Remarks by Admiral James G. Stavridis at Americas Quarterly Launch

***Remarks prepared for delivery by Admiral Stavridis*** 

Americas Quarterly 2nd Issue Launch 

Center on Media, Crime, and Justice, John Jay College 

New York, 22 October 2007

Thank you Chris for the wonderful introduction. It truly is an honor and pleasure to be here today. I find this setting – this Center on Media, Crime & Justice – to be a perfect place to tackle today’s topic: “Crime and security – or insecurity – in the Americas.” President Travis, I’d like to thank you and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and your co-host for the event, the Americas Quarterly, for having me here today. And all of you who’ve come out to join us in what should be a lively and informative afternoon – thank you. I’m truly honored.

Before I get to the heart of my comments today, I’d also like to give special thanks to Chris Sabatini, editor of this excellent new journal – Americas Quarterly – thanks to you and the entire team for your amazingly fresh, and dare I say, edgy new look at the important issues affecting us in this wonderful hemisphere we share – right here in the Americas.

When you take into account the tremendous linkages, challenges, and opportunities we share in this hemisphere, you quickly realize that it’s only right to think in terms of the Americas as one big interacting system – a diverse, yet interconnected community, which in every sense of the word is our home. Indeed, it is anything BUT the “backyard” of the USA -- an expression that is wrong in every dimension. The Americas are a home we all share together.

So congratulations Americas Quarterly on this – your terrific second issue – titled, “Coping with Insecurity”. The image on the cover is perfect – a padlock – a padlock for security. But it’s not just an ordinary padlock. Instead of numbers, it’s marked by words: “Military, Politicians, Citizens, Business, and Police.” It captures nicely a fundamental question for us: what is the right security combination for our hemisphere? What’s the right mix of national, public, private, interagency, military, police and international organizational elements? 

Today, I’d like to spend a few moments “spinning this padlock’s dial”, if you will, and discussing how I see the security situation unfolding in our hemisphere. And although I don’t presume to have all the tumblers in place, I believe my organization, the United States Southern Command – today primarily a Department of Defense organization – I believe we are moving in the right direction to best align ourselves for the future – to be part of the solution – part of the final “click” – as all of us who care about this hemisphere dial in the right combination together.  So I want to tell you about that as well.

Let me begin with a quote that sets the scene for my comments today and for our discussion on security, democracy, and the region’s future. It is from none other than the great Liberator himself, Simon Bolívar. Just prior to his death in 1830, during the same period as the setting for Gabriel García Márquez’s “The General and his Labyrinth,” Bolívar lamented, “If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primitive chaos, it would be America in her last hour.” A gloomy thought. 

But today, after a long, hard slog for freedom and liberty – after juntas, caudillos, dictators, civil wars, insurgencies, a thousand indignities – the entire hemisphere hopes to be soon – for the first time – united in democracy.  Yet at the same time, there are rising levels of violent crime, human trafficking, drug sales, and potential terrorism. So the question becomes, is America – our Americas – in her figurative “last hour?” I don’t think so. I choose to believe the region is rather at “the first hour.”

Let me begin by exploring the linkages between the United States and the rest of the Americas.

Today here in the Americas, we are united, intertwined, and interdependent in many more ways than just the belief in the idea of democracy. Even though each of our nations celebrates its uniqueness, and we share a wonderful diversity across the Americas, we are still getting closer demographically, culturally, and economically as our planet “virtually” shrinks. Besides the obvious pull of geographic proximity, all the natural alignments of the Americas are becoming more and more pronounced. 

From the U.S. perspective, to see some of the linkages, all you have to do is turn on the television or walk down the street. 15% of our population is of Hispanic origin. Almost 50 million people – who, as a popular commercial once said, “live in English, but feel in Spanish.” Actually the Ad said, “vives en inglés, pero sientes en español,” since it was on Spanish broadcast television here – all in an attempt to attract our growing Hispanic population – a population with a combined economic power of nearly one trillion dollars!

And it’s a population whose 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th generations are speaking Spanish. Unlike my family – Greek Americans – with my father who spoke excellent Greek…my Greek is, well, awful, and my daughters don’t speak it at all. But Spanish is flourishing because it can – because it’s a functional language here. Steadily, more channels and broader programming is available in Spanish.

Did you know that the U.S. is now the second largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world? Right behind Mexico. Ahead of Argentina, Colombia, and of course Spain. More people speak Spanish in the U.S. than LIVE in Canada. And seven of the top ten largest cities in the U.S. are now arrayed in states along our southern border – San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. A huge population density shift from 100 years ago, when all ten were in the Northeast.

So the linkages we enjoy with the region are profound.

But what about the challenges?

 “Ours is a region of cruel contrasts,” recently wrote Oscar Arias, the President of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Contrasts like: extreme wealth, yet devastating poverty, social equality for some, yet inequality and social exclusion for many … nations with developed economies, yet others struggling from year-to-year, with many an economy at the whim of often-fickle commodities pricing. 

And still, fully 40 percent of the population is living on less than two U.S. dollars per day, almost half of whom are living on less than one dollar per day. Even more telling, about 80 percent of the region is living on less than ten dollars per day.

These contrasts, these socio-economic cleavages loom large across our hemisphere. They divide; they anger; they weaken our natural linkages.

Compounding these underlying conditions, the 21st Century security environment presents us with some significant new challenges, both globally and regionally, such as:

• Global reach of radical organizations bent on religious or ideological domination through terrorist tactics. In our hemisphere this threat is still nascent, but remains a concern – as the recent foiled plot on the JFK International Airport’s fuel pipeline, which originated here in the Americas, can attest.

• Nation states fighting in unconventional settings with unfamiliar tool sets

• The “marketplace of ideas” at the root of conflicts, requiring sophisticated strategic communication

• A globalizing economy with perceived winners and losers

• Environmental concerns rising and coupled to globalization

• Miniaturizing technologies producing powerful effects

• Diffusion of weapons of mass destruction – including biological and chemical

• 24/7 news coverage with satellite radio and television

• Satellite information and instant, global communication at everyone’s fingertips

• Exploding Internet with bloggers, hackers and chat rooms

• Cell phone cameras and recorders, making everyone a “reporter”

• Sophisticated media engagement by transnational terrorists and criminals.

A difficult set of conditions to be sure. 

Perhaps nowhere in the security construct does this new set of conditions present itself more fully and offer greater opportunity for new approaches than in Latin America and the Caribbean. From my perspective, U.S. Southern Command, as a traditional military jurisdiction, has a focus area that is notable by its current lack of conventional military threats; but the region’s persistent conditions of poverty, unequal wealth distribution, social exclusion, and corruption provide fertile soil in which international criminals and terrorists can flourish.

Throughout our assigned area – 45 countries and territories, 500 million people, 15 million square miles -- security threats most often take forms that we more readily associate with crime than war. In the region’s growing gang activity, we see criminals and the disenfranchised band together and combine traditional criminal activities in ways that threaten our regional partners as well our own national security. Kidnapping, counterfeiting, human trafficking, and drug trafficking – which leads to over 10,000 cocaine-related deaths annually in the USA – combine with extremist ideologies to create a dangerous blend. 

All of these conditions can undermine fragile democracies. Not to mention the devastating and destabilizing affects of ecological natural disasters.

These new threats -- while ultimately not susceptible to traditional military operations -- tend to operate at our intellectual seams, and thrive in our bureaucratic and cultural blind spots. Our system of legal, political, moral and conceptual boundaries defining what constitutes combat versus criminal activity; domestic vs. international jurisdiction; and governmental versus private interests all provide operational space for lethal opponents with no such boundaries to respect.

Countering such threats and reacting to the informational realities will require new organizational structures not predicated on traditional notions of war and peace. Our old model, wherein the State Department offers a “carrot” in time of peace while the Defense Department threatens the “stick” in time of war, provides solutions only when peace and war are readily distinguishable. Today they are not so neatly divided. 

Given an environment of unceasing micro-conflict and constant ideological communication, “carrot and stick” must work not merely hand-in-hand, but hand-in-glove (“mano en mano” versus “mano en guante”). We cannot expect clear transitions between peace and war, and, thus, we need to explore a new standing organization chartered to operate within today’s dynamic and changing international environment. 

The geographically focused Military Commands of today, like Southern Command, appropriately seek to maintain a vital regional perspective on security issues. However, enabling truly joint and interagency activities will require additional modalities to help improve synchronization of various U.S. government agencies’ resources. We need better integration across the entire government of the USA, and better coalition integration. We also need stronger connections to the private sector.    

We need to “test drive” a new model that truly melds joint, interagency, international, and private-public cooperation. We plan to transition over a relatively short period to a more integrated posture that expands its strong interagency perspective and capacity. 

            • More Interagency integration: A true interagency team, with senior representatives from each key agency and cabinet actually holding command positions throughout the organizations. We need functional internal divisions reflecting the kinds of missions of the command in the 21st century, divisions with new names like Security, Stability, and Prosperity.

            • And especially more State Department Teaming: Of particular note, we need greater engagement with State Department throughout the enterprise. This should be highlighted with sending a high-level, post-Ambassador, as a Civilian Deputy to the Commander of the organization.

            • Combined / International partnering: An expanded set of partnering arrangements with all the nations and territories in the region, to include more liaison officers, both military AND civilian from the region.

            • Strategic Communication Focus: We are in a geopolitical market place of ideas, and strategic communication – our ability to get our message out – thus becomes the “main battery” of U.S. Southern command – both in the sense of providing power like a battery AND sending shots downrange, as in the “main battery of a ship.” At SOUTHCOM we aren’t launching Tomahawk missiles … we’re launching ideas. In the geopolitical marketplace of ideas in our hemisphere, we must increase our market share!

A British comedian once quipped that a computer once beat him at chess, but that it was no match for him at kickboxing. It’s a great image for the importance of the human dimension in our society for communication and understanding. Human contact trumps them all – internet, blogs, publishing articles – although they are crucial supplements, human contact…what we are doing here today, in person, to me is the core of building understanding.

            • Public-Private Linkages: So much of the power of the United States to create successful partnerships in the Americas is found in the private sector. At the command, we are finding ways to work with non-governmental organizations, private charitable entities, international organizations, and the private sector. We are looking for ways to do this in appropriate staff nodes.

We are moving in this direction now, but there is much to be done. Taking this new approach at SOUTHCOM should prove to be a useful avenue in creating new organizations to best meet 21st century security challenges. It seems clear that it is time to rethink the fundamental structure and approach of Southern Command, and perhaps the broader national security apparatus writ large. Today, I believe we are already on the right path, and together with our partners in the U.S. government, private sector, and international community, we should be able to get the security combination right – be able to unlock the promise of a secure, stable, and prosperous hemisphere of cooperating and democratic nations.

So that is our approach at Southern Command as we look at potential ways to be helpful in ensuring this is indeed “The First Hour” for the Americas, and not “The Last.”

I’d like to close discussing merging cultures. A New York Times correspondent, James “Scotty” Reston, once wrote a little more than two decades ago that, “Americans will do anything for Latin America – except read about it.” That’s not true anymore. He wrote those words before Gabriel García Márquez’s “100 Years of Solitude” caught on here … before Isabel Allende’s popular novels hit national and international bestseller lists … before Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest homage to Gustav Flaubert, “The Bad Girl” was the cover article in the NYT Review of Books a couple of weeks ago, before “Love in the Time of Cholera” was a top selling paperback in the U.S. this month (October 2007) … before wonderful new and enticing professional journals, like Americas Quarterly, hit our newsstands.      

Moreover, today’s society is increasingly influenced by visual imagery – by movies, photos, and videos to transmit information and share and blend cultures. And today’s rapidly growing and connected U.S. Hispanic population is watching almost more “Spanish” content than was available in their countries of origin. With two clicks they can change a web page to Spanish. They can buy Spanish songs, videos, and TV shows on iTunes Latino. They watch state-of-the-art news broadcasts such as Univision’s Noticiero. They laugh to “got milk?” commercials translated as “toma leche” with culturally appropriate humor and images. They watch one of the longest running variety shows in television history, the zany, yet cherished, Sábado Gigante – with its 40 years of continuous weekly broadcast with no re-runs -- 21 of those years aired here in the U.S.

So how do we use this great mixing of cultures in our country? Well, for starters, we should leverage all of our natural alignments with the region and couple them with our country’s natural generosity and ability for innovation. And ultimately apply them to solve our shared challenges, many of which are splendidly discussed in this issue of Americas Quarterly.

With interested people like all of you, with people who truly care about our nation’s security and the future of the Americas, I‘m firmly optimistic that instead of “The Last Hour”, we are just now reaching the first few minutes of a promising new hour for the Americas. An hour not of chaos, but one of hope, security, and prosperity.

And as the title of my article in this issue of Americas Quarterly states: in the Americas, “we’re all in this together.” Together, I am confident we’ll make this a confident and successful First Hour indeed.