by Barry Rubin
An interesting detail about Rod6's work was his use as the story's hero of Ariel, a character from William Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. In Shakespeare's tale, Prospero, an Italian ruler fleeing a coup, and his daughter are washed ashore on an island. There they meet Ariel, a spirit with magical powers, and Caliban, an ignoble savage who Prospero makes his servant. Prospero uses Ariel to rule the island.32
Rod6 identifies the spirit of Latin America with the noble Ariel and that of the United States with the brutish Caliban. Democracy in the United States is no more than the "enthronement of Caliban."33 Yet, a century later, Latin American and European anti-Americans had completely reversed this metaphor. Now the evil United States was portrayed as a symbolic Prospero in its insatiable thirst for domination, while Latin America-or the Third World, or the entire world-was embodied in the unjustly repressed, falsely slandered Caliban. Ariel was merely a dupe of imperialism, a collaborator with imperialist domination.
The contradictory use of these images shows well the mixed strands that merged under the banner of anti-Americanism. Conservative and romantic thinking viewed Latin America and Europe (and later the Middle East) as superior, aristocratic cultures dragged down by racially inferior and crude American upstarts who represented a decadent democracy and a society with too much freedom. In short, America was too radical and modern. From the leftist perspective, though, Europe and Latin America (and later the Middle East) were portrayed as weaker, oppressed societies facing domination by a reactionary, antidemocratic United States, which allegedly considered them inferior and inhibited them from changing. These conflicting ideas often existed in the same thinkers or movements with no sense of their opposite origins or implications.
This theme of Latin American superiority proved persistent as the message of countless Latin American literary and nonfiction works, like the 1917 prose-poem of Jose Vargas Vilz, a Colombian novelist, who branded North Americans as "barbarians," "drunken mobs," and "a voracious, unfriendly, disdainful race," committed to the "doctrine of plun dering, robbery, and conquest." The United States was no more than "a burly bandit" cutting the throats of other nations.34
One of the best embodiments of the European-Latin American link and superior-victim themes for anti-Americanism was Manuel Ugarte. Born in Buenos Aires in 1878, he went to Paris after graduating college and became a noted cultural figure there. On visiting the United States and Mexico in 1900 and 1901, he became convinced that the United States was seeking to dominate Latin America. He began a campaign of writings and lectures, supported by French and Spanish intellectuals, in Europe and Latin America to rouse people against the Yankee peril.35
His 1923 book, Destiny of a Continent, was part travelogue, part antiAmerican indictment, coupling anti-imperialist rhetoric with the older themes of Latin American cultural superiority. The United States was following the tradition of the Romans, Napoleon's France, and other peoples "overflowing with vigor" to seek empires. By not opposing this threat more energetically, his fellow Latin Americans were giving "proofs of an inferiority" that the Americans then used to justify their expan- sionism.36
Ugarte angrily claimed that Americans looked down on their neighbors to the south. Most Americans, he wrote, viewed Latin Americans as "savages, ridiculous phenomena, degenerates. "37 But, sounding like the French intellectuals who so influenced him, Ugarte made it clear that this was the way he felt toward North Americans. The United States was "great, powerful, prosperous, astonishingly progressive, supreme masters of energy and creative life, healthy and comfortable." But its people were also too practical, proud, and unprincipled, having the mentality of a "cowboy, violent and vain of his muscles, who civilizes the Far West by exterminating simultaneously the virgin forest and the aboriginal races in the same highhanded act of pride and domination. "18
At the U.S.-Mexico border, Ugarte explained, one could clearly see the difference between the "Anglo-Saxon ... hard, haughty and utilitarian, infatuated with his success and his muscular strength," who domi nates nature and uses other races as servants in exchange for some "crumbs of the feast." In contrast, Mexico's people had "easy-going customs," were closer to nature, and had "contemplative, dreamy tendencies" that made them generous.39
One of Ugarte's ideas, which was a forerunner of contemporary antiAmerican thinking, was that the very fact that the United States did not act like other imperialistic states proved that it was even worse than they were. By not seeking full or permanent political control of Latin American states, the United States showed that it was more subtly dangerous. "Only the United States," he wrote, understood how to be expansionist by using alternative tactics: "At times imperious, at other times suave, in certain cases apparently disinterested, in others implacable in its greed.... North American imperialism is the most perfect instrument of domination."40
In fact, the U.S. refusal to incorporate Latin America into a political empire was said to show clearly how devious, racist, and aggressive it was. The Americans did not want to annex people it viewed as inferior to avoid "any impairing or enfeebling of the superiority which he claims. "41 In other words, Americans looked down on the peoples of the south so much that they would not even take them as subjects. In later decades, this need to explain the imperialism of a country that consciously rejected such methods would spawn all sorts of theories of neocolonialism, whose supposed tools included cultural exports as well as economic investment and political plots.
Even many of those noting that local problems, not foreign oppression, was the real reason for the region's difficulties still made clear their disdain for the overwhelming, overbearing neighbor to the north. One example was Gabriela Mistral, an esteemed Chilean educator, writer, and poet who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1945. Her work focused on practical progress for her society. Even when she called for continental unity against the Yankee menace, she emphasized the need for higher standards and harder work as the key factor.
It was necessary, she wrote in "The Scream," to fight "the invasion of blond America that wants to sell us everything, to populate our lands and cities with her machinery, to use our resources that we don't know how to exploit." But she also claimed not to hate the Yankee:
He is winning ... because of our fault-for our torrid weakness and for Indian fatalism. He is crumbling us by virtue of some of his qualities and because of all of our racial vices. Why do we hate them? Let us hate what is in us that makes us vulnerable to his ... will and to his opulence.... We talk tirelessly while ... meanwhile he sees, he founds, he saws, works, multiplies, forges, creates ... every minute, believes in his own faith and because of his faith, he is ... invincible.42
Despite all this talk, however, there was surprisingly little antiAmerican action by Latin American states. Perhaps that was largely because in most countries, the local factors of factional conflict and civilian-military rivalries determined matters and the United States was of little importance. In a few places, mainly in Central America, U.S. influence was indeed powerful enough to ensure that no hostile political movements succeeded and could be held responsible for repressive regimes at various times in the past.
In this context, then, it is not surprising that the most significant antiAmerican revolution was waged in one such country, Nicaragua. Under the leadership of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the flag of revolt was raised in 1927 against what he called the "drug dependent Yankees," "Yankee cowards and criminals," and "adventurous Yankees who are trampling Nicaragua's sovereignty under foot." These people were nothing more than "blond beasts," "blond pirates," and "piratical assassins." Sandino's country had suffered far more than most from American depredations, and he himself was killed by a U.S.-backed army that soon backed the corrupt Somoza dynasty.
But Sandino, later hailed as a progressive (so enshrined by the Marxist Sandinista movement), expressed a racialist anti-Americanism that was consistent with the most reactionary traditionalist forces in the region. His view of the United States as evil, innately aggressiv
e, and inhumanly greedy made him identify all Americans as the enemy. "The North American people," he said in 1930, "support and will always support the expansionist policies of their unprincipled governments." On another occasion, Sandino explained, "The North American people are as imperialistic as their own leaders."43
When later developed by radical intellectuals in Latin America and elsewhere, this kind of thinking would blame America for the failure of their own utopian revolutions. This view would also justify antiAmerican terrorism there or elsewhere in the world, since all citizens of that country were complicit in its profiteering and thus legitimate targets. In addition, the idea that everyone was suffering because of America made a good ideology for mobilizing an entire national or religious community. Everyone from the "victim" country could unite in their hatred for everyone in the "imperialist" state. Thus, Marxism, a supposedly class doctrine, became adapted for effective use by nationalist (or even radical Islamist) movements or demagogic dictators.
Two new developments helped put anti-Americanism at the center of revolutionary ideology in Latin America during the middle years of the twentieth century. One was the growth of what had hitherto been a small intellectual class there. As universities expanded in the 1930s and thereafter, students were attracted to new versions of Marxism, often indoctrinated in radical views by their professors. Anti-Americanism, which had previously been spread largely by random literary works, now was systematically taught by institutions to large elements of the elite in every country.
The other new development was the Cold War. In earlier decades, the United States had been little concerned with Latin America except where some collapse or short-term crisis forced involvement in a specific country. President Franklin Roosevelt had even ended interventions in the 1930s with his Good Neighbor Policy. But with the worldwide U.S.-Soviet conflict beginning in the late 1940s, and especially after the Cuban revolution opened a new Cold War front in 1959, the United States became concerned with a potential Marxist revolution in every country. Consequently, it also became more likely to back local military and right-wing forces who promised that they would forestall this danger if only given American help.
The first victim of this new situation was Guatemala, where the CIA helped overthrow a left-wing populist, but non-Communist, government in 1954 and replaced it with a military junta. That regime's previous president had been Juan Jose Arevalo'44 who expressed his bitterness in a 1961 book, The Shark and the Sardines. In contrast to Sandino, Arevalo took a different approach. "The great North American people" were unaware "of how many crimes have been committed in their name." They were also "victims of an imperialist policy" steered by big business. Originally, the United States had been "inspired by ideals of individual freedom, collective well-being and national sovereignty," but in the twentieth century this "grandeur of spirit was replaced by greed" and the government became the "protector of illicit commercial profits."45
Yet even he did not forego all the long-standard cliches of Latin American anti-Americanism. In his fable, America, represented by a shark, is a great beast "that dismembers all, destroys all, and swallows all, in sporting slaughter." It is amused when it passes a sardine that trembles in fear. A serpent sees the scene and proposes they work together as brothers, a parody on the spirit of Pan-American or Cold War cooperation. The shark would use its money, power, and ferocity to help the sardine, which would be a good servant, applaud his speeches, and spy on others to make sure they are the shark's friends. The shark agrees, but then whispers to the sardine, "Just wait till I catch you alone! "46
But the man who was caught alone, in the most celebrated antiAmerican incident of the time, was Vice President Richard Nixon when he visited Latin America in 1958. At the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, he was confronted by an angry crowd that threw stones at him. Returning to his hotel, Nixon was spat at by another mob. In Caracas, Venezuela, his motorcade from the airport was attacked by an angry crowd that used both rocks and spit. The latter flew so freely that his driver had to turn on the windshield wipers, and the chanting crowd almost overturned his car. In Venezuela, aside from all the long-term causes of antagonism, and perhaps deliberate Communist efforts, there were two grievances against the United States: the unpopular military junta enjoyed U.S. support, and the United States had just imposed restrictions on oil imports from that country.
This was only the beginning. Latin America was about to become the location of the world's second major state sponsor of anti-Americanism.47 The U.S. relationship with Cuba had long been one of the most complex in the region. While the United States had freed Cuba from Spain and then given it independence, there had been many U.S. interventions in that unstable country that were motivated by a high degree of investment in the sugar industry, tourism, and other areas. Still, there were also strong currents in American policy that believed that democracy and reform were the best ways to fight Communism. Thus, even after Fidel Castro overthrew the incumbent, U.S.-backed dictatorship on January 1, 1959, the United States tried to build a good relationship with him.
But revolutionary Cuba, soon transformed into a Communist state, was a new phenomenon in Latin America: a country dedicated to a continent-wide revolution against America. The Cuban regime called its land the first territory of the Americas liberated from the United States. The price for this step, though, included an economic and political dependency on Moscow, a typical (except for its rhetoric) Latin American dictatorship, and a degree of conflict with the United States far higher than if Castro had been an independent nationalist.
The main statement of Cuban foreign policy, the February 1962 Second Declaration of Havana, constituted a declaration of war on the United States and the enshrinement of a new theory of antiAmericanism. Latin American states had failed to develop and were even becoming poorer, it charged, because they were in thrall to American imperialism. "Like the first Spanish conquerors, who exchanged mirrors and trinkets with the Indians for silver and gold, so the United States trades with Latin America. "48 According to the declaration, only the United States was holding back the solutions for such Latin American problems as unemployment, inadequate housing, shaky economies, and a sagging infrastructure.
The whole purpose of American diplomacy and military policy was said to be maintaining this system, which, according to the declaration, could only be overturned by revolution. This struggle would provoke U.S. countermeasures, but by the same token it would ensure a spreading anti-Americanism that would fuel its triumph: "Even though the Yankee imperialists are preparing a bloodbath for America they will not succeed in drowning the people's struggle. They will evoke universal hatred against themselves. This will be the last act of their rapacious and caveman system."49
This basic approach to anti-Americanism would continue to dominate the Latin American left for many decades, and for good reason. It proposed that all local problems and rivalries were to be subsumed into a unity of the people against the United States. By this means, the limited appeal of Communism would be greatly extended by dressing it up as nationalism. Expelling U.S. influence was presented as a magic elixir that would quickly and decisively solve the region's long-standing problems. Anti-Americanism was no longer one feature of regional ideology; it was to be the centerpiece.
Moreover, unlike earlier intellectuals who only wrote books or poems, the Cubans tried to put their theory into practice. Che Guevara, Castro's lieutenant who was assigned the leadership role for the hemisphere-wide revolution, explained in i96i that though the United States imposed its "domination over every one of the twenty republics," American imperialism was on its way into the dustbin of history.so
But Guevara was wrong. Choosing Bolivia as the first place to test his revolutionary theory, he launched guerrilla war there in 1967. But he underestimated his adversary while misunderstanding that country's people and society. Thanks to a U.S. counterinsurgency effort, it was not long before his bullet-riddled body was being displayed. The war first
unleashed in Bolivia by Cuba and its followers did intensify antiAmerican hatred in Latin America, yet this strategy also blew up in their faces. There were no Communist revolutions but plenty of hard-line military regimes that seized power and repressed opposition in order to prevent such an outcome.
A score of radical groups with the words "People's," "Revolutionary," and "Army," in their names fought local regimes throughout the late 196os and into the 1970s in almost every Latin American country. Even in Chile, where the elected government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a brutal coup, the army did not need much more encouragement than the knowledge that the United States would not oppose them. The battles were fought out mainly among local forces. The resulting costly violence in so many countries simply became one more factor holding back the continent's development.
Other than kidnapping a few Americans and attacking some embassies, the revolutionaries did little damage to U.S. interests. AntiAmericanism, though, depended less on weapons than on words, a tool more easily wielded by Latin American intellectuals. Dozens of writers emerged to bash the United States with varying degrees of literary skill, to repeat the charge that it was to blame for everything. Their ideas had far more impact on fellow intellectuals-including those in Europe and the United States-than on local workers and peasants. But, ironically, while they decried American culture, it was the ideas of such intellectuals that dominated American thinking about Latin America on campuses, in publishing houses, in Hollywood, and in much of the media.
Such anti-American intellectuals, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa wrote sarcastically, took grants from American institutions while endlessly proclaiming "that American imperialism-the Pentagon, the monopolies, Washington's cultural influence-is a source of our underdevelopment." They detected CIA plots in everything from "tours of the Boston Symphony [to] Walt Disney cartoons." This also gave them the ideal tool for delegitimizing critics: branding them as American agents.51 Such was the charge, for example, against even the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez when he resigned from the Communist Party.52 No accusation was considered too extreme or undocumented, as was the case with claims that the United States advocated population control in Latin America to get rid of competing peoples, an imperialist measure just one step short of genocide."
