PERSPECTIVES ON THE MILITARY : Lift the Arms Ban for Latin America

A little-noticed plank in the Republican Party’s platform calls for lifting the 20-year-old ban on the export of advanced U.S. weapons to Latin American governments.

There is considerable merit in the proposal, beginning with the reality that much has changed since 1976. That year, Congress voted to prohibit arms sales to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. A year later, the Carter administration extended the ban to the whole region, hoping to discourage debilitating arms races among Latin America’s numerous authoritarian, human rights-abusing governments. The State Department continues to favor the ban; the Defense Department would relax it.

Since 1976, democratically elected governments have driven out dictatorships throughout Latin America except in Cuba. Key military establishments, such as Argentina’s, have been stripped of political authority and of excessive claims on national budgets and manpower. Many now seek prestige abroad in the form of participation in international peacekeeping operations.

Internal leftist insurgencies have declined in the region, eliminating a major excuse for military rule. The Cuban revolution, as a model of both governance and economic progress, has become a laughingstock. War-threatening territorial disputes also have declined (though not disappeared); indeed, war among states south of the border is notable for its absence. Country after country has adopted free market institutions and prosperity is spreading.

In short, Latin America has become a kinder, gentler place. For this and other reasons, calls are growing to lift the arms ban. In May, some 40 senators, including Bob Dole and Democrats Sam Nunn and Robert Byrd, wrote to Secretary of State Warren Christopher urging an end to the “extraordinary restrictions on arms sales to Latin America.” In August, the Republican Party adopted a platform plank pledging to reverse the administration’s “policy of denying .J.J. Latin American countries the opportunity to replace their obsolete military equipment, raise the professional competence of their armed forces and cooperate fully with the United States in joint military training and exercises.”

The case for a discriminating relaxation of the ban is persuasive. It has become a standing insult to national sensitivities south of the border. How does the United States justify shutting out an entire and relatively democratic and quiescent region in its own hemisphere, while it continues to arm anti-democratic countries, such as its Persian Gulf protectorates, in regions pockmarked by recurring war and instability? On what grounds, for example, does the United States refuse to sell a few dozen F-16 fighter aircraft to Brazil, when it has already sold or agreed to sell more than 1,700 such aircraft to Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan, among others?

Not that U.S. policy has prevented Latin American governments from acquiring modern arms; it has simply driven the business elsewhere. Since 1976, France alone has sold around 200 fighter aircraft to seven Latin American countries, sales that today would represent at least $4 billion in U.S. export earnings and the provision of 40,000 jobs. Russia, which last year surpassed the U.S. as the largest arms exporter to the developing world, reportedly is negotiating the sale of 28 MIG-29 Fulcrum jet fighters. Chile, which has expressed an interest in the F-16 and other U.S. fighters (but has not made a formal request for fear of humiliating rejection), is prepared to buy the French Mirage 2000-5 or the Swedish Jas 39 Gripen if U.S. planes are not available.

Latin American investment in U.S. military equipment would not only create jobs; it also would help preserve the U.S. defense industrial base at a time of plummeting defense expenditure. It would enhance the efficiency of inter-American operations and peacekeeping missions. It would provide some degree of leverage over how U.S. equipment is employed; potential misuse of weapons would be reduced by dependence on American suppliers of training, spare parts and other support. Finally, it would promote professional and even political camaraderie between the hemisphere’s two great cultures.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, a beleaguered President Bush capitulated to pressure to renounce his policy of refusing to sell Taiwan 150 F-16s it had long sought. Four years later, the Clinton White House faces mounting calls to abandon an equally obsolete policy regarding the sale of advanced armaments to Latin America.

And it would be entirely consistent for such a policy change to be effected by the Clinton administration, for which export promotion has been the only persistent and consistent feature of its foreign policy.