What Obama can do for Latin America

[CHIMO]

Of all the regions in a dangerous and intractable world, forgotten Latin America might paradoxically offer Barack Obama the best opportunity to influence events so that the "hope for the future" embodied in his recent Nobel peace prize becomes a reality.

Building upon his creative engagement with the continent after the Bush years of blindness and neglect, there is much the president can accomplish immediately. Lifting the senseless blockade against Cuba, followed by full diplomatic relations, would be a good beginning. Another sore spot is Honduras, where the US has not done enough to isolate and punish the de facto government, which stubbornly clings to power after having ousted the legally elected Manuel Zelaya. And Obama should rethink his approach to continental security (cancelling, for instance, Plan Colombia), as a way of defusing tensions in a Latin America threatened by a new arms race.

The US, one of the largest Spanish-speaking countries in the world, could also send a signal of friendship to Latin America by legalising the situation of millions of undocumented Latino workers, tearing down walls instead of erecting them.

On another front, presidents Álvaro Uribe and Felipe Calderón, seconded by Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have valiantly opened up a tentative conversation about the failed "war on drugs". If Obama were to encourage, and perhaps imitate, their efforts to decriminalise the use of marijuana, it would help alter an irrational policy that has generated a mafia of narcotraficantes across the Americas, filling jails and devastating the young.