Washington Post endorses Obama aid request for Central America

The Washington Post Editorial Board has come out in lukewarm (?) support of President Obama's aid request for the Northern Triangle of Central America.

In short, the United States has a strong interest in helping Central America achieve the prosperity and stability that have so long eluded it. President Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget proposal addresses that interest with a request for $1 billion in aid to the northern triangle. A little more than half of that would go to beefing up the countries’ security forces and public institutions, with the rest going to economic development. This would be the first installment on a five-year program of still-undetermined size, officials say.

This is the first that I've heard of US financial support for a five-year program. I might be wrong but I am guessing that this is one billion of the fifteen billion that Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are looking for to support their five-year plan. However, the link from the Post goes to the White House's Fact Sheet from June that only mentions two small USAID plan that will run for five years so it's not entirely clear. I haven't read that the Administration is prepared to ask for increased resources not just next year, but every year after. That's what I had in mind earlier this week.  

The WP isn't ready to proclaim the surge in unaccompanied minors over but they are somewhat optimistic by this year's number of migrants which is down from last year. It makes sense - most who can and want to leave have done so already. That should provide respite for a few months or so. However, the decreased flow out of Central America means that this will still be the second highest year on record. That's not something to celebrate.

I'm with their call for economic and physical security. Who isn't?

I really need to get more familiar with Plan Colombia because it has apparently solved world peace. Everybody loves it or everybody thinks that it is very useful to persuade reluctant members of Congress to support whatever initiative that our heart's desire.

High quality leadership is needed in the region. We are on board here. A colleague and I tried to get an op-ed published on this month's ago but no luck.

The concern with the FMLN manipulating "constitutional rules for their advantage" - somewhat confusing unless you are speaking about Decree 743 and the packing of the courts a few years ago. To reduce the crisis to FMLN manipulation, however, would be naive and sustained for simply partisan means. Aligning with Venezuela? Well, you have Alba Petroleos but that sure seems like the extent of it. FMLN and El Salvador alignment with Venezuela might be an issue but it hasn't come up since US right wing forces tried to sabotage the FMLN in last year's presidential election. That's not to say that there are not problems with corruption and transparency. To be fair, they did highlight insecurity in Honduras earlier in this post.

Finally,

Mr. Obama’s aid plan is appropriately ambitious and generous; over the coming years, though, it must also be conditioned on recipients’ fulfillment of conditions related to transparency and respect for human rights. That approach, or a version of it, has been tried before in Latin America, both in Colombia and in Central America during the 1980s. Congress and the administration must adapt a new conditionality for the Central America crisis of today.

The aid plan is welcome news. However, I would stop short of calling it "ambitious and generous." It breaks down to $33 per capita. I cringe, however, at the next statement which goes on about conditionality. There needs to be some accountability for the money and the programs, but conditionality like this does not have a good history in Central America. Here is a paragraph that mostly got cut from my recent World Politics Review analysis.

I do not doubt that the countries of the Northern Triangle have carried out some reforms that indicate a willingness to make hard decisions. However, it feels somewhat reminiscent of the Cold War when President Ronald Reagan’s administration would go before the US Congress to certify that the Salvadoran military and government were taking human rights more seriously because they had killed fewer people than the previous month. We can point to isolated examples of progress but it is challenging to identify sustained progress.

The conditions that the US placed on aid to El Salvador during the 1980s had some success. The Salvadoran military, when pressured, did respond to US calls to respect human rights - not absolutely, but better. However, it also led members of the US Reagan administration to go before Congress and the media to lie about significant progress. It also led many members of Congress to play dumb and simply pass all responsibility for the failures of US policy to the executive branch.