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“No excuses are necessary for making a study of United States relations with Latin America. The importance of the region to us is only equalled, except for specialists, by our ignorance of it . . . In terms of United States trade and investment, Canada and Latin America outweigh the whole rest of the world put together . . . An awareness has grown among us in these last few years that we have neglected or know little or nothing of the area of the world which is of supreme importance to us . . . [T]he whole Latin American scene has suffered from a North American failure to know and to understand.”
These plain-spoken and perceptive words words could be written today, but in fact they were written in 1959 by the then star Latin American correspondent for The New York Times Herbert L. Matthews in the foreword of a series of essays gathered to provide background for the participants in the Sixteenth American Assembly held in October of that year in the United States to discuss relations with Latin America. Presided by Henry Wriston, later CitiBank’s CEO, its roster of participants was a Who’s Who of scholars, journalists and public figures from the U.S. and all over the hemisphere supposed to be experts on U.S.-Latin America relations.
The 1959 edition of the Asssembly was the sixteenth. Others came and went since then, but Matthews’s words are still valid. He, by the way, eventually proved to be part of the problem he identified. A few months before he wrote those words he had come down from the Sierra Maestra where he had spent enough quality time with Fidel Castro to be able to assure us at the Overseas Press Club that democracy had finally arrived to Cuba.
Nothing has changed substantially since then. Reporting on Latin America continues to be an exercise in which the disinformed lead the uniformed
Three weeks ago, we chronicled in this space (“Brazil Confounds the World’s Prophets of Doom”) what we called an act of “information terrorism” performed on Brazil early last year by the financial community in the United States and elswehere when, after the late 1998 meltdown of Russia’s economy, they predicted Brazil’s economy would implode, and with it the economies of other nations in Latin America. As we said then, this was an opinion based on “the superficial analysis, the interested opinions and the catastrophic vision of the future of the most crude speculators, whose actions define markets and help create conditions that work for their own benefit—something that time and again has been suffered by various Latin American countries.”
We explained how “that same international financial community was meanwhile undermining Brazil’s economy with its loans to global speculators who were after the $63 billion in reserves in its central bank by attacking the real, the Brazilian currency, in the hope that the government would use those reserves in an attempt to defend it. But that was not mentioned in January 1999. Speculators’ balance sheets are not subject to public analysis, and the speculators themselves, such as George Soros, acquire prestige as prophets of the financial catastrophes they themselves generate.” However, we added then, “Brazil, as was expected by those who didn’t believe the Apocalypse was around the corner, not only failed to conform to those frightful predictions but has successfully navigated toward a much healthier economy than it had before.”
This has been a fact since mid-1999, but Stephen Buckley, a member of what the Washington Post pompously labels its “Foreign Service,” got around to writing about it on April 1st under the headline of “Brazilian Economy Back from the Brink.”
Should we be grateful for delayed mercies? Not really in this case, for the Post reporter, even while explaining how Brazil’s economy was “rescued,” shows he doesn’t know what happened.
“Fourteen months ago, economists, investors and other analysts forecast that the world's eighth-largest economy would be walloped by the Brazilian government's decision to float the country's currency, the real. They said that the economy would implode. They predicted that foreign investment would shrink. They warned that inflation would shoot into double figures,” writes Buckley. “But none of it happened.”
According to Buckley, “a combination of smart Central Bank policies, restrained government spending, a strong banking system and congressional progress on some key fiscal and structural reforms have rescued the country from those doomsday forecasts.”—which, by the way, in what must win this year’s understatement trophy he earlier labels “as frightening as a summer storm in Rio.”
Actually, the predictions were more like a tidal wave so, if true, the uppper levels of the Brazilian government and financial comunity must be populated by a race of supermen who should be immediately put in charge of the whole world’s economy. The Brazilians, no doubt, did a superb job of overcoming their difficulties, but 14 months later this member of the “Washington Post Foreign Service” hasn’t yet realized that the predictions were enormously overblown—and his editor must have been out to lunch when the 30 colun-inches of this story made their way into the paper.
Claudio Campuzano is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com