Friends and Interests

At the recent Summit of Trinidad and Tobago, there was a black sheep: the President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias. While nearly all his colleagues paraded around complaining about wealthy countries, Arias threw a bucket of cold water when he stated: The fault for our crisis does not lie with the United States, but with us, the Latin Americans.

His speech, replete with historical references, has been an unprecedented success, and it circulates around the internet, but I fear very much that he speaks only falsehoods. The North American governments have never been the bogeyman . . . but neither have they been guardian angels.

Arias says: In 1950, Mexico and Portugal were poor, and today Portugal is a developed country and Mexico is not.

I answer: The backward state of both countries originated from the existence of a huge state apparatus, enemy of civil liberties. Now then, Portugal got rid of its totalitarian regime following a popular uprising in 1974 – and its subsequent avatars – which restored its democracy. Until the last day, the United States attempted to support the dictatorship.

Sometime earlier, in 1968, the Mexican people wanted to follow suit. Thousands of students poured into the streets, demanding freedom. But the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) brought out the army and massacred hundreds of young men in the Tlatelolco public square. Even so, the State Department continued providing support to the PRI.

Arias says: During the sixties, the East Asian countries liberalized their economies, while we refused to do so; today the former are wealthy, and we are poorer.

My answer: It is true, but during the sixties and seventies, the State Department, far from promoting freedom or economic growth in Latin America, dedicated itself to organizing dictatorships. Thirty thousand people died in Argentina, alone. In Ecuador, the super-state dictatorship of the sixties profited from an unconditional American friendship.

The good news is that all this is changing. We Ecuadorians experienced this first-hand, when Ambassador, Kristie Kenney, with her bossy and authoritarian style, left and was replaced by Linda Jewel, who delighted even Correa. Barack Obama wrote, prior to assuming the Presidency, (Although I quote from memory, I believe I am not betraying the meaning of the phrase.): “Our country has not used its strength to do good”. A few years earlier, Bill Clinton had admitted to the genocide of Vietnam, and Jimmy Carter revoked the CIA’s authorization to organize assassinations abroad.

Correa is illogical in his relations with the U.S., but so were the governments (not all) that aligned themselves, unconditionally, with a foreign policy abroad. We don’t need to offend the U.S., as Correa does every time; it is our partner and needs to remain so, which implies that we need to maintain the most cordial relations possible.

But in the end, as an American once said, countries do not have friends, but interests, and it would be naive to ignore this.