I can remember how excited I felt when the news was confirmed that November night. After months of awkwardly defending my nation and its unpopular president to my Argentine friends- I was living in Mendoza at the time- my home country had finally done something I could brag about.
The United States, after eight years of controversial wars and blustery foreign policy had elected not just a young, inspiring new leader, but a black man at that. Millions of people around the world were ecstatic.
“The symbolic significance of his run and his biography really elevated everybody’s expectations,” said Dr. Kimberly Stanton of the Project Counseling Service, which assists non-government organizations throughout Latin America. “People expected him to revolutionize all of politics at once.”
Lights show the electoral college tallies in real time on the spire of the Empire State Building on election night 2012.
Four years of sometimes brutal reality later, the president faces another term sure to present numerous challenges.
Nonetheless, the president’s impact here in Colombia, and in Latin America in general, has received generally positive reviews. Over the past four years, the U.S. revitalized relations with Cuba and Venezuela, reformed immigration laws to grant temporary legal residency to many children of illegal immigrants, and passed a free trade agreement with Colombia that promises to bring the ally nations closer together economically than ever before.
Still, some argue the Obama administration has failed to grant the region the attention it deserves, and foreign aid toward Colombia has declined significantly since the Bush administration.
“There is a weaker bureaucratic support for the relationship with Latin America. It’s not a priority for the U.S. right now, which is not necessarily a bad thing per se,” explained Dr. Sandra Borda, the director of the American Studies program at the Universidad de Los Andes.
But the next few months are for looking forward rather than backwards, and determining what the president has on the agenda for relations between the United States and Colombia during the next term.
“It would be great to imagine that he would rethink the region, but I feel like Latin America is seen as relatively quiet and not troubling whereas the rest of the world is more complex,” said Stanton.
Warming relations with neighbors
Indeed, many agree that Obama’s relationship with Latin American leaders, notably Hugo Chávez and the Castros has been warmer than it would probably have been with a Republican like Romney.
President Obama’s attendance at the Summit of the Americas this year in Cartagena in particular showed a “willingness to go to foreign meetings where his policies were criticized,” according to Stanton. That tolerance of foreign criticism was been repeatedly attacked by the Romney campaign as weak and apologetic.
Additionally, Obama’s recent affirmation of renewed negotiations between the Santos administration and the FARC-EP suggests that US support could be valuable to a peaceful future in Colombia.
“By intuition you can say that a Democratic government would be more welcoming of a peace process in Colombia. I’m not sure how Republicans would view peace talks with the FARC, for example, who are also drug traffickers,” noted Borda.
Turning the demographic tide
Also particularly key in the most recent presidential election was the rising important of Latino voters, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama.
Although many Latino voters were frustrated with a lack of immigration reform in his first term, they voted overwhelmingly for Obama.
“Legal immigrants understand that what the Democrats have proposed for them is more attractive than the Republicans, who want to criminalize and militarize the immigration process in a lot of ways,” mentioned Borda.
Winning over Independent voters could shift that balance of power decisively, however, and Republicans want to exploit the social conservatism of many Latino voters, the majority of whom are Catholic.
“Many Latino voters are pro-life and somewhat conservative on social issues,” said Stanton, who also pointed out that Republicans have moved away from George W. Bush’s more liberal immigration stance. “The fact that they still vote Democratic shows a focus on the Democratic policy toward immigration.”
While the last election could dramatically affect Colombians living in the United States, the general consensus seems to be that the Andean nation and its neighbors will remain a relatively low priority in the face of larger issues like the global economic crisis and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
“I don’t see a big vision,” confirmed Stanton, offering her prediction for the second Obama presidency. “I see good bilateral relations, but not a grand vision.”
