bridge differences over last year’s refusal by Brazil and Turkey to join the international effort to isolate Iran over its nuclear weapons program.
The statement underscored closer defense cooperation in recent months. “They reaffirmed both countries’ commitments on disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, with a view to achieving the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” it said.
Daniel Mariaschin, executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International, speculated that Obama is sounding out Rousseff privately to see if she plans on continuing the tilt of her predecessor, Lula, in setting Brazil apart from U.S. policy on the Middle East.
“From what I understand, he’s going to ask where will Brazil be going from this particular point,” said Mariaschin, who was slated to head to Latin America this week. “He will be raising the issue to try and discover if there is daylight in the policies between Lula and Rousseff.”
Lula, who was Rousseff’s mentor, was behind Brazil’s decision to recognize Palestine and to attempt, with Turkey, to strike a separate nuclear inspections deal with Iran. Brazil predominates in South America, and its decisions had a domino effect, particularly on recognizing Palestine.
Vann said Lula had his eye on history as he left office. “He wanted to go out with a bang,” she said.
That’s typical of a region that often has sought to distinguish itself from its powerful northern neighbor, Mariaschin said.
“There’s an interest in showing bona fides to the Islamic world, the Arab world, the nonaligned, that these countries in Latin America are of an independent mind,” he said.
Other factors have played into the pro-Arab leanings of an area that once was perceived as a redoubt of pro-Israeli sentiment; Latin America votes tilted the U.N. 1947 vote toward creating a Jewish state.
Also factoring in are the region’s substantive Arab diasporas, including what is believed to be the largest Palestinian diaspora in the world in Chile, and a Lebanese community in Brazil said to outnumber the Lebanese in Lebanon.
Another factor is the tendency of Latin America nations to follow each other’s leads. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez courted Iran to needle the United States, which had sought his ouster in the early 2000s because of his nationalization of the oil industry.
“More often than not, there’s a tendency among Latin Americans to vote as a bloc” in international bodies, Mariaschin said. “I don’t think that’s helpful or healthy.”
The Iranian influence on Latin America has been especially troublesome, he said, not just because it hindered efforts to set up a united front against the prospect of a nuclear Iran, but also because of the reported infiltration of Iranian terrorists into the region.
U.S. lawmakers, led by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who chairs the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, have pressed the Obama administration to make a priority of driving Iran’s influence away from Latin America.
The threat is real, Vann said, particularly in the little-policed “triangle” where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet.
“Iran’s presence in the region is very detrimental, and it’s not theoretical,” she said, pointing to the certainty in Western intelligence circles that Iran was behind deadly attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and its AMIA Jewish community center in 1994.
Vann cautioned against overstating Iran’s danger, however, noting the skepticism in the region over such claims, stemming from how the Bush administration made its case for the Iraq War with unfounded evidence.
“They truly don’t believe Iran is a threat, and they draw parallels with Iraq and [weapons of mass destruction],” she said. “We have to be careful not to magnify the problem.”