Latin America's Image of the U.S.
TANNENBAUM, FRANK
Failure of both sides to face reality plagues Hemisphere Latin America's Image of the U.S. By Frank Tannenbaum POLITICALLY, the United States and Latin America have gone a long way toward...
...is $2,200 per person, while in Latin America it is $200 per person—and this gap is widening...
...Certain policies that we have pursued in the best of faith have not improved our image, and those who have been injured have long memories...
...To the Latin Americans we are made to stand for an absolute individualism and an absolutely competitive free enterprise system, as if there were no trade unions, no Social Security, no Food and Drug Act, no Security Exchange Commission...
...but present a perverted picture of their own present state of cultural and institutional development...
...Thus the population south of the border will be larger than that of the United States and Canada combined...
...At the present rate of growth, Latin America's population will total 300 million in 1980 and 500 million in the year 2000...
...This question of dictatorship has been complicated by our policy of equipping the armies of Latin America with modern weapons...
...This is partly due to the failure of those who talk for us to appreciate the change which has been wrought and to find words to express it...
...It also means that what local opposition there might have been to keep a government from becoming too oppressive has now become impotent...
...it is doubling every 30 years and in some countries, Mexico among them, every 20 or 25 years...
...Some of our leaders are either indifferent, unaware or on occasion smug about the situation, and explain it all by the presumed laziness, if not by the natural inferiority, of the peoples of Latin America...
...This image has been strengthened in recent years by our tolerance of Latin American dictatorships...
...at best, there is such an insufficiency of these as to make the situation deplorable...
...One aspect of this is their complete distortion of the role of private investment in a developing economy...
...They are economic and social and involve a failure of leadership on both sides...
...We are wedded to the status quo...
...In part, as can be seen, our difficulties lie in our failure to accept reality as it is, and in our persistence in talking to each other and about ourselves in ways that bespeak an image of the U.S...
...Certainly some of our Ambassadors seem to have made it a point to hob-nob in public with the dictators when they and the rest of the world knew the horrors and cruelties that were being committed by these dictators...
...By Frank Tannenbaum POLITICALLY, the United States and Latin America have gone a long way toward fulfilling an age-old dream: that the strong and the weak nations may abide in peace and without fear...
...We must find a way for the Latin American people to identify us with their aspirations for a better life...
...I have said tolerance rather than support, which Latin Americans declare it to be...
...Nor is there an easy way out of FRANK TANNENBAUM is professor of Latin American history at Columbia University...
...It is perhaps not unkind to say that our official or private spokesmen in Latin America talk the language of Adam Smith and Ricardo dressed in the style of the best advertising firms on Madison Avenue...
...If the picture is bleak on the economic side it is equally so socially...
...the dilemma...
...Taken as a whole, food production and food consumption per capita in Latin America are below prewar levels and undernourishment prevails in many places...
...Whatever the good reasons we had for doing this, the effect has been to strengthen the local armies and freeze them on the governments...
...They are without running water, sanitation, electric lights or schooling...
...and Latin America that does not exist...
...Latin Americans still remember the exuberant days after the Spanish-American War when the air was filled with talk of American expansion...
...The liberals in Latin America used to argue that the United States was actually arming its enemies because the only real friends of American democracy are those who believe in democratic institutions...
...It is difficult to assume, and to go on believing, that mutual confidence and common ends can continue to exist between the United States and Latin America when the economic gap between them is so wide...
...Of course, there are exceptions— Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba and perhaps others—but for the area as a whole this general proposition remains true...
...No one can now overthrow a president except the army, which means that no one can become president unless he is acceptable to the army...
...That in fact is the U.S...
...We have, in fact, helped to saddle the military upon Latin American governments, and it will not be easy to change our policy or to lessen the great burdens of maintaining a large military establishment out of a poor budget...
...dilemma...
...Under these circumstances, it is not difficult to explain why there is so much misunderstanding between Latin Americans and ourselves...
...Some of their leaders blame us for their poverty and lack of growth...
...There was little clarity and no compassion in the use of these speculative ideas as grounds for public policy...
...But the Latin American intellectuals who do most of the image-forming have a false view not only of the U.S...
...They have not learned to understand what may be the greatest political revolution of our time: an egalitarian society where individual freedom and human dignity remain undiminished...
...Nor do they know of the importance and influence of our large trade union movement...
...And for some countries it will prove difficult not to fall into greater poverty with the passing years...
...A great deal of local social change is a preliminary to the development of representative democracy and industrialism in Latin America...
...They talk among themselves and to us as if they spoke for a free society of equal men, as if theirs was a purely humanistic world faced by a material-driven civilization that is indifferent to human values...
...They still picture us as a Shylock armed to exploit his neighbors without mercy and without pity...
...They seem unaware of political corruption...
...So in their majority are the governments of Latin America—and yet the status quo, if taken literally, would make any change impossible and provide no remedy for the poverty and social deficiency which has to be eliminated if there is to be mutual confidence...
...This article was adapted from his address last week to the AFL-C10 Conference on World Affairs...
...And we have not helped them to a better understanding...
...They are apparently unaware of the hacienda system where men are still sold with the land, of the great wealth and poverty with inadequate taxation for capital development, of ignorance and poverty which in part, at least, is the result of failure of private and public conscience...
...They think of this country as they knew it in 1900 or 1910...
...Of those that enter school, about half drop out by the end of the first year...
...Ours is the oldest international system in existence and it has shown itself to be increasingly effective...
...Nor have they learned of the wide social security systems which protect the individual against the worst effects of our industrial society, or of the many public controls over industry and finance that attempt to defend the individual against the implicit indifference to human values of large organizations...
...The average annual income in the U.S...
...Latin America would have to increase its real income by 100 per cent, and some countries by more than that, every 30 years to remain as poor as it is now...
...Latin Americans have a completely distorted image of the U.S...
...Such a program would be more difficult to carry out in the southern part of the Hemisphere than it was in Europe, for socially and politically Latin American countries are less able to accept or use the help they cry for...
...The other half of the problem is developing a whole series of policies that will give Latin Americans the prospect of narrowing the gap economically and socially between themselves and the U.S...
...A recent study, competently done and published locally, suggests that in Chile the "average consumption per person was about 10 per cent lower in 1958 than six years ago," and that at best "it is unlikely" that per capita consumption could catch up before 1965 with what it had been in 1952-53...
...2. In all the large cities—Caracas, Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, etc.—there are hundreds of thousands of people living in shanty towns (200,000 in Caracas according to Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt...
...Most of the children stop going to school by the third year, and at best only about 5 per cent of those entering the first grade complete the primary school cycle...
...But getting around the false image is only half of the problem...
...Whatever the reasons, and they are not simple, the fact remains that the vast majority of Latin Americans believe that we have favored the dictators...
...We were told many times that strengthening the armies in Latin America is a political error and that it will identify us with enemies of democracy and with the opponents of freedom...
...The difficulties that confront the United States in Latin America are of a different order...
...The population in Latin America seems to be growing faster than in any other part of the world...
...There are many specific projects that suggest themselves...
...Although more could be cited, two examples are sufficient to illustrate this: 1. About half of the school-age children in Latin America (in some countries less, in some more than half) do not go to school because there are no schools for them...
...They also remember the days when our publicists proclaimed doctrines of "survival of the fit" that imputed the misfortune of poverty, unemployment, illness and old age to those who suffered because they were weak and unworthy of survival...
...The rate of growth of the economy in North America is such that the people in South America, even if their real income is increasing, are still relatively poorer than they were before...
...Our help requires and will stimulate profound social change, and neither we nor the governments of Latin America are prepared to accept the impending change...
...The task of leadership on both sides is to prepare the ground for the needed changes...
...Unfortunately, Latin Americans have not learned of the great revolution that came in the wake of the New Deal...
...Clearly, neither side has been prepared to face and deal with the reality...
...They remember the days of the Big Stick, and of the many interventions in the Caribbean and Central America...
...These can best be put together under some single rubric such as a "Marshall Plan" for Latin America...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 18
