United States Policy and Security Interests in Latin America As a consequence, most of the analytical effort in Washington has been devoted to thinking about potential threats or challen­ges. The first of these was the Chavez regime in Venezuela. The review of how to deal with Venezuela began in the Bush administration, which had a powerful prejudice against Chavez. It took three years of internal debate, continuing into the first year of the Obama administration to recognize that Chavez was not a threat; at worst his government represented a challenge which required a diplomatic response. Such a response was not the job of the Pentagon. We are still waiting for a clear statement from the Department of State. Meanwhile, it is clear that Chavez has no intention of using the sale of petroleum to the U.S. as a political weapon. He has used trade as a weapon against Colombia, not the U.S. Aside from Chavez, now downgra­ded from a threat to a challenge, the U.S, does not recognize any threat from within the region. The threat of drug trafficking and organized crime, intermestic issues that are not considered traditional security threats, is considered the most significant by the State Department. Therefore, the focus of the State Department's attention has been on the relationship with Mexico and how to secure the border between the two countries, and the new version of Plan Colombia, through which the U.S. helps the government of Colombia regain control over its national territory. Trade, once considered a vital strategic concern, has been pushed to the back burner by the recession to such a degree that the U.S. has broken its agreement with Mexico on easier the barriers to Mexican truckers in the U.S., and failed to exert any pressure on the congress to reduce the tariff on Brazilian ethanol, despite the growing concern for alternate forms of energy. Other strategic studies have focused on the potential threat represented by China, Russia, and Iran. Again, after nearly two years of discussion, the conclu­sion for the moment is that none of these nations represent a threat to the security of the United States nor to the security of the region. The only long-term challenge is the possible influence of China through its rapidly expanding investments in raw materials and burgeoning trade. The irony here is that the Latin American nations themselves do not seem to feel that Chinese investments, even enclave invest­ments with imported Chinese labor and Chinese security forces, represent a threat to their sovereignty or to their security. The question that must be posed for the Latin American nations is why Chinese behavior so similar to British and U.S. investors in the 20th century should be considered without blame whereas the historic pattern of foreign investment by Britain and the U.S. is still considered imperialistic and a denigra­tion of national sovereignty. At the same time, various depart­ments of the U. S. government have achieved remarkable progress in sharing intelligence with governments of Latin America. Mutual confidence in dealing with drug trafficking, terrorism, and international crime has reached historic levels. The success is most notable in the cases of Mexico and Brazil. In the former, the boundary between the two countries is treated with greater bilateral cooperation July 2010, Page 5