Latin America

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, for many decades now, Britain has not been giving the priority that it should have done to its relations with the countries of Latin America. Diplomatic posts have been closed and thinned out, ministerial visits have been few and far between and at a junior level, and our trade and investment have fallen behind those of our main competitors from both Europe and elsewhere. Latin America has become a group of far-away countries of which we know little—and this in a country that played, as other noble Lords have said, an important role both politically and commercially in the first century of every one of Latin America’s states’ histories—so the excellent initiative taken by my noble friend Lord Montgomery of Alamein to debate our relationship with Latin America is really timely, all the more so as it comes just after a new Government have come to office and a new ministerial team has been installed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Britain’s relative neglect of its relations with the countries of Latin America is all the more regrettable in that it has coincided with the rise in world economic and political rankings of a number of those countries. Not only does Brazil supply the “B” in the acronym BRICs, which has become synonymous with the leading emerging countries, but there are three Latin American countries—Brazil, Argentina and Mexico—in the G20, which now has the principal co-ordinating role on global economic issues.

A good number of Latin American countries have paid the painful transition from military-dominated authoritarian regimes to relatively stable democracies with much improved human rights records. There have also been some remarkable economic success stories: Chile and Brazil prominent among them. We are therefore missing a lot of tricks, and we have quite a lot of catching up to do. Some of that catching up surely needs to be done through our membership of the European Union, and here I welcome the maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and what he had so say about Europe in general and its relationship with Latin America in particular, with which I agree wholeheartedly. The establishment of the EU’s External Action Service provides an opportunity to thicken up and to strengthen Europe’s, including our, overall relationship with Latin America. It is high time, surely, to dust off the trade negotiating file between the EU and Mercosur and to try to bring those negotiations to a conclusion.

Of course Europe will not provide us, or anyone else, with a soft option. The days when the elites of Latin America looked almost automatically towards Europe as an alternative to their fraught relationship with the United States are past or passing, as indigenous leaders come to the fore in a number of Latin American countries and as new players—China and India—muscle in on Latin American markets. However, Europe will continue to matter to Latin America, if only it can learn to speak with a single voice and to make itself heard.

Any strengthened British relationship with Latin America has, I suggest, to begin with Brazil—the regional giant, if not a superpower—but, economically and in world politics, that country is on the rise. This October, a new President will be elected, and we need to build a new, broader and more mature relationship with her or his new Administration. It will not be entirely easy or straightforward, as reactions to Brazil’s recent efforts to broker a deal over Iran’s enriched uranium have shown. Reactions to that deal have tended to be either dismissive or submissive. Neither is the right response. The deal itself if Iran were to implement it, which now seems highly unlikely, could have bought some time, but it did not address effectively the wider issue of Iran’s nuclear programme as its centrifuges continued to spin, so it was a bit unwise to suggest that it did or that it precluded the need for another round of sanctions. We need a much deeper, broader and ongoing dialogue with Brazil that covers the whole range of international politics, and I hope the Minister will say that we intend to build that up.

I will say a few words, if I may, about our aid efforts in Latin America. Here, I declare an interest, because one of my sons runs an activity centre for deprived children in one of the most poverty-stricken parts of greater Sao Paolo. It is quite right that the main thrust of our aid effort should be poverty elimination, but I hope that we will not be persuaded by any general statistics that demonstrate rising economic growth in Latin America into thinking that there is no need and no justification for a continued effort by us in that continent. The plight of deprived and abused children, which I have seen at first hand, is truly terrible in many parts of Latin America. With our skills, our experience and well-directed resources, we can do something to make a difference, and I trust that we will continue to do so.

I have one final thought. In recent years, the developed world has found it more difficult to work with Latin American countries at the UN and in other international organisations than in the past. On human rights, our agendas seem to have drifted apart. We really cannot afford simply to accept that as a continuing trend. If we cannot work effectively with Latin American countries across a wide range of global issues when that region is less troubled by security and governance problems than pretty well any other part of the developing world, we really will be in poor shape as we search for global solutions to the global challenges that face us. I so much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, had to say on climate change, which is a perfect example of that issue. I therefore hope that we will put our backs into this relationship in a way that we have not done in recent years.