While US cuts aid Spain plans volunteer corps

Posted on Thu, Mar. 16, 2006
THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT

While U.S. cuts aid, Spain plans volunteer corps

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
aoppenheimer@MiamiHerald.com

While the Bush administration is cutting back foreign aid to Latin
America, Spain -- the ''other'' economic superpower in the region -- is
planning to launch an ambitious volunteer service in the region
fashioned after former President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps.

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos wants to announce
something that may be called the International Spanish Corps of
Volunteers at the Ibero-American Summit scheduled for October in
Montevideo, Uruguay, Spanish officials say.

''The plan would be open to include Latin American individuals and
governments, with a special invitation to Brazil and Portugal,'' wrote
columnist Miguel Angel Bastenier of Spain's daily El Pais. ``It's goal
is to be an across-the-board, joint and comprehensive effort to fight
the big battle against underdevelopment.''

Two senior Spanish foreign affairs ministry officials told me that the
plan is still in the drawing stages, and has not yet been sent to the
government bureaucracy for closer review. But it would be in line with
Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's goal to substantially
increase Spain's aid to Latin America, they say.

Since it took office two years ago, the left-of-center Rodríguez
Zapatero government has increased foreign aid to Latin America from
little more than $400 million in 2004 to more than $600 million in 2005.
For this year, aid to the region is scheduled to surpass $700 million,
Spanish Agency for International Cooperation director Aurora Diaz-Rato
told me in a Wednesday phone interview.

The Spanish government has vowed to increase its world-wide foreign aid
from 0.28 percent of the country's gross national product in 2004 to 0.5
percent in 2008.

According to the El Pais column, the volunteer corps plan would be
coordinated with Enrique Iglesias, the former head of the
Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank, who is now the head of
the Madrid-based headquarters of the Ibero-American summits organization.

In a telephone interview from Brazil, where he was traveling Wednesday,
Iglesias said the volunteer corps plan ''is an interesting idea, which
must be looked into, and which certainly is in line with the general
goal of promoting a volunteer corps for young people'' that his office
is working on.

OTHER IDEAS

Iglesias said that, in coordination with the Ibero-American Youth
Organization, his office is working on a massive program to send
Spanish-speaking Latin Americans to spend their summer vacations
learning Portuguese in Brazil, and Brazilian students to do the same in
Spanish-speaking countries.

Likewise, the Ibero-American Summit office is planning a program to
increase student exchanges across Latin America, Spain and Portugal, and
eventually the United States, he said.

Spain's plans are in sharp contrast with the Bush administration's
recent announcement that it plans to cut U.S. development funds to Latin
America and the Caribbean by about 28 percent next year, and to reduce
the overall U.S. economic and health-related assistance to the region by
an estimated 7 percent.

What's more, the number of U.S. peace corps volunteers to the region has
dwindled from nearly 4,000 in 1965 to 2,194 last year, even if it
recovered from its all-time lows in the 1970s.

To be fair, U.S. aid to Latin America -- currently about $1.2 billion a
year -- has been decreasing steadily for the past two decades, and is
relatively unimportant compared with the $20 billion a year in U.S.
investments in the region, the estimated $40 billion in family
remittances sent by Latin American migrant workers, or the $276 billion
worth of U.S. annual purchases from Latin America.

BENEVOLENT POWER

And it is also true that the Bush Administration has launched a $5
billion Millenium Challenge Account for the world's poorest countries,
which may include three or four Latin American nations, including
Nicaragua and Honduras.

But the fact is that, at a time when Cuba is flooding Latin America with
thousands of doctors and teachers, Venezuela seems to be writing checks
to its neighbors around the clock and now even Spain is stepping up its
aid to the region, the United States -- the world's biggest economy --
is not doing much to regain its 1960s image as a benevolent superpower.
Judging from the foreign-aid figures, it looks like Washington hasn't
even noticed what others are doing south of the border.

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