Americas Quarterly

H. E. Oscar Arias Sánchez is serving his second term as president of Costa Rica and is the 1987 Nobel Peace Laureate.

MigueL goMez/aP Photo

they can join the globalized is concerned, we are already world rather than fall behind. entangled, and there is no way Every step you take could back. We are as entangled as fund more than a year of $100 the roots of the trees we must monthly grants to keep a poor save if our great-grandchildren student in school so he or are to have any chance at she can get a decent job. The breathing fresh air. We are as entire wall could provide such inseparable as the seas whose grants for 1. 75 million. If your climbing temperatures can government has funds like this cause a brutal storm in one to keep out undocumented part of the world, a drought immigrants, it also has in another. In the Americas, the funds to keep those we are as intertwined as the immigrants from leaving their families of the immigrants homes in the first place. and emigrants who cross and

George Washington re-cross our shared borders, famously warned his country creating new cultures and to avoid foreign entanglements. histories as they go. Today, as far as human welfare The question is not whether

the U.S. will affect the world, but how. The question is not whether the problems of other countries will come home to roost among U. S. citizens—nor even when, for it has already begun—but how the new president will address those problems.

We need you to lead on a global agenda. Nowhere has this been more clearly demonstrated than in Latin America. We have stood by your side both literally, as neighbors, and ideologically, as a region that is now more democratic than ever before. This is a region of countries such as Costa Rica that are proud to call the United States their friend. Yet the deeper that friendship has become, the more thoroughly we have been ignored. Some of our countries have received the benefits of free trade, but we watch as a multibillion-dollar wall is mounted against illegal immigrants, while the poverty that causes that immigration has gone unchecked.

Can you imagine how Latin America might look if you were to adjust these priorities? Can you imagine how the world might improve? Can you imagine how not only the many countries that look to the U.S. for guidance, but also the United States itself, would be empowered by this shift?

The path I have laid out is not an easy one. In fact, it may be a much more difficult path than the one any of your predecessors have trod. The real enemies of freedom, democracy and peace are much more formidable than any single person, government or nation. But it is the only path; and it is one that the nations of the world, rich and poor, neighbors and strangers, can succe.ssfully travel only if _you _join _us—or _better _yet, _{lead the} _way.