By Jorge Castañeda

For the next American president, fixing the international mess inherited from the Bush administration will be no simple task. While Latin America will not be a priority for either an Obama or McCain administration, continuing the United States’ neglect of the last seven years is no longer viable.

Two distinct political/diplomatic challenges stand out: Cuba’s imminent transition or succession crisis, and the continuing ascent of the region’s “two lefts,” one represented by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez and the other by Brazil’s increasingly influential President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The next US administration will only prove successful if it grasps that Latin America is living through a moment that combines the best and worst aspects of its history: the fastest economic growth since the 1970s, with poverty and inequality diminishing, and more democratic and respectful of human rights than ever before, but becoming more politically polarised.

In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s eventual passing from the scene represents an immense challenge. The US cannot continue with the failed policies of the past half-century. Demanding a full-fledged democratic transition as a pre-condition for normalising US-Cuban relations is both unrealistic and unpalatable to Latin America. Yet the US cannot set aside the question of democracy and human rights in Cuba while it awaits the departure of Fidel’s brother, Raúl.

Realpolitik and fear of another exodus of Cuban refugees across the Florida Straits may tempt the US to pursue a “Chinese” or “Vietnamese” solution to Cuba: normalising diplomatic relations in exchange for economic reform, while leaving the question of internal political change until later. But the US should not succumb to this temptation. The US, Canada, Europe, and Latin America have constructed a regional legal framework, which must not be abandoned, to defend democratic rule and human rights in the hemisphere.

Cuba needs to return to the regional concert of powers, but it must accept this concert’s rules. Holding free and fair elections may not be the primary issue, but nor are they issues that should be shelved in the interests of stability and expediency. Elections must instead be part of a comprehensive process of normalisation: they should neither be a deal-breaker nor a non-issue. While the US should lift its trade embargo as soon as Cuba’s transition begins, everything else should be conditional on Cuba initiating a process of resolving all outstanding issues.

But Cuba is just part of what might be called Latin America’s “left” problem. Indeed, much has been written recently about the ascent of the left in Latin America over the past decade. In fact, there are two lefts in the region: a modern, democratic, globalised and market-friendly left, found in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, parts of Central America, and, up to a point, in Peru; and a retrograde, populist, authoritarian, statist, and anti-American left, found in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, and, to a lesser extent, in Argentina, Colombia, and Paraguay. Some of these “lefts” are in power; some, as in Mexico in its last, disputed presidential election, barely missed conquering it, but may still do so.

Over the past two years, it has become increasingly evident that the “modern” or “soft” left is, all in all, governing well. The other left has proved to be more extreme and erratic than many anticipated. The former feels no urge to “export” its “model”, whereas the latter has a strategy and the means to do so.

The retrograde left today can realise Che Guevara’s old dream: not “one, two, many Vietnams”, but “one, two, many Venezuelas”, winning power by the ballot and then conserving and concentrating it through constitutional changes and the creation of armed militias and monolithic parties. It can finance all of this with the support of Venezuela’s state oil company, implementing social policies that are misguided over the long-term but seductive in the short-run, especially when carried out by Cuban doctors, teachers and instructors.

Herein lies a dilemma for the next US president: how to address the clear rift between the two lefts in a way that improves US-Latin American relations, fortifies the modern left, and weakens the retrograde left without resorting to the failed interventionist policies of the past. The best, strictly Latin America-focused steps, are self-evident, if not easily achievable. They require strengthening those governments of the modern left, or those of the centre or centre-right threatened by the old-fashioned left, and simultaneously making it clear to the latter that there is a price to be paid for violating the basic tenets of democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law.

Turning its back in the face of such challenges is no longer a viable American option. Aside from areas of particular concern (oil, arms, guerrillas, drugs), the US needs Latin America dearly nowadays because resistance to it is springing up everywhere, and with greater virulence than at any time since the end of World War II. The next US president must reinvigorate a relationship that is ready to be substantially transformed for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy of seven decades ago.

The writer, former foreign minister of Mexico (2000-2003), is a Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University. ©Project Syndicate, 2008. www.project-syndicate.org