Latin America, in search of a Marshall Plan at the UN Assembly?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The seventy-sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly, to be held between September 21 and 27 in New York, will be the scenario in which Latin America will expose its complicated situation after the pandemic, both in economic terms and in terms of access to vaccines.

The action of the coronavirus and the reaction of the governments to contain it left the economies of the region seriously damaged, which as a whole fell by 6.8% in 2020, but which, according to calculations by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), will recover by 5.2 percent this year. However, it will not ensure sustained growth due to the strong social impact of the crisis.

Poverty, inequality, low investment, and low productivity continue to take their toll on a region trying to recover but continue with these burdens on its feet.

“We need policies for a transformative recovery with an emphasis on investment. Industrial and technological policies to boost the growth of more technology-intensive sectors that generate quality jobs”, said Alicia Bárcena, Executive Secretary of ECLAC, last July during the presentation of the study “The Paradox of Recovery in Latin America and the Caribbean”.

These problems already existed, but the pandemic made them more visible.

The great UN event, for which the multilateral organization expects the presence of 126 heads of state and government, may be the appropriate scenario to raise the issue of a large aid package for the Latin American economy, a sort of Marshall Plan again implemented for the recovery of Europe after the Second World War.

The sheer strength of the region’s most powerful economies, such as Brazil and Mexico, would not be enough to leave the deficit numbers behind.

Brazil is just overcoming a severe recession that caused its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to fall by 4.1 percent in 2020 (the worst slump in more than 25 years). Mexico barely grew 1.5 percent in the second quarter, an insufficient figure.

Last January, the issue of great aid for the region was raised during the debate ‘How can Latin America have its post-COVID-19 ‘Marshall Plan’, moderated by the director of Agencia Efe, Gabriela Cañas.

During this virtual event, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Mauricio Claver-Carone, stated that US$150 billion are needed to cover the health costs associated with the pandemic. “We face two paths of two realities: the possibility of another lost decade with further economic and social deterioration or recovery, reinvestment, and renewed opportunity,” he said.

The IDB itself launched in February 2021 an initiative for large multinational companies based in the region and mutilations to join the economic reconstruction effort.

“There are no resources in Latin American states to provide an effective response to this crisis (…). This Marshall Plan would imply creating a global fund of cooperation and solidarity that we could place on the horizon of 2 trillion dollars that could be channeled through the region’s development banks”, said former Dominican President Leonel Fernandez last January the 5th Santo Domingo Forum.

The first Latin American president to address the General Assembly (in fact, the first of all the heads of state summoned) will be Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday.

“I travel on Sunday, make the opening speech on Tuesday and then return”, said the president last Friday, without referring to the controversy that exists in the United Nations about the mandatory vaccination against COVID-19 demanded by the New York City Council and a process to which the president has not submitted.

Colombian Iván Duque will be the second on the list of Latin American speakers in New York. His country’s economy, according to official data, made a massive leap from last year’s debacle caused by the pandemic and grew in the second quarter of 2021 by 17.6 percent compared to the same period in 2020, when it suffered a contraction of -15.7 percent.

The numbers and the Colombian social reality do not seem to go hand in hand since, in that same period, a severe outbreak was recorded that put the country in check, and Duque’s image continues to plummet.

Chile’s Sebastián Piñera, third in the region to speak although remotely, presides over the Latin American country with the highest anti-COVID vaccination rate (with 87.64% of the target population with the whole scheme), but the mercury of the social thermometer remains high after the revolts of 2019, which led to a constitutional renewal process.

Argentina’s Alberto Fernández was scheduled to go to the UN and speak on Tuesday. Still, the political storm in his government coalition after the defeat in the primaries of September 12 and the rift with Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has forced him to stay in his country and make his appearance using a pre-recorded video.

In the first appearance for both newly-elected Presidents before the forum, those who will be in New York and address the UN that day will be the Peruvian Pedro Castillo and the Ecuadorian Guillermo Lasso.

On Wednesday, it will be the turn of Uruguay’s Luis Lacalle Pou and Dominican Luis Abinader, whose countries have had an outstanding performance in the fight against the coronavirus. The absence of Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be one of the most notable in the region. As usually happens in this event, other heads of state, such as the Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro, are still unknown.

But perhaps the key to the post-COVID Latin American Marshall Plan lies in the second speaker at the event: US President Joe Biden. He is the one who should be asked for the blank checks.