Itchy trigger fingers: the U.S. military wants to buddy up with Latin America's armed forces. Now there's a bad idea.

Latin America militarism could be revived if the top U.S. general in the region has his way. In March, Gen. James T. Hill, commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, told a congressional committee: "We must take comprehensive measures in our region to combat international terrorism ... in the coming year." In testimony, Hill included strengthening Latin America's militaries.

The general divided the threats to the United States into two camps: What he called traditional terrorists--drug traffickers, urban crime gangs and guerrilla and paramilitary groups tied to drug trafficking--and emerging terrorists, "radical populists" the general said, who tap into "deep seated frustrations of the failure of democratic reforms to deliver expected goods and services." It would appear he is referring to Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian indigenous leader Evo Morales.

Hill also noted that "branches of Middle Eastern terrorist organizations conduct support activities in the Southern Command area of responsibility" He raised some eyebrows by proposing that, the limit on U.S. troops in Colombia be doubled to 800 and the number of civilian contractors rise to 600 from 400 to help President Alvaro Uribe win the now four-decade-old war against leftist insurgents.

Hill is an intelligent man who heads what is sadly the U.S. agency most engaged with Latin America--the U.S. Army. The Southern Command's US$800 million annual budget covers 19 countries in Central and South America and 12 in the Caribbean. It has more people dealing with Latin American matters--1,470--than at the departments of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, the Pentagon's Joint Staff and the office of the Secretary of Defense combined.

Nevertheless, the biggest security threat in the hemisphere is not drug-runners and leftists, as troublesome as they might be, but endemic poverty, which is the force that turns people to the drugs lords, guerrillas, urban gangs and populist leaders who rant against U.S. free-trade policies. Latin America has the world's worst distribution of income: The richest 10% account for 35% of total earnings. Forty-three percent of Latin Americans live below the poverty line. Twenty million more were officially poor in 2003 than in 1997, according to the United Nations.

If the United States really wants to improve hemispheric security, it should follow the example of Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of Bogota, who has made his city safer than Washington, D.C. He did this by implementing projects to combat alcohol and drug abuse, unemployment, poverty, prostitution and domestic violence. From 1994 to 2002, Bogota's homicide rate plummeted 61% to 28 deaths per 100,000. Sixty-two persons per 100,000 were murdered in the U.S. capital in 2002.

Hill seems to be blind to these basic facts, telling U.S. legislators instead that the United States must broaden military contacts. Even more outrageously, he said last year that Latin American governments should consider watering down the boundaries between intelligence forces and civilian police.

It would be a huge mistake to draw the armed forces into police work while the memory is still fresh of widespread human rights abuses by past military juntas. Fledgling democracies in the region have worked too hard to get the soldiers back into the barracks where they belong.

"In the 20th century, all Latin American militaries had to do was call someone a communist and that person become fair game," says Harley Shaiken, chair of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. "Terrorism could become the communism of the 21st century that puts someone under a death sentence."

Latin America sees quite a few terror incidents each year--car bombings, kidnappings and assassinations by leftist and rightist armed groups, mostly in Colombia. Yet there is no proven connection to Islamic extremists or any other international terrorist organization.

Southern Command spokesman Raul Duany concedes as much. "There is no evidence of a direct connection to al Qaeda" in Latin America, he says. But, he says, "with ungoverned spaces combined with corruption, [and] radical populism like in Bolivia and Venezuela that fuels anti-U.S. sentiment, the potential [for international terrorism] is there."

At a time when the Bush Administration has shown little interest in Latin America unless a crisis hits, the U.S. government, seems, as usual, to be 180 degrees off base. Hill should lobby for more social investment, not fan fears of terrorism. Using al Qaeda as cover for encouraging the region's hawks is a mistake, the kind that could lead to needless political deaths, something Latin Americans hoped to have left in the dustbin of history.

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