Episode 45. US Security Interests in Latin America & the Caribbean Part I: Admiral Kurt Tidd and Ambassador Liliana Ayalde Discuss Their Partnership at US SOUTHCOM and Working With Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy (00:00): From the American Academy of Diplomacy, this is The General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in conversations about their partnerships and how they tackle some of our toughest national security problems. You can find all our podcasts and more information at generalambassadorpodcast.org. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, and I'm the producer and host of the series. Today our conversation will be on the US Southern Command and US interests in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our guests are Admiral Kurt Tidd and Ambassador Liliana Ayalde. Admiral Tidd was the Commander of United States Southern Command from 2016 to 2018. Previously, he served as Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Director for Operations Joint Staff, and Commander United States Naval Forces Southern Command and United States Fourth Fleet. Just before his retirement in 2018, he received the honorific title of Old Goat, meaning he was the longest serving Naval Academy graduate on active duty. Currently, Admiral Tidd is the Chairman of the Board at the Olmsted Foundation and Senior Fellow at National Defense University's Capstone, Keystone, Pinnacle program. Ambassador Liliana Ayalde was a civilian Deputy to the Commander and Foreign Policy Advisor at SOUTHCOM from 2017 to 2019. Previously, she was the US Ambassador to Brazil. Her other senior assignments include Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID for Latin America and the Caribbean and US Ambassador to Paraguay. Today, we're going to focus on US interests in Latin America, as well as the Caribbean and drill down on the US Southern command. I want to start with some basics to orient our listeners, the US Southern Command covers 31 countries and 16 dependencies across Latin America and the Caribbean. The US has strong economic and people ties across the region. At the same time, the area is a major source of illicit drugs coming into the United States, fighting this flow and the related problems of crime, violence, and corruption has meant that the United States has focused very much on security cooperation in the region. Not all governments in the area are easy to work with. While most countries are democratic, Cuba remains under authoritarian rule and Venezuela, as well as Nicaragua, have slid into what I call elected dictatorships. Before we dive into all these issues, I wanted to ask a question. Admiral Tidd, you have been sometimes called the "diplomatic admiral" due to the breadth of your assignments. Before arriving at SOUTHCOM, you were the Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff assigned as the military advisor to the Secretary of State. You also have worked in the National Security Council, and Ambassador Ayalde, you arrived at SOUTHCOM with long and deep experience in the region, having served as Mission Director for USAID in Colombia and Bolivia, as Ambassador to Paraguay and as Ambassador to Brazil. So my question is as follows, with this background that you had, how did you both end up at SOUTHCOM and how did you start working to establish a relationship between you?

Adm. Tidd (03:41): Do you want me to tell the story, or would you like to tell the story?

Amb. Ayalde (03:44): I'll tell a summary of the story, and then you can certainly tell your part, because the story is, it's one between the two of us. So as Ambassador in Brazil, we worked very hard with the Brazilians to prepare for the Summer Olympics, but not only that, but the World Cup and all these mega events that Brazil was hosting. This was in 2014 and 2016, and SOUTHCOM had a very important role in supporting us on the security part. Certainly for the Olympics, it was a lot of concern because we were expecting a huge number of American citizens going down. And the White House was particularly concerned about possible problems and attacks, or that the country was just not prepared. And so we offered our assistance in various ways to make sure that the Brazilians hosted a successful games, and part of that was working with the military. And so that was my first contact with Admiral Tidd, when we were preparing some of the aspects of the joint collaboration with the Brazilians on the security side.

Adm. Tidd (04:51): It got a little bit interesting because, you know, we all come into our jobs with the baggage of previous assignments. One of my other previous assignments on the Joint Staff, was as Director of Operations. And in that capacity, I'd been involved in coordinating, across a number of these major international events, the different kinds of assistance that the United States would be prepared to offer. And having had some experience as we were setting up support for the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, the Summer Olympics in Australia, Summer Olympics in Korea and other places, the theater commanders that were associated with those activities had had a lot of their own organic forces available that were just naturally available to be able to have in the vicinity in the event that something were to pop up. Now, one of the delightful challenges working at US Southern Command is, it's lots of mission and a real paucity of forces. And what that meant was, if we envisioned, or if the national leadership envisioned, having the same kind of support to be available, they were going to have to make some conscious decisions and to actually deploy some forces down into the theater that were not previously deployed down there. The headquarters at SOUTHCOM was working very closely with the US country team in Brasilia, and probably over drove the problem, and certainly horrified some of the folks on their staff down there, thinking that we were getting ready to send down all of these different forces and things. And that was not the intent. The intent was to kind of expose here are an array of options, a menu of things. How do we want to do this? One of the things I had seen done successfully in previous headquarters was they hosted a tabletop, you know, we call it a war game, but really it's just a tabletop discussion, a seminar that involved all of the actual senior leaders who would be involved in the discussion. And that was really my first encounter with Ambassador Ayalde, she was on the other end of the video teleconference. And I think we kind of were able to eventually reassure both the Ambassador as well as her country team that no, this was not the big, bad military rolling in with all of these forces. It worked out great. It was a wonderful seminar, and it was a wonderful, I think, opportunity for us just to kind of see eye to eye. Fast forward to when it came time to hire a new deputy, a civilian deputy, and I was pretty confident I knew who exactly who I wanted. I wanted somebody who had the enormous breadth of experience in the theater that Ambassador Ayalde had. And if she picked up the phone and called Foggy Bottom, I wanted to be sure that somebody would answer and would take the call and she'd be able to cut through the well intentioned but sort of staff bureaucratic churn that are inevitable in all of our organizations. I kind of had to twist her arm.

Amb. McCarthy (07:22): Really?

Adm. Tidd (07:23): We had all of the ambassadors for our conference that we host all of the various country teams then. And I took her aside and I said, look, I kind of want to make you an offer, you know, I realize this may not necessarily be what you have in mind or what you're thinking about, but how would you feel about coming to Miami and coming in as a civilian deputy? And I was surprised, I mean, she actually was looking forward to an opportunity to do something a little bit different.

Amb. Ayalde (07:43): My reasoning for hesitating was that, I remember saying this to the Admiral, I don't know that much about the military. Of course, I've worked with the military as part of the country team, during disasters and the different things we do with the military in the region. But being part of the military team to me seemed like, okay, am I going to be comfortable or effective in that role? And actually the things we did together, because once we negotiated exactly what we wanted as a country team, in terms of military cooperation, asset [inaudible], let's say in the Olympics, then I had to go and negotiate with the Brazilians, right, In that case. That was comfortable to me. So when the Admiral said to me, oh, I don't need another military advisor. What I need is someone who knows the embassies, who knows how to reach out to State Department leadership or the leadership in Washington, because a lot of it is interagency, someone who knows how the embassies work and then the negotiations and the nuances of the different countries that we had. So I said, oh, that is exactly what I do. And the reason I stayed longer than I probably had intended was precisely because it's such an important role in this region. Everything we do, I mean, there's a history of the military in South America, so there's baggage and the way you word it, the way you come in, the timing of it, how you coordinate the messaging, all of that is so important. That may not be as important in other regions. So I found that the civilian deputy's role was really, really important to ensure success of every training, of every mission, of every exercise. There's one particular one that jumps up to mind in Trinidad and Tobago, very close to Venezuela. If we hadn't coordinated the messaging on that, months and months ahead with the embassies, not only in Trinidad, but in Colombia, in the Caribbean, if we hadn't done that, it probably would have been a real nightmare to manage. It proved to me the longer I stayed that there was such an important role for that coordination, communication flow to be happening between foreign policy and our military cooperation.

Adm. Tidd (09:53): The experience that I brought with me coming from that prior proposition as Assistant to the Chairman and liaison to the Department of State. I recognized that if SOUTHCOM was going to have any kind of success, we had to have a good, solid, positive working relationship, again, with Foggy Bottom, with the State Department. If we didn't, I gotta be a little bit careful, you know, you're referred to, somebody called me a diplomatic admiral. I kind of like to think all admirals are diplomatic. You know, we all kind of go about it perhaps a little bit differently, but I knew enough to know what I didn't know, and that if I wasn't able to negotiate a positive working relationship with our partners within the interagency, but most notably Department of State and then USAID, it wouldn't matter what we did on the military side, we would just find ourselves, I think with a lot of frustration. As you well know, Liliana brings not just a solid State background, but also an enormous wealth of experience in the USAID business, which was like getting a twofer.

Amb. McCarthy (10:43): Well let me ask you, as you began starting, Admiral, what were your main missions when you arrived down in SOUTHCOM?

Adm. Tidd (10:50): It was trying to crack the code on how to gain acknowledgement and recognition, with all of the things that were going on in the Middle East for the last decade and a half, with all of the things obviously, and the importance of the Asia Pacific theater, we still had interests in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it would no longer suffice for us to be able to just ignore them. And I'd had a chance to observe that by having, you know, kind of practiced a fairly lengthy period of benign neglect, we had opened the door for those same countries that we were most concerned about in other parts of the world, Russia, China, Iran, most notably, we had opened the door for them to gain footholds and gain influence in this part of the world that literally is part of our hemisphere, part of our home, and with whom we have such enormously strong historic and familial ties. And so I had to come up with a different way to describe the problem. What are the real sources of concern? And for so long, we had used the shorthand of drug trafficking and that had become the shorthand for the problem, but that wasn't the problem that was merely a symptom of the problem. And I felt like we needed to come up with a different way of describing it. One that on the military side would have more credibility and that hopefully would allow us to build stronger partners with our interagency partners, most notably in the law enforcement, in the intelligence community, as well as in the diplomatic community. You know, we tried to take a look at what are the right roles and what's the appropriate role for the military. And, you know, I spent 25 years probably hearing from within my own community that the counter drug mission, it's not a valid military mission. It's a law enforcement mission. It's a societal mission. It's a diplomatic mission, but it's not a military mission. For much of that time, I fully agreed with it because I just didn't see what was the right role for us to get involved in. But as we started taking it apart and looking at it, and that's where we began to take a look at what's the real threat, and the threat became looking at the networks and recognizing that there are a variety of networks that trade at any kind of a commodity imaginable. So if we focused on the networks, that was a problem that when I would go in and sit down and meet with the country teams and talk with the legal attaches and the other elements of the federal law enforcement communities represented there, they acknowledged that and they got that right up front. And I said, we're in the military, we don't want to take over, that's your business. You've got the authorities, you've got the legal basis to be able to go after those networks, but we can help. And based on the wealth of experience that we had gained in countering terrorist networks, primarily in the Middle East, but elsewhere, we knew how to go in and take a look at threat networks, how to identify them, how to visualize them, how to illuminate them, and then ultimately pass it off to somebody who's got the legal authority to be able to disrupt them. But we could play, I thought very effectively, in the identify and the illuminate threat networks piece, but only if we were trusted by our interagency partners. So we had to figure out how are we going to break through how are we going to gain trust? And that's where Liliana was absolutely critical in kind of translating where I was coming from and what I was trying to do and explain it to people. No, he's not trying to go in and take over your business or your responsibility. We're just trying to figure out how to help and how to be a trusted partner and a trusted member of the US whole-of-government, US interagency solution to dealing with these threat networks that ultimately posed a threat to all of us. And, you know, right here close to home.

Amb. McCarthy (14:10): You're bringing out something that I think is very important, which is there was a lot of focus in the past on the drug trade and thinking of it just as movement of commodities, let's bust the traffickers and so forth. And I did some work in this area years ago, but the global networks and mapping and using advanced tools, technology, artificial intelligence, and you name it, in a new and modern way to break them up, using all parts of the government is really where I think our military have added a lot to really truly track what are global networks. They're not just regional networks.

Amb. Ayalde (14:47): When I worked in Columbia there was of course lots of drug trafficking, but there was never the issue with the gold. Today, that is a major issue in the region, the gold being extracted illegally in Colombia, Peru, and then going to Venezuela and then leaving the hemisphere. I raise that because it can be any commodity. Today, it's gold. Yesterday it could be people or... You know, and so they are going to reinvent themselves. I'm talking about the illegal criminal organizations. They have the money, they can buy off people, they use corruption. So the commodity, it really doesn't matter what the commodity is. It's just an illegal business and they can do illegal business today with gold, tomorrow with something else, yesterday with drugs. Now not that drugs doesn't continue to be an issue. It is, but that in itself is morphing because you know, it can be synthetic drugs. And so you've got China involved, but how do you dissect that? And how do you deal with the countries and strengthen the partnerships? So they are also part of this knot to counteract these networks that become more sophisticated by the minute. So when we get stuck on one commodity, we kind of lose all the other stuff that goes on. And to me, at least, what's going on with the gold business, it's a real eyeopener because that kind of sheds a light on the need to be looking at this more globally. It's all interconnected. And when you look at these security issues in a much broader way.

Amb. McCarthy (16:18): Well, speaking of Colombia, I wanted to ask and go in a little bit deeper on that country because it's gone through such an amazing transformation from being a major recipient of assistance from us to fight the drug production and to push back on those who profited, the two guerilla groups, the FARC, the ELN, and also the paramilitaries, and fast forward to today, the paramilitaries disbanded, they have a peace agreement with the FARC, they're now a net exporter of security. In other words, they work beyond their borders to help others, lessons learned.

Amb. Ayalde (16:50): I'm looking at it over time, having served there in 2005 to 2008 and the issues that we we're dealing with then and the relationship now, and my work in SOUTHCOM during almost three years, it's just an amazing relationship of trust. And I think, you know, it sounds easy, but you build that over time. I would say that on the military side it's a very, very mature, sophisticated relationship. One where you could sit down and have these very complicated conversations that you probably wouldn't have with other partners, because that relationship has been there for that long. And I think Plan Colombia and the various contributions and having it be a bipartisan program helped kind of build that over time, that regardless of our own administration here, we kept on supporting and they matured and they have a very strong military. And of course they have an active crisis conflict that they're dealing with. So what I saw there, it was just a really, really mature relationship where you can talk to each other on the tough terms, and we're dealing with similar, very, very similar, we see the same enemies. And so it makes it easier. When we talk about Venezuela, and of course they're a border country, so they have their unique sensitivities, but they also understand where we're coming from. So it made things much easier, but they are managing very, very complex issues. They have the tremendous flow of the Venezuelan migrants close to 2 million, maybe even more. And they open their arms for that. And after the peace accords, they were supposed to demobilize well, some of them didn't. And so you have these new groups that have come up, which challenged the implementation of the peace accord. And of course it has tremendous implications for the region, regardless of how many issues the country has to deal with, the partnership with the United States continues to be strong.

Adm. Tidd (18:51): The challenge that we had was how do you take that relationship with Colombia and kind of take it to the next level? We had actually about two decades of experience where we were working side by side with them as they were really wrestling with these issues that threatened their national sovereignty. Over the course of those two decades, their military and national police force officer corps kind of grew up having a relationship with the United States. Their best officers were attending our war colleges and our service schools. And just a whole variety of these efforts that sometimes we don't think of in terms of being a big payoff, but when you have the Chief of their National Defense is an officer who is a graduate of our war college and has lived in the United States for a couple of years, having attended a number of schools, that changes people, and that gives them a focus and a perspective, and they knew who we were and how we think. So I thought it was important that we include a senior Colombian military officer within the headquarters staff, not as a liaison officer, but as an actual staff director within our headquarters. That was kind of a commitment that I made to the Chief of Defense and this was something I wanted to do, and I said but here's what I need, you need to send somebody here who is a well-respected Colombian military officer, so there's a little bit of a cultural dynamic in the Colombian military up to that point that if you got sent as a senior officer to an assignment outside of Columbia, you're on your way out. That was kind of a last job before retirement. And I said, we've got to make sure that that doesn't happen, that you send somebody that is going to come back and take all of the lessons and the connections that have been made, of having worked inside of our headquarters staff and be able to invest that, pay it forward for the relationship. So the Colombian military really went out on a limb and sent us an absolutely superb officer, who had a great combat record, was a graduate of our War College, was comfortable, and he came into our headquarters. And no great surprise, I mean, we had some challenges within our own internal bureaucracy and up in Washington as well. "Oh, you can't do that." You can't have an officer from a foreign military inside your own headquarters. I said, well, of course we can, you know, we do in all of these other headquarters in the Pacific and Europe and other places. So, you know, SOUTHCOM is no different. And so we kind of had to fight our way through the bureaucratic challenges. I was happy to see that not only was the first officer who came an absolute rockstar, terrific, highly respected, and really changed the way that we looked both at ourselves and also at our partners and the opportunities to work with partners, which was something that I was kind of hoping for, having had a chance to work with various multinational militaries before, that would kind of hold us accountable or feet to the fire that we actually did what we said we were going to do when it comes to partnering with other nations. But it would also send a very powerful signal to other countries and other militaries around the theater that friendship has privileges. My predecessors had worked really hard to proclaim Colombia is our closest military partner here in the region. And we can ask our Colombian friends to do things which they willingly embrace. Things like conducting a lot of the training and mil to mil engagements with some of our partners in Central America who were still very early in this path to a military that has a longstanding respect for human rights and understanding the role of the military as the protector of the population and not as the predator on the population. And as a result, Colombia was recognized as a major non-NATO ally. And they were very proud of that because they were the first Latin American country to achieve that.

Amb. McCarthy (22:14): Well, I thought I would take advantage now, speaking of other countries in the region, and talk a little bit about another country with whom we've had a more mixed relationship, which is Brazil. I mean, Brazil is a powerhouse of its own. It's very significant in global terms, but it's been rocked by political turmoil in the last decade. Liliana, you were ambassador there during a difficult period, 2013 to 2016. There have been two elections since then, but we've maintained a good level of security cooperation. During your time at SOUTHCOM, how was the relationship?

Amb. Ayalde (22:50): You're right. I arrived at a very difficult, tough time in US Brazil relations. In fact, it has said that it's the lowest point historically in bilateral relations between Brazil and the United States as a result of the disclosures and it became very ideological.

Amb. Ayalde (23:07): This was the WikiLeaks, correct?

Amb. Ayalde (23:08): It was the Snowden one. So this was chapter two. I got caught in WikiLeaks with Paraguay. So I've got both experiences, but that meant that this was taken to a higher level. It became Presidential. You know, so the president herself felt that she had to turn things down, lower the intensity of the cooperation and collaboration and communication. So what happened on the military side was that we couldn't really go beyond a certain level, but what was there was there, the Brazilian armed forces have had a very long standing relationship, they go on to our schools, they admire us, and we've worked together over the years. And it was fascinating to watch that continue despite the very negative political relationship that we had during Dilma's tenure. So they wanted to work together, but we couldn't have any discussions that were policy related. So in a way, expanding that relationship was limited by the politics, by the administration at the time, on their end. So what happened when Bolsanaro comes in, of course, it's full embrace. He has a number of former military or active military members who are part of the cabinet and they embraced us. Brazil is tougher to understand, because I think people have the tendency of lumping Brazil with the rest of Latin America. And Brazil is different, maybe because I've served there, but yes, it is different. It's huge, but not only is it, you know, the biggest economy and democracy after the United States, but it's very similar to us in terms of our history, in terms of the population mix and the way we perceive things. So understanding that is important. And I think we, as certainly in the military side, we understand that everyone talks the same language, that relationship has been able to grow. And that means agreements that provide for more sharing of more classified information, more sophisticated engagements and things that wouldn't happen before because, oh, it's sovereignty. We can't do that exercise. Suddenly, you know, they're embraced, oh yes, let's do more. Of course let's be helpful for this objective. Let's talk about Venezuela together. Before it was no, no, you know, that's, you know, we don't want to sit down with the United States. So I think from the military perspective, we're in a good place. We're in a terrific place. I think right now putting politics aside, but we have two administrations that get along together. So that allows the military to really expand on their collaboration and coordination on exercises and different types of exchanges and learning from each other, seeing Brazilians perspectives on different issues, which is important because they bring a different insight to it. And so that engagement is fluid and I think that is a good thing.

Adm. Tidd (26:01): That's probably a good reflection on the enormous utility in having this kind of a partnership with a theater commander who is on the military side and a civilian deputy on the senior State Department side that allows us to play off of each other's strengths and can be able to recognize the diplomatic or the political track may be challenged right now with a particular country, but we still have opportunities to communicate, opportunities to sustain, maybe not increase the level of our relationship, but to sustain a relationship knowing that it will come back around again, the downtimes will inevitably turn. We've seen this with a number of countries throughout the region, Brazil, Argentina, there's a classic case. It may have turned again. We don't know. And we'll see with the last election in Argentina, we were able to immediately reach out and find opportunities to reestablish relationships with senior military officers and to engage in meaningful exchanges and take meaningful actions. I'd point to when the Argentine Navy tragically lost one of their submarines, our immediate response by flowing unique capabilities that don't exist anywhere else in the world and flowing them down there to help them search for and ultimately locate the remains of that submarine. There was a shared appreciation and understanding. This was a tragedy lives were lost. Sailors felt that, but more importantly, they recognized that no other nation in the world could do or would do what the United States did on behalf of the Argentine Navy. And that created a bond of trust that will last for another 20 years. I mean, it's those kinds of things. When opportunities arise, you move out and you take advantage of them. And that's one of the reasons why we respond the way we do when we have humanitarian crises, which unfortunately are fairly endemic throughout this theater

Amb. Ayalde (27:48): The role of the civilian deputy is important in those circumstances. I think of Ecuador, for instance, just to take that one. Since we talked about Argentina, let's take Ecuador. We had no military cooperation programs there. The President had kicked us out in many programs, USAID and others, and suddenly with a change of administration, there was a lot of eagerness at many levels of the Ecuadorian government to reengage with the military. Our military was very interested, so they were rushing down to start setting up the offices and everything. And I said, wait a minute, let's coordinate this. Because one thing is for the military to say, yes, we want to have a security cooperation counterpart here at the embassy and have all these programs and start reengaging again. But there's another thing that are the politics. And we want to be certain that the political machinery will be consistent with our own foreign policy objectives. So in the case of Ecuador, there were some individuals in government who didn't want us to reconnect and reengage. They would put anything in the way to stop it. So it just took us a little longer. And I think that's where the role of the civilian deputy to be able to articulate back and forth, okay, let's work together with the ambassador and make sure the timing is right. The size is right. There is a tendency for us to want to embrace. And I'm saying us as the US government, you know, Argentina opens up, there's a change. Everybody goes down there and poor embassy, I've seen it happen. You know what, who is trying to coordinate everybody coming in. So you pace it. And I think because there are certain domestic politics there, and that was the case in Ecuador, that they needed to manage. If all of a sudden we came in and started talking about re-establishing Manta and all these sensitive issues that would have been killed. So, you know, we started, what about the comfort? You know, so humanitarian missions coming in and seeing the health needs of some of the poorest parts of the country, working together with the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Health, and that came in. So there was this comfort level that was building up. And eventually of course, with the ambassador and with State and with SOUTHCOM and DoD at large, we worked it so that we got the security office, the cooperation office re-established in Ecuador, but it was that navigation that is helpful because you want it to be solid. You don't want to have problems later on. I went down with our military deputy and we together met with both the military leadership and the civilian leadership to see when this opening could actually happen and it eventually did happen. Maybe not as fast as we hoped, but it did happen and it's now very solid.

Amb. McCarthy (30:33): This concludes part one of our podcast with Admiral Kurt Tidd and Ambassador Liliana Ayalde. Stay tuned for part two. This has been a new episode in the series of The General and the Ambassador, thank you for listening. The series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, as well as visit our website generalambassadorpodcast.org. We very much welcome input and suggestions in this series. You can contact us at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.