Don’t Leave All the PR Work To Colombian Prostitutes

[flamingdem]

* This rings so true, not only the disinterest in the USA but the general disinterest in L.A. even here at DU.

Don’t Leave All the PR Work To Colombian Prostitutes

Latin America Has More Good Reasons Than Ever to Be Noticed—And Taken Seriously

by Andrés Martinez

“The only thing that matters in the world is China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter. Consciously. People don’t give one damn about Latin America now.” That was the assessment President Richard Nixon shared with a young White House aide named Donald Rumsfeld when the latter expressed an interest in bolstering his foreign policy experience. Nixon was speaking a mere decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, at a time when Communists were taking over in Chile and acting up in South America.

Nowadays, many Americans still associate the region with little more than a good fiesta. When President Obama welcomed Mexican President Felipe Calderón (a strong ally in a bloody conflict) to the White House earlier this month, he lightheartedly made mention of the mariachis and tequila that color his memory of their gathering in Guadalajara last year.

Even the Secret Service can’t seem to muster up that much respect for the region. Eleven of its agents, you may have heard, got caught up in the erotic charms of the lovely colonial gem of Cartagena, Colombia, the setting (protagonist, really) for Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. The reserved Secret Service agents, upon finding themselves south of the border, couldn’t help but relax and join in the desmadre (mayhem). “There are people who willingly went to prostitutes and other people who ended up with prostitutes,” was the classic statement of a “senior official” to The New York Times. “Either way, it’s just unacceptable.”

Hilariously, the assistant director of the Secret Service said he regretted “any distraction from the Summit of the Americas this situation has caused,” but he needn’t have apologized. If it weren’t for his agents’ escapade, most Americans wouldn’t have noticed that their president was meeting with more than 30 fellow heads of state from the hemisphere. MORE

http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2012/04/15/don%E2%80%99t-leave-all-the-pr-work-to-colombian-prostitutes/read/nexus/

[flamingdem]

1. U.S. hipocrisy, hasta cuando?

President Obama, while personally popular throughout the Americas, found himself on the defensive at the summit meeting. It’s no wonder. Another sign of how little respect Latin America gets in Washington is that everyone knows that the three pillars of U.S. foreign policy towards the region—immigration policy, the war on drugs and the anti-Cuba embargo—are intellectually bankrupt. But hey, who cares, it’s only Latin America. People don’t give a damn. Consciously.

Latin Americans feel indignant about the tens of thousands of deaths their security forces suffer because of the demand for illicit drugs north of the Rio Grande and the lackluster effort by the United States to join the “war” in any meaningful way. Things have reached a point where large swaths of respectable opinion across Latin America are willing to contemplate the decriminalization of drugs, a conversation Barack Obama is not eager to join, certainly not in an election year.

On immigration, Latin Americans are offended by what they consider U.S. hypocrisy. They see a United States addicted to Central American and Mexican immigrant laborers but perfectly happy to exploit them by denying them legal status.

On Cuba, the scent of hypocrisy wafts from north to south as well. It’s a well-established tenet of U.S. foreign policy to engage totalitarian powers culturally and economically in order to erode their dictators’ hold on power, inundating them with subversively American influences that can’t help but spread freedom. That’s the theory, anyway (it’s taking a while in China), at least the one applied to countries that don’t harbor large embittered exile communities in Florida. MORE

http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2012/04/15/don%E2%80%99t-leave-all-the-pr-work-to-colombian-prostitutes/read/nexus/

[Judi Lynn]

2. The disease is bone-deep here. Disrespect for Latin America has been in place for ages, here.

Our own culture has been blissfully unaware of everything about Latin America from the first, simply swallowing any and everything people have heard along the way from childhood, never realizing what they were hearing was a thick cloud of delliberate misinformation, created to keep them ignorant while our government and the greedy, totally amoral companies based here raped, plundered, murdered, coerced their way into power long ago, and bribed, and seduced enough officials in other countries to throw open the doors to the bloody devouring their resources, and destructive exploitation, using EVERY method available, of their work forces to mash maximum profits from helpless hordes of people.

The only hope in our country is for an awakening of consciousness, of conscience in large numbers of U.S. citizens. Once a person has penetrated the ultra-dark fog of misinformation, disrespect, classism, racism, ignorance, and indiference promoted freely since we were children, a moment of clarity will come, and he/she can never go back to the deep misunderstanding of the past.

If only every could have that moment, finally. You only get there by concern, keeping an open mind, looking for answers, questioning new material you hear, comparing it to what you've learned before. When the pieces suddenly come together, you realize, sorrowfully, what a collossal con has really been cast upon the U.S American people by keeping us away from the truth about US influence in the Americas.
.
Shameful.

Only someone with the maturity of a totally self-seeking child would never have wondered if there might be a reason for Latin America people's resentment of the U.S. government.

[flamingdem]

3. From the comments section of the Zocalo post -

Thanks for the thoughtful comments Judy!

-- from Zocalo:

@LKitsch: “Only then will Latin America get the respect it earns by engaging in the world of commerce…”

And the phrase, “…get the respect it deserves” is sufficient reason to understand what is inherently wrong with the public view of Latin America, if not the rest of the world. This sense of entitlement and attitude that one can go anywhere in the world and do as s/he likes is quite old and it seems that most countries are finally fed up with it. I think this op-ed is spot on.

Cheers.

[roody]

4. k

[Judi Lynn]

5. I found the possible origin of the term "Ugly American."

I was still thinking about your O.P., and went to Wikipedia to see if they had anything for this term. It was used in 1948 by a Cuban photographer, who took a photo of a classic American jerk!

[center]

Constantino Arias' photo titled Ugly American,
showing a 1950s Batista-era tourist in Havana, Cuba.[1][/center]

The term was used as the title of a 1948 photograph of an American tourist in Havana by the Cuban photographer Constantino Arias (see infobox above)[38], but seems to have entered popular culture as the title of a 1958 book by authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. In 1963 the book was made into a movie directed by George Englund and starring Marlon Brando.

The best-selling, loosely fictional account provided contrasting characters with different approaches to opposing Communist influence in Southeast Asia, and the use of foreign aid in particular. The majority of the Americans exhibit a range of blundering, corrupt, and incompetent behaviors, often concentrating on impractical projects that will serve more to benefit American contractors than the local population. A minority are effective because they employ knowledge of the local language and culture, but most of these are marginalized and some even considered suspect. As a result, their influence is more limited than it should be.[39]

The title character, Homer Atkins, is introduced late in the book. He is "ugly" only in his physical appearance. His unattractive features, rough clothing and dirty hands are contrasted with the bureaucrats' freshly pressed clothes, clean fingers and smooth cheeks. Their behaviors have the opposite contrast: Atkins cares about the people of southeast Asia and wants to help them create practical solutions to their everyday problems; the bureaucrats want to build highways and dams that are not yet needed, and with no concern for the many other projects that will have to be completed before they can be used. [40] The book led to a move by President Dwight Eisenhower to study and reform American aid programs in the region.[41]

In the book, a fictional Burmese journalist wrote, "For some reason, the people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they're frightened and defensive, or maybe they're not properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance."[42]

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_American_(pejorative)

[flamingdem]

6. What a find!

This is really interesting and moreso coming out of Cuba.

It's easy to imagine the Secret Service guys whooping it up at the "Pley Club" and then being cheap about the bill! Interesting that it seems that prostitution is legal in Colombia. Didn't know that.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/04/exclusive-secret-service-bragged-about-protecting-obama-while-partying-at-colombian-brothel/