Dialogue: Buenos dias, amigos, we want to know you better

Helen Clark is not in Latin America for the alligators and pyramids. She recognises how important the continent could be for us, writes MATTHEW O'MEAGHER*.

Is the Prime Minister indulging a personal whim by spending two weeks in Latin America at the taxpayers' expense?

The answer is "no" - and not just because no prime minister, let alone this one, would be so foolish as to do that.

Latin America must clearly matter enough to New Zealand for Helen Clark to make such a major trip there when so many other tasks could be occupying her time at home and abroad.

So far, however, the importance of her trip has barely been explained, leaving most of us struggling to make sense of why she would be watching the haka at the foot of Mexican pyramids, or catching up with Sir Peter Blake on the Amazon. In fact, her visit to Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina is a taste of things to come.

On one level, the reason Helen Clark is in Latin America is simple. She is putting the weight of her office and the force of her personality behind the Latin American strategy her Government introduced 15 months ago, and whose fruits are slowly starting to emerge. Why, though, was that strategy begun in the first place?

Without doubt, the Prime Minister's abiding personal interest in Latin America has a lot to do with the continent being higher on the list of this country's foreign policy priorities than ever.

As Helen Clark has acknowledged, she and other left-leaning students in the late Vietnam War era became fascinated with the democratic and socialist experiment of Chile's Salvador Allende and went on from there to discover the compelling cultures of Latin America as a whole, opposing an American intervention or two in the region along the way.

And even today a small subset of people in this country, including some Latin American refugees, remain interested in the region mainly because of utopian hopes for the course of its political evolution.

Between the 1970s and today, however, other groups of New Zealanders have engaged with Latin America, too, for very different reasons. Aside from rugby tourists and secondary school students on exchange and other cultural connections, an ever-wider range of businesspeople have begun to sell goods to the region.

For years, the old Dairy Board did extraordinarily well there, laying one of the foundations for Fonterra, one of the few large international traders we have left.

And before this Government it was traditionally National Governments which did most to boost New Zealand's relations with the region, opening up four embassies there from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Where, then, do New Zealand-Latin American relations stand today? At a point both similar to and different from where New Zealand's relations with Asia stood 30 years ago. Then, as the Vietnam War was winding up, visions of closer relations with Asia had some 20 years of political and military ties to build on, but more than a century of prejudice to overcome.

Today, New Zealand's relations with Latin America also have about two decades of warm relations between Government officials to build on, but no comparable baggage of prejudice to surmount.

Therefore - especially when we remember that New Zealand will always be as close to Santiago as it is to Singapore, that we have a broader trade base with Latin America to build on than we had with Asia, and that globalisation is binding all nations together in ways unimaginable in the 1970s - is it too unreasonable to think that one day Latin America might be as important to us as Asia is today?

Opportunities await New Zealanders if we move to make it so, and dangers await us if we do not. Positively, despite all the future financial crises they will surely experience, Mexico and Brazil, in particular, are huge and growing markets, whose rich are increasingly able to consume our luxury niche exports and whose poor are already (in Mexico) receiving food their Governments are buying from us.

Negatively, if we do not keep up the momentum Helen Clark is building, we could find it harder not just to maintain our existing trade with Latin America, but our already vital trade with the US.

First, the latest US census indicated what many had predicted for decades - Spanish-speaking "Latinos" are now the largest minority group.

Before September 11, furthermore, President George W. Bush appeared to have only two foreign policy interests, missile defence (in which the Latin Americans agree with us) and intra-American trade. And while his attention is now elsewhere, it may not always be so.

Therefore, along with continuing our free trade talks with the US, we must also keep them up with Chile, too, to ensure that these intra-American negotiations do not shut us out of the region's trade.

To seize the opportunities and reduce the threats, however, New Zealanders must first get to know Latin America better. Clearly, this is a cornerstone of the Government's strategy, for at the heart of the strategy is the goal of boosting people-to-people links. In three months, Latin America should be the talk of Wellington as numerous performers from that region perform in the New Zealand Arts Festival.

But for all the impulse it has given to boosting New Zealand's ties to these eastern neighbours, there is more the Government could do.

Unfortunately, the impact of the Latin American presence at the arts festival will be confined to Wellington and to those wealthy enough to travel to it, thereby limiting the ripple effects reaching Auckland and the rest of the country.

Furthermore, if one looks at the Latin American strategy closely, the money set aside to encourage New Zealand's tiny community of development experts to take an interest in the region dwarfs that assigned to encourage people-to-people links across all sectors of New Zealand society with their Latin American counterparts.

Set against the lead given by Helen Clark, however, these are mere quibbles. She has recognised how important Latin America could be for New Zealand, even though it will take time for the results of efforts to become apparent.

It is now up to the rest of us to follow that lead and to wake up to the ways by which we can benefit by getting to know Latin Americans, and they can benefit from knowing us.

* Dr Matthew O'Meagher heads the Latin American studies programme at the University of Auckland.