• Submitted by: manso
• Politics and Government
• 05 / 08 / 2011

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The head of the U.S. State Department’s Latin American and Caribbean will resign this summer.

Arturo Valenzuela announced he will leave his post of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs to return to Georgetown University, where he taught before his appointment by Barack Obama in 2009.

The United States currently doesn’t have ambassadors in Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. There are only rudimentary diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Although Valenzuela advocated change in U.S. relations with Cuba before he assumed his post, there has only been a gradual shift, bringing U.S. policy essentially back to the status quo under President Bill Clinton. Cuban Americans are now allowed to travel freely to Cuba for family visits, and remittance caps have been eased under Obama; also, under new regulations published early this year, people-to-people travel is being revived. However, the Obama Administration has barely reacted to the intensive reform process underway in Cuba; the enforcement of sanctions against third-country banks dealing has actually intensified during the past two years.

The exit of the Chilean-born political scientist as the head of Latin American affairs comes as the State Department is changing the top post of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Jonathan Farrar, in Havana since 2009, will become ambassador in Nicaragua. The State Department hasn’t announced a successor, but the Miami Herald reported that John Caulfield, the chargé d’affaires in Caracas, will replace him.

Among speculated successors could be Roberta Jacobson, his second-in-command. Other candidates are Nelson Cunningham, a former Clinton adviser, and Julia Sweig, director of Latin American Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. She has followed the changes in Cuba closely, frequently traveling to the island.

Observers have criticized the Valenzuela’s failure to establish a clear political line in Latin America, others criticize the Obama Administration’s negligence. “It’s not your fault, but the region doesn’t exist for Obama,” University of South California expert Abraham Lowenthal said at a recent Brookings Institution seminar in Washington, directed to Valenzuela.

Source: www.cubastandard.com/2011/05/06/u-s-chief-of-latin-american-affairs-to-q...