by Barry Rubin
Both the United States and Latin American states shared the experi ence of waging independence wars against European colonialism from Britain and Spain, respectively. Yet almost from the start, Latin Americans reestablished their identification with Spain and shared much of the European anti-American critique. They did not welcome U.S.-style liberal democracy or its antitraditional approach. Their society was based on big estates, oligarchy, centralization, and a very strong church. But while they rejected the mass industrialized society built in the United States, they were also envious of that country and all too conscious of their own failure to make dramatic progress.
Two themes intertwined in the long history of anti-Americanism there. First, Latin America believed itself to be culturally and morally superior to the United States, which made its relative weakness all the more frustrating and hard to explain. Second, the failure to catch up or surpass the United States was blamed on American policy.
Conservatives in the ruling oligarchies and army shared the sentiments of the European right, including a suspicion of America as too secular, soulless, modernist, and Protestant. The left's emphasis was that U.S. imperialism was the source of all their problems. Yet each side used all of these themes. A sense of superiority coupled with one of victimization would always characterize Latin American anti-Americanism across the political spectrum.
Still, American behavior toward Latin America would often be of an imperialistic nature and constituted an important factor in antiAmericanism. Arguably, no anti-Americanism in the world was more rational than that arising in Latin America. Yet even this objective situation left much room for interpretation. The distinction most important regarding anti-Americanism was between those who criticized specific U.S. policies and those who made a blanket condemnation of that country.
As many Latin Americans recognized, American power and progress were more humiliating reminders or scapegoats than causes for the fact that the region was often bogged down in military juntas, bitter factionalism, repression, instability, weak economies, and social repression. At the most basic level, the roots of anti-Americanism in Latin America arose from the encounter between a united, successful, and powerful country with two dozen divided, weak, and frustrated ones. The antiAmerican standpoint, especially among intellectuals, however, would reflexively interpret events and American actions in the most hostile sense possible.
From the very start, Latin America was at pains to distinguish its identity and strategy for progress as being different from that of the United States. Simon Bolivar, the general who did the most to lead South American armies to victory in the independence wars, was called the "George Washington of South America." But, unlike Washington, he favored highly centralized political systems with strong presidents, perhaps chosen for life, and he seriously considered establishing a monarchy. So antagonistic to the United States was Bolivar that he sarcastically remarked that it would be better for South America to adopt the Muslim holy book, the Qu'ran, rather than U.S.-style institutions. As early as August 5, 1829, in a letter to a British diplomat about the unsuitability of the American system, Bolivar asked whether the United States was destined to plague South America with misery in the name of liberty.2
Indeed, the old colonial power, Spain specifically, and Europe generally would remain the role model for Latin American politicians and intellectuals. In 1845, for example, former president Joaquin Pinto of Chile said: "We will never use the methods of democracy as practiced in the United States of America, but rather the political principles of Spain."' Yet Spanish institutions were antidemocratic, highly centralized, and monarchist, and they inhibited progress, helping to ensure that the country fell steadily further behind the rest of Europe.
When Latin Americans remarked on visits to the United States in their writings, they sounded quite similar to their European counterparts. The conservative Mexican writer Lucas Alaman was quite sarcastic about any U.S. claim "to be in the vanguard of nineteenth-century civilization." After all, that country lacked morality, order, and good customs. Even American diversity provoked his scorn: "We are not a people of merchants and adventurers ... and refuse of all countries whose only mission is to usurp the property of the miserable Indians, and later to rob the fertile lands opened to civilization by the Spanish race.... We are a nation formed three centuries ago, not an aggregation of peoples of differing customs."4
Like Europeans, South Americans saw the United States as merely materialistic while they occupied a higher spiritual plane. Benjamin Vicuna MacKenna, the Chilean statesman and writer, thought Americans put too much emphasis on making everything the biggest and best. MacKenna's 1856 travel book duplicated many European criticisms with only slight variations. Thus, while Europeans were scandalized by tobacco spitting, he was dismayed by the way Americans ate apples.'
As in Europe, though slightly earlier, the fear of a threatening United States also arose. The first dangerous omens were seen in the revolt of American settlers to win Texas's independence from Mexico in the 1830s, followed by its incorporation into the United States, and the U.S. defeat of Mexico in the 1848 war, leading to the annexation of California and other territories from that country.
Francisco Bilbao, a Chilean, wrote America in Danger in 1856, in which he included a remarkable prophecy that the two great future empires would be Russia and the United States, with the latter trying "to secure the domination of Yankee individualism throughout the world." Their proximity made the Yankees most dangerous for South America. Already, it "extends its talons ... against the south. Already we see fragments of America falling into the jaws of the Saxon boa ... as it unfolds its tortuous coils. Yesterday it was Texas then it was northern Mexico and the Pacific that greets a new master."6
Bilbao's proposed solution was to imitate the secrets of U.S. success: "Let us not scorn, let us rather incorporate in ourselves all that shines in the genius and life of North America. We should not despise under the pretext of individualism all that forms the strength of the races."7 A similar point was made by a Guatemalan leader: "It's curious that in the heart of the United States, the source of our pain is also where our remedy is."" But few Latin Americans agreed with that assessment.
Not surprisingly, it was in Mexico, the only Latin American country bordering the United States, where the greatest suspicions developed toward the United States. It was Porfirio Diaz, Mexico's dictator during most of the nineteenth century's second half, who supposedly coined the famous lament, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States."' In 1877, the Mexican poet Guillermo Prieto, after a visit there, rejected the idea that anything good could come from the United States. He wrote bitterly,
They can do everything; they can change the shreds of my unhappy country into splendid nations, booty of deceit, victims of outrage!10
But Mexico was not the only country that saw itself as a victim. Already by 1893, the Brazilian Eduardo Prado claimed, quite inaccurately, "There is no Latin American nation that has not suffered in its relations with the United States."" The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked a decisive escalation of such sentiments. American forces defeated Spain and gave Cuba independence, though bypassing the Cuban nationalist movement already fighting for that cause. The defeat of the oppressive mother country, Spain, however, stirred more sympathy in Latin America than the however imperfect liberation by the United States.
Immediately after the war, a spate of novels attacking the United States was published throughout the region. One of them, El Problema, by a Guatemalan, Maximo Soto-Hall, defined Latin America's problem as the penetration of North American companies anxious to grab its oil, mineral resources, or fruit. Those responsible were heartless Yankee businessmen or managers who worked with servile local overseers. They seduced maidens while colluding with politicians to steal the nation's resources. At the same time, they represented a cultural invasion armed with whiskey, aspirin, their strange language, and immoral ways.12
One of the most out
spoken critics of the United States and supporters of Spain in this period was Jose Santos Chocano. Born in Peru in 1875, Chocano was a poet who so expressed continental sentiments that he was hailed as the "Poet of America." He wrote of the glories of the Incas and the Spanish race, ignoring the fact that the latter had committed genocide on the former. "My blood is Spanish and Inca is my pulse," he wrote in one poem. On two occasions, in 1894 in Peru and 1920 in Guatemala, Chocano's involvement in failed revolutions ended with imprisonment. The second time, he was saved from execution only by the intervention of the king of Spain, among others.
Latin America's most popular poet viewed the conflict with the United States in racialist terms, as a battle for dominance between Anglo-Saxons and Latins. He wrote in his poem "The Epic of the Pacific (Yankee Style)".
Chocano had predicted that the North Americans, "the race with blonde hair," would not succeed in building the Panama Canal. Only Latin Americans "with dark heads" could do so.14 But he was wrong. The U.S. building of the Panama Canal showed that the gap in effective organization and institutions could not be banished by poetry. Even the idea of racial solidarity was disproved as Panamanians used U.S. backing to seize independence in their own interest against a Colombian regime that had so long neglected their isolated province.
Both Bilbao, who was basically a liberal democrat, and Chocano, a romantic nationalist, agreed very much on one point. To maintain their sovereignty and ward off the U.S. threat, their people would have to learn from what their rival had done, certainly through technological progress, possibly by social modernization. Yet it was Latin America's failure to do so, its inability to stamp out chaos and put its own house in order, which invited U.S. intervention. In that sense, Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would most resemble the Middle East in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Also, in both cases, the frustration of local failure produced a high level of anti-Americanism and the notion that-in addition to all its other sins-it was actually the United States' fault that they had not succeeded.
One of the earliest and best-known of such arguments came from Ruben Dario, the Nicaraguan poet, journalist, and diplomat who repeatedly expressed his distaste for civilization North American style. After an 1893 visit to New York, he called that city "the gory, the cyclopean, the monstrous capital of the banknote." Five years later, he wrote that Americans were "red-faced, heavy and gross ... like animals in their hunt for the dollar."15
Responding to the canal issue, Dario composed a 1904 poem, "To Roosevelt," which became one of the best-known works of Latin American literature and was assigned to generations of students to memorize. Indeed, it stands as the clearest statement of the Latin American critique of the United States. The United States is "the future invader" of the innocent America that has Indian blood, speaks Spanish, and practices Christianity. True, the United States is powerful as a lion and rich, too, but this is merely crudeness. In contrast, Latin America was heir to the great ancient cultures and a mass producer of poets. It was a place of light, fire, perfume, and love. In comparison, the people of the United States were "men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul" who "lack one thing: God! "1fi
But, like some other anti-Americans, Dario would change his mind about the country he initially so reviled. Only two years later, in 19o6, Dario would write another poem urging his brothers to learn "constancy, vigor and character" from the Yankees. On a later visit to New York, he described it as a city of happy laughing boys and bright girls.'' Dario even wrote a friendly tribute to the United States and called for a union of all the American republics.'8 These lesser-known statements show that, despite objections to U.S. policy and fear of future American intentions, the Latin American response was far from exclusively one of resentment. But, even more significantly, these were not the images that would dominate the anti-American side of the Latin American intellectual tradition.
Joining the wars of 1848 and 1898 and the canal issue as anti-American grievances was the growing U.S. power in the area. American involvement and control over the region's economics and politics were proportionately greater than they have ever been in any other area of the world. United States Marines intervened more than a dozen times in Caribbean states from 1905 through the 19206 at times of civil war or social disor- der.19 American companies owned large tracts of land in some countries, controlling the key products for export and even determining-in the case of the United Fruit Company-who governed such states as Honduras and Guatemala.
The anger of Latin American intellectuals at U.S. economic power was most clearly expressed by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, diplomat, and Communist who won the Nobel Prize for his poetry and the Stalin prize for his politics. In "The United Fruit Company," he sarcastically suggested that the corporation had benefited from God's partition of the universe among big American corporations. There, the company killed the heroes who harassed it, chose the dictators, carried off booty, and oppressed the workers 20 The United States turned these countries into "Banana Republics" whose "farcical society" was built over the bodies of the great heroes of liberty. The United States "abolished free will/gave out imperial crowns," and created "the dictatorship of flies."21 In a sim ilar poem, "The Standard Oil Company," Neruda wrote that the "obese emperors" of Latin America-"suave and smiling assassins"-lived in New York buying the continent's products, land, governments, and whole countries at will.22
There were valid complaints about the brutal behavior of these powerful companies, which often enjoyed U.S. government backing. But they also contained the basis of an idea that both radical and conservative Latin American intellectuals often accepted: that American influence was to blame for everything, that dictators and injustice would not have existed if there had been no such U.S. presence, and that such behavior was innate in the U.S. system.
Yet while such sentiments were incorporated into the rhetoric of Latin American anti-Americanism, they took a place alongside such other factors as the idea that the United States was inferior on racial and religious grounds or that its system, apparently so successful, was evil in itself. This kind of thinking was manifested in a belief that Latin Americans had been endowed by the culture of the pre-Columbian inhabitants and Spain with qualities superior to the materialistic, vulgar culture of America, which disrupted family, tradition, religion, and all the things that made Latin America unique.23
As in Europe, such ideas were embraced by both leftists and rightists. Many of the region's greatest intellectuals and cultural figures expressed such concepts endlessly throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: "If there is real poetry in our America, it is to be found in things refined ... in the legendary Indian, in the subtle and sensual Inca, in the great [Aztec Emperor] Montezuma of the Golden Throne. The rest I leave to you, Oh Democratic Walt Whitman," wrote the Nicaraguan poet Dario in 1896.24
One of the most important such anti-American works in Latin America was Ariel, by the Uruguayan critic, essayist, and philosopher Jose Enrique Rod6. Its publication in i9oo was hailed as the continent's definitive manifesto, as it called on Latin Americans to reject the materialistic values represented by America and hold true to their own superior civilization. The book's similarities to European anti-Americanism are striking but not accidental since Rod6, like many of his compatriots, combined a mystical celebration of the pre-Columbian heritage with an impassioned admiration of French culture.
In his prologue to a later edition of Ariel, Carlos Fuentes, an important anti-American writer in his own right, made this connection clear. France "gave us culture without strings and a sense, furthermore, of elegance, disinterestedness, aristocracy, and links to the culture of the classics solely lacking in the vagabond, unrooted, homogenizing pioneer culture of the United States ."21 No Frenchmen could have more elegantly put the case for French superiority and American inferiority.
In Ariel, Rodo identifies the spirit of Latin America with Ariel, who symbolizes the "noble, soaring aspect o
f the human spirit. He represents the superiority of reason and feeling over the base impulses of irrationality. He is generous enthusiasm, elevated and unselfish motivation in all actions, spirituality in culture, vivacity and grace in intelligence ... the ideal toward which human selection ascends."26
In contrast, the United States is the brutish Caliban, a "spirit of vulgarity" who cannot "distinguish the delicate from the vulgar, the ugly from the beautiful," and certainly could not tell "good from evil." These traits arise inevitably in a democratic society like the United States, which enthrones a "code of conduct by utilitarianism in which our every action is determined by the immediate ends of self-interest." In short, Rodo concluded, basing his case on quotations from French philosophers, "Democracy is the ... dominance of a mediocre individualism."27 The American has achieved wealth, "but good taste has eluded him."28
While the United States appeared to be winning as it accumulated money and won wars, these triumphs were meaningless. Latin America represented a highly cultured Athens, while North America was merely the incarnation of materialistic Phoenicia and militaristic Sparta. It would fail and leave no heritage.29
Rodo warned that "left to itself-without the constant correction of a strong moral authority to refine and channel its inclinations in the direction of exaltation of life-democracy will gradually extinguish any superiority that does not translate into sharper and more ruthless skills in the struggles of self-interest, the self-interest that then becomes the most ignoble and brutal form of strength."30 America merely represented an empty pursuit of well-being as an end in itself"
The complaint of most anti-American intellectuals during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century was not that the Yankees inhibited democracy or progress in Latin America-as later left ists would suggest-but rather that they were offering a bad model of excessive democracy and too much change, a system that neither worked well nor fit with the continent's own heritage.
