The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, together with his US counterpart, Joe Biden, during an official meeting in Washington, on July 12. KEVIN LAMARQUE (REUTERS)
It's Americanism for "spoiltness", another Americanism.
I would add to the meaning offered by the Royal Academy —“quality of the spoiled”—, that of futility.
How inane it is to snub the Summit of the Americas that Biden called for last June because they did not invite his three dictator friends.
Only to agree to go to Washington with a list of wishes and leave, once again, pending the serious immigration problem that ceased to be exclusively Mexican a long time ago.
Dwelling on the Latin American rudeness that, from time to time, marks our diplomatic relations with Washington provides an opportunity to laugh at our foolish jingoistic nonsense without for that reason one should forget the many damages that the gringos have done us.
It is worth remembering, however, as Moisés Naím observes, that many of our ills have been the result of decisions taken, not in Washington, but in our capitals.
All in all, the “anti-American obsession”, as Jean-François Revel called it twenty years ago, is a complex and universal disorder, by no means exclusively Latin American.
It has both sides and, among us, one of them, or both!, is the fascination that the Cuban Revolution still exerts.
Among democratically elected Latin American politicians, it is today in good spirits to flirt with Havana and thus dragon for independence and sovereignty against Washington.
Havana has always known how to take advantage of that weakness that, to tell the truth, never fails, domestically, to yield electoral results.
It wasn't always like this.
The late Carlos Andrés Pérez, one of the first champions of the economic reforms induced by the Washington consensus in the late 1980s, patented a form of Latin American performative anti-Yankeeism: the inauguration with Commander Fidel Castro as a guest star.
With Fidel absent, AMLO has had to make do with Nicolás Maduro and the insipid Díaz-Canell.
These pantomimes of anti-Yankeeism without practical consequences reminded me of the brilliant Antonio José Urbina, the man who prevented a mob from lynching Richard M. Nixon during a state visit that the then Vice President of the United States made to Caracas in 1958.
Urbina, nicknamed “Caraquita”, was the head of the Communist Youth in Caracas during the resistance to the military dictator Pérez Jiménez, who was violently overthrown in January 1958. In May of that year, the State Department organized a South American tour for Nixon that resulted in a hemispheric public relations fiasco.
The culminating moment of that ill-fated tour was a violent street demonstration to repudiate Nixon, organized by Caraquita, given the support provided by his government to the dictatorship.
There was then an anti-Yankee mass boom, fueled by communist agitators.
The provisional government had no interest in upsetting the mood of the populace and deliberately neglected the safety of the illustrious visitor.
It was then that Nixon's motorcade was ambushed by the mob in the narrow streets of downtown.
A May 26
Life
magazine cover of that year shows Caraquita's men kicking in the door of the Cadillac.
Moments after the kick captured by the
Life
photographer , the mob began to shake the Cadillac.
Years later, Caraquita would remember the moment when, on top of the car, he could see the Secret Service agents draw their weapons.
She could see Mrs. Patty and Nixon, circumspect and livid.
Caraquita had seen the hated political police agents of the ousted Pérez Jiménez lynch, very closely and only weeks before.
The rage against the dictator and his friends in Washington had not yet died down.
"If the mob managed to overturn the car, Nixon would surely be taken out and lynched."
“I had a flash of
real politik”
, he would tell many years later.
“That frightened man in the backseat of the Cadillac was the Vice President of the United States and this was 1958, it was John Foster Dulles, my brother!: if the mob dragged Nixon into the street and killed him, the 82nd would follow Airborne Division and that was the end of the provisional government film”.
In one jump, Caraquita stood in front of the Cadillac and ordered his men to clear an escape route at all costs, without ever ceasing to talk the hell out of Yankee imperialism or yelling
Nixon go home
.
Thus they forced a truck full of press cameramen to act as a battering ram and make way for the caravan through the vociferous crowd.
Nixon's version of the incident in his book
Six Crises
does not contradict Caraquita's story at all.
"Everything in its proper measure: total, we had already kicked the bodywork and broken the windows of the Cadillac," said my friend.
“That was enough as a statement.
Lynching Nixon in the center of Caracas would have been a rudeness, I don't know if I explain myself."
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