As U.S. aid dwindles, Spain picks up slack

While the Bush administration is cutting back foreign aid to Latin America, Spain -- the "other" economic superpower in the region -- is planning to launch an ambitious volunteer service in the region fashioned after former President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos wants to announce something that may be called the International Spanish Corps of Volunteers at the Ibero-American Summit scheduled for October in Montevideo, Uruguay, Spanish officials say.
"The plan would be open to include Latin American individuals and governments, with a special invitation to Brazil and Portugal," wrote columnist Miguel Angel Bastenier of Spain's daily El Pais. "Its goal is to be an across-the-board, joint and comprehensive effort to fight the big battle against underdevelopment."
Two senior Spanish foreign affairs ministry officials told me that the plan is still in the drawing stages, and has not yet been sent to the government bureaucracy for closer review. But it would be in line with Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's goal to substantially increase Spain's aid to Latin America, they say.
Increase in aid
Since it took office two years ago, the left-of-center Rodriguez Zapatero government has increased foreign aid to Latin America from little more than $400 million in 2004 to more than $600 million in 2005. For this year, aid to the region is scheduled to surpass $700 million, Spanish Agency for International Cooperation Director Aurora Diaz-Rato told me in a phone interview.
The Spanish government has vowed to increase its worldwide foreign aid from 0.28 percent of the country's gross national product in 2004 to 0.5 percent in 2008.
According to the El Pais column, the volunteer corps plan would be coordinated with Enrique Iglesias, the former head of the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank, who is now the head of the Madrid-based headquarters of the Ibero-American summits organization.
In a telephone interview from Brazil, where he was traveling last week, Iglesias said the volunteer corps plan "is an interesting idea, which must be looked into, and which certainly is in line with the general goal of promoting a volunteer corps for young people" that his office is working on.
Exchange programs set
Iglesias said that, in coordination with the Ibero-American Youth Organization, his office is working on a massive program to send Spanish-speaking Latin Americans to spend their summer vacations learning Portuguese in Brazil, and Brazilian students to do the same in Spanish-speaking countries.
Likewise, the Ibero-American Summit office is planning a program to increase student exchanges across Latin America, Spain and Portugal, and eventually the United States, he said.
Spain's plans are in sharp contrast with the Bush administration's recent announcement that it plans to cut U.S. development funds to Latin America and the Caribbean by about 28 percent next year, and to reduce the overall U.S. economic and health-related assistance to the region by an estimated 7 percent.
What's more, the number of U.S. peace corps volunteers to the region has dwindled from nearly 4,000 in 1965 to 2,194 last year, even if it recovered from its all-time lows in the 1970s.
Declining U.S. aid
To be fair, U.S. aid to Latin America -- currently about $1.2 billion a year -- has been decreasing steadily for the past two decades, and is relatively unimportant compared with the $20 billion a year in U.S. investments in the region, the estimated $40 billion in family remittances sent by Latin American migrant workers, or the $276 billion worth of U.S. annual purchases from Latin America.
And it is also true that the Bush administration has launched a $5 billion Millenium Challenge Account for the world's poorest countries, which may include three or four Latin American nations, including Nicaragua and Honduras.
But the fact is that, at a time when Cuba is flooding Latin America with thousands of doctors and teachers, Venezuela seems to be writing checks to its neighbors around the clock and now even Spain is stepping up its aid to the region, the United States -- the world's biggest economy -- is not doing much to regain its 1960s image as a benevolent superpower. Judging from the foreign-aid figures, it looks like Washington hasn't even noticed what others are doing south of the border.
Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.