Monday, January 28, 2008
Americas Specialist Andrés Oppenheimer
Visits Houston
By George Baker
Andres Oppenheimer, the well-known U.S.-based journalist
who covers Latin America, spoke in Houston at an event sponsored by the Houston World Affairs Council on Tuesday, January
15, 2008. The Houston stopover was on his tour to promote his newly published book, Saving the Americas: the Dangerous Decline of Latin America and What the U.S. Must Do (Random House, 2007).
The book is the English edition of the previously published
Cuentos chinos (Tall Tales), published in 2005.
The reader will rightly deduce that the book is a collection of anecdotes that revolve around the interviews with senior
government officials and other public figures, access to whom is all but impossible except for a senior journalist from a
major newspaper (Miami Herald, in his case) or TV network. There is a second meaning to “tall tale” in the Spanish edition, which includes (translated)
in the subtitle “Populist Lie.”
Oppenheimer, who immigrated to the United States from
Argentina decades ago, is also host of a Spanish-language TV program, and his columns are syndicated in the United States
and Latin America. He has traveled to every corner of Latin America. He is the
author of a book on Mexican politics: Bordering on Chaos (Little Brown, 1996) about
the Salinas and Zedillo presidencies.
The author is also something of a troublemaker
(as anyone in his position should be). He told the Houston audience that on Fidel Castro’s orders he has been denied
entry into Cuba, and he refers to the cause of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela as the “Narcissist-Leninist Revolution.”
He said that, after Castro, pro-market reforms will
doubtlessly take place in Cuba – but advertised as being in Castro’s name and memory. When I spoke to him afterward, during the book signing, he commented that in Mexico the eventual opening
of the oil sector will, similarly, be done in the name of Lázaro Cárdenas.
Oppenheimer contrasted the experiences of Latin America
with those of countries that have had stellar growth stories in recent times: China, India, Ireland, Spain, and Finland, among
others (the book lacks an index, making the finding of references difficult). Oppenheimer,
who visited all of these countries in the hope of discovering insights on what is missing in Latin America, was especially
impressed by China, and, to a lesser degree, India. China, he notes, starts teaching
English four years ahead of Mexico, and assigns four hours of weekly instruction in contrast to the two hours typical of Latin
America. He quotes a list of the top 200 universities worldwide, and observes
that on this list there are only two from Latin America (Mexico’s National Autonomous University, UNAM, is 195). “The
UNAM, like most major state universities in Latin America, is inefficient no matter how you look it.” He notes that
the University of Beijing, in contrast, is ranked 17th in the list of 200 universities.
He said that there are 80,000 Chinese students
studying in America – 97% paid for by private, family money. From Latin
America, there are 7,000 students from Mexico, 5,000 from Brazil and so on. He
observed that in Asia most presidents are engineers while in Latin America most are lawyers.
“Where Asia looks to the future, Latin America looks to the past,” he said.
His major argument was that on a world stage Latin
America is becoming increasingly irrelevant: where, in the 1970s Latin America received 51% of direct foreign investment and
Asia only 27%, thirty years later the numbers were reversed. There is a chapter on the “political paralysis” in
Mexico: Oppenheimer blames many of the lost opportunities in the Fox presidency on Santiago Creel, the interior minister,
who, he says, deferred reforms so as not to jeopardize the promise of PRI support in the Congress – a promise that was
never kept.
Oppenheimer’s grounds for optimism derive largely
from the recent experiences of Brazil, where a left-of-center government has – against expectations – pursued
the rule of law while simultaneously pushing social programs to alleviate poverty. Other
countries of the region, he believes, could follow the examples of Brazil and Chile, as well as those of China and India.
As an aside, Oppenheimer told us that he had interviewed
all of the current United States presidential candidates and had asked each one this question: “Which three Latin American
presidents do you most admire?” Not surprisingly, none could name even
one. “I admire the president of Mexico,” replied one candidate, gamely.
As for steps that the United States [read: government]
could take to help Latin America, one idea he suggests would be to promote what he calls “medical tourism” by
Americans eligible for Medicare: it would mean that they could obtain medical services at certified facilities in Latin America,
thus promoting jobs in the region while alleviating overload of facilities at home.
Spain, he said, has benefitted from a similar program sponsored by the German and French governments.
In the Q&A session there was a request for a comment
about regional oil politics, but the topic was not addressed directly. He did reply to another question about the reliance
of Latin American economies on commodity exports. He gave the example of Finland,
which used to produce lumber and now designs and manufacturers cell phones. Given
that he was in front of a Houston audience, it was surprising that Oppenheimer had nothing specific to say about the oil industry
in Latin America, its challenges and needs.
While his idea of Latin America being fixated on the
past rings true in the case of Hugo Chávez, who went so far as to change the name of the country to honor Simón Bolívar [the
“Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”], an early 19th century politician and military figure, in general
the idea as an explanation seems shallow. Why should this be true? What could cause such a fixation? Time constraints did not permit an exploration of these deeper questions.
In his travels around the globe Oppenheimer discovered
many points of contrast between the logic of development in China and India (and other countries) compared to that of Mexico
and Latin America. But discovering those differences is not the same as adding
decimal points to our understanding of why Latin America is, or appears to be, stuck in a highly skewed economic model in
which the benefits tend to accrue to the Euro-Latins at the expense of the peoples of color who, in general, make up the region’s
poor.
To explain the level of poverty in the region, Oppenheimer
concentrates his anger and indignation on the shortcomings of the educational systems of Latin America, and observes that
the 21st century’s economy is about ideas, not commodities. He therefore finds fault with politicians who
want to define economic policy around the defense of a country’s natural resources.
Yet petroleum is not just any commodity. In the petroleum
producing counties, the management of the energy sector has contributed to the economic transformation that Oppenheimer wants
for the region. The rise of Petrobras and the oil system in Brazil contributed
to the creation of value, including export-quality goods and services. It is an odd omission that Brazil’s story and
that of Norway are not told as strong lessons regarding the benefits of wise policy and strong regulators.
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George Baker, a MexiData.info guest columnist, is the director of Energia.com, a publishing and consulting firm based in Houston.
