Obama in Latin America: So not Nixon
President Obama plays soccer with children last Sunday during his tour of the Ciudad de Deus Favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais~AP
President Obama is not the only high-profile U.S. official to have kicked around a soccer ball in Latin America, as he did in Brazil a few days ago.
When Vice President Richard Nixon toured Latin America in 1958, he walked out onto a soccer field in front of 10,000 Ecuadorians and did some dribbling, joking that he never could use his head.
Obama didn’t try to head the ball in Rio, but I bet he could have. He is not only more athletic than Nixon ever was but also a better statesman. His popularity in Latin America is another testament to that.
In the 1950s, Nixon went to Latin America ostensibly to woo the middle classes but he wound up lecturing them and reverting to patting dictators on the back.
Obama, in contrast, went to connect with all groups. He met with elected presidents from the left and the right, and with business groups. In Rio, he visited a slum and spoke, like the former community organizer that he is, of the possibilities of self-improvement. In El Salvador, he visited the crypt of Archbishop Oscar Romero, slain by a U.S. ally in 1980.
Obama came to the poor and forgotten. Nixon avoided them, so they came to him. When he landed in Caracas, Venezuela, denizens of a lower-class neighborhood rushed his motorcade, spit on his windshield and banged it with iron bars, almost killing the vice president.
Obama has shown that he can use his head and his heart.
He can also use his identity, which he seems reluctant to do. During his visit, Brazilians often explicitly spoke of his African heritage, seeing in him an exemplar of the possibilities of progressive, mixed-race societies. Obama also obliged crowds with some Portuguese and Spanish. Nixon, in contrast, was a white, only nominally Quaker, middle-class suburbanite from southern California. He couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish, and we all know what he thought of minorities.
Of course, Obama’s success is not all due to his personality and policies. He is president in different times. The Monroe Doctrine, which allowed U.S. officials to lord over Latin America, is dead.
In Nixon’s time, U.S. officials bemoaned that Latin America was so economically dependent that when the United States caught a cold — say, a mild recession — Latin America caught pneumonia — a full-blow depression. The recent global crisis has witnessed the opposite. The U.S. is still in bed recovering, and Latin America has healed from its mild head cold, growing at 5 percent, back out on the soccer field. Obama is thus faced with ample opportunity for growth in trade and for tackling common concrete problems.
Accordingly, in contrast to the launch of the Alliance for Progress 50 years ago this month, during this latest trip the U.S. president signed minor technical agreements and stayed away from major unilateral commitments.
In a broader sense, unlike Nixon, Obama can convince Latin Americans that all “Americans” have an essential common identity and interest in which there is no domineering “big brother.” The administration’s language of “partnership” with the Americas is a good start.
The Obama administration has also been unfurling an interesting rhetoric about history when dealing with Latin America. Since Obama went to the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago in April 2009, he acknowledged tensions in the past but refused to get bogged down in apologies or debates about them.
“I didn’t come here to debate the past, I came here to deal with the future,” he said at the summit.
In Chile, a Chilean reporter asked Obama if he would “ask for forgiveness” for the Nixon government’s support for the regime of Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende and then killed and tortured thousands. Obama offered to give Chile access to the CIA’s Pinochet file, but refused to apologize.
“The history of relations between the United States and Latin America has at times been extremely rocky,” he said. “I can’t speak to all of the policies of the past. . . . It’s important for us to learn from our history, to understand our history, but not be trapped by it.”
What Obama is really trapped by is Nixon’s Republican Party. If only it could use its own head, stop blocking all progress in inter-American relations and enter the 21st century as Obama has.
Alan McPherson is associate professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
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