Double Standard
The people in Uruguay distrust our government but revel in our culture.
By Benjamin N. Gedan
November 13, 2008
A demonstrator holds a poster with the image of President George W. Bush and the word “terrorist “ on it during a protest against the his visit to Uruguay in 2007. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY — I spotted a friend, Agustín, outside El Barril, a pub in Montevideo and invited him to the Fourth of July party I was organizing. The U.S. embassy in Montevideo hosts its popcorn and hamburger gala on Jul. 3, so I had decided to give my American colleagues a place to celebrate the actual holiday and my Uruguayan friends a chance to sample meatloaf and apple pie. Agustín was not enthusiastic. Flanked by colleagues from the student union, he said my invitation was a “provocation.” So I stepped aside, and he stepped into El Barril, where a D.J. was blasting American music.
Living in Uruguay for the past year as a Fulbright research scholar has both affirmed and challenged my understanding of America’s image in Latin America. It has been easy to find evidence of anti-Americanism to confirm my worst fears about the state of U.S. relations in the hemisphere. At the same time, I have encountered enduring cultural connections that permit an optimistic view of the future of our diplomatic efforts, particularly with the arrival of a new administration in the White House.
Given the involvement of the United States in the Cold War-era coups that dismantled many Latin American democracies, some believe that improving America’s image here is a hopeless cause. Raised in the United States of Amnesia, as essayist Gore Vidal put it, I have become acutely aware of the weight of history in Latin American society. In Chile and Argentina, former members of the military dictatorships have been prosecuted since my arrival. In Uruguay, activists are campaigning to repeal the 1986 amnesty law (known as the Immigration Reform and Control Act) that shields human rights violators from criminal allegations. United States cooperation with South American dictatorships is not central to public debate, but nor is it forgotten. A Uruguayan presidential candidate, José Amorín Batlle, repeated a popular joke when he told me recently that the reason the United States has avoided a military coup is because it hosts no American embassy where coup plotters can hatch their malevolent plans.
President Bush has largely ignored Latin America over the past 8 years. But as leftist leaders have come to power in the so-called “pink tide,” hostility toward the United States has grown. That is true not only in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where the region’s most radically leftist leaders rule, but other Latin countries as well. Even in moderate Uruguay, President Bush’s visit last year sparked protests, and many supporters of the ruling party have not forgiven Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez for feting the leader of the “Empire” at a traditional asado (Uruguayan barbecue).
But, in this instance, culture doesn’t reflect policy or politics. I have struggled to find theaters playing Uruguayan films; most pledge their allegiance to Hollywood. Radio stations favored by bus drivers and cafes stick to American pop music, and for Uruguay’s most popular national holiday, the Night of Nostalgia, every nightclub plays American “oldies” and ‘80s hits. Taxi drivers won’t discuss American diplomacy while speeding past the riverfront U.S. embassy, convinced the CIA is listening. But their biggest critique of the embassy, it turns out, is the difficulty of getting a visa. In Paraguay, Chile and Argentina, where I have traveled this past year, U.S. pop culture and politics dominate the front pages of newspapers. At lunch last week with a Communist political activist, I was surprised to hear that a criticism against the presidential candidacy of José Mujica, a former Tuparamo guerrilla fighter and popular senator, is that he does not speak English.
At Uruguay’s Universidad de la República, where last semester I studied the region’s Cold War dictatorships, U.S. support for Latin American military coups is not overlooked. But neither is Jimmy Carter’s promotion of human rights or Amnesty International’s anti-torture campaigns during this country’s 11 years of dictatorship. My Homeland in a Suitcase is a book about one of Uruguay’s best-known political exiles, Wilson Ferreira Aldunate. In the book, as Ferreira’s son prepares to join his father aboard, he visits several embassies searching for help. After establishing ties in Mexico and Venezuela, he meets the U.S. ambassador, who only offers a travel guide to Colorado. Still, he decides to go to the United States, where he’d eventually live, to protest the Uruguayan dictatorship. The United States, Juan Raúl Ferreira writes, "was an obvious destination, one that does not need an explanation."
That passage embodies the challenges and possibilities for American policy in Latin America that Barack Obama will inherit when he takes office next January: justifiable skepticism of the United States alongside a surviving hope that America can become a true partner in economic development and human rights projects, not simply a force promoting open markets and battling drug traffickers.
Here in tiny Uruguay, there is little direct contact with U.S. tourists or key policymakers. But government-to-government relations have been surprisingly positive since President Vázquez, Uruguay’s first leftist leader, took office in 2005. In addition to President Bush, Uruguay last year hosted three U.S. cabinet members: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, and Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao. The United States is Uruguay’s third-largest trading partner, consuming more than 10 percent of Uruguayan exports. Many Uruguayans still warmly recall the $1.5-billion loan from the U.S. in 2002 that helped Uruguay emerge from a crippling financial crisis, and the more recent offer from President Bush to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement. Just last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice included Uruguay in a (short) list of countries in the region that still have strong relations with the United States.
Still, the invasion of Iraq, U.S. immigration policies and the president’s perceived belligerence in foreign affairs seem to have taken a toll on public opinion here, just as in many parts of the world. In 2002, for example, the Pew Global Attitudes survey found that 82 percent of Venezuelans and 34 percent of Argentines had a favorable view of the United States; by last year, those numbers had fallen to 56 percent and 16 percent, respectively.
President-elect Obama has promised a new approach to foreign policy, and he directly addressed his global audience during his victory speech last Tuesday: "All those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular but our destiny is shared," he said.
So far, at least, that message is being celebrated across the world, including here in Latin America. In Uruguay, I’m not sure the White House will ever be as popular an American brand as Sex and the City, but it is clear that a foundation exists for greatly improving U.S. relations.
Benjamin N. Gedan is a Fulbright research scholar living in Uruguay, where he studies the role of the Uruguayan media in the political tensions that led to the 1973 coup. He has written for The New York Times and The Miami Herald and blogs at Small State.
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Please be careful of your use of the word “American” when you talk of anti-American sentiment or America’s Image. Is Latin America not also part of the Americas? Please clarify that you are talking about “North American Culture,” or “U.S. Culture” and not the Americas as a whole.
— Bliss Requa-Trautz - Nov 14, 01:19 PM - #Bliss — just thought I’d throw in that I was impressed by the tone of your comment. I had noticed the same thing myself, but I was afraid I was going to see the author merely blasted as insensitive rather than being offered constructive criticism. Bravo!
— Scott Buchanan - Nov 14, 02:45 PM - #exactly.. Mr Gedan should begin by avoiding that obnoxious linguistic imperialism: In Spanish ‘America’ correctly means the continent, not the self-denominated country..
Also the author could have employed a bit more sophisticated understanding of media, youth, entertainment and culture. Most mass entertainment in Latin America (movies, commercial radio) happens to be US media does not necessarily reflect an ‘obsession’ with US culture, but rather it obeys to a specific conjunction of industry practices, commercial interests and youth culture patterns…
And, the fact that the US presidential election featured prominently in newspapers in the region (and across the globe) reflects rather the sad fact that US unilateralism has had devastating effects for millions of people around the world, so people have a unfortunately clear vested interest in knowing who the next US president will be.
This note reflects a long tradition of chauvinistic US thought among US liberals (Thomas Friedman being a prime contemporary example) that wants to explain away the global distrust and hate against the US as a result of its unilateralism, with the false pretense that the ‘world’ still admires US culture (as reflected in.. movies and pop music!!).. Most US people understandably would want it that way, but reality is US people should look more into their own amnesiac past and understand that most of the world would rather want the US to leave us alone and stop intruding into our own affairs.
— Carlos White - Dec 30, 12:54 PM - #