What's going on down there?

January 23, 2006 8:18 AM

I know nothing about South America. Where do I start making up for this?

It has come to my attention that despite years of "multicultural" education and what I thought was fairly unbiased attention to the news, I know next to nothing about South America. Where do I even start making up for this? What are good sources for the reality of life right now in nations like Bolivia? What are civil rights like? How does the history of revolution etc relate to the modern problems?

Furthermore, this is a common problem among my peers. I've been asking around to see what anyone knows, and every once in a while someone will be able to mention Simon Bolivar, but that's as far as anyone ever seems to know. Is there a reason that American interest seems to end around Costa Rica or Panama?

posted by honeydew to education (20 comments total)

I have learned more about South America since subscribing to the Economist than I did in my previous 27 years. Pick up a copy and see if it appeals. BBC News' website covers the region quite accessibly too, and "special reports" such as this one have gotten me up to speed fairly quickly on any number of current events in all areas.
posted by jamesonandwater at 8:26 AM on January 23, 2006

Is there a reason that American interest seems to end around Costa Rica or Panama?

USian insularity?
posted by the cuban at 8:32 AM on January 23, 2006

I find the best way to find out how a country is doing is to go there. Not exactly the most practical, but from what I've heard about countries like Venezuela, what you read/see in mass media is vastly far away from what the actual situation is there.
posted by antifuse at 8:51 AM on January 23, 2006

antifuse's suggestion may seem a little impractical, but you could learn a lot by making the first step, in taking such a trip: visit your local library and peruse the shelf of travel books for South American destinations. (They're in the 900 section somewhere if they use the Dewey Decimal system -- ask the librarian.) Or if you'd prefer reading the latest versions, do this at your local Borders & Noble.
posted by Rash at 8:59 AM on January 23, 2006

Go there. I particularly recommend Argentina. Beautiful country, friendly people, great looking women and its cheap.

Other highlights:

San Pedro de Atacama in Chile
Foz de Iguazu in Brazil
Some lovely parts of Uruguay too.
posted by mooreeasyvibe at 9:00 AM on January 23, 2006

I agree with the Economist suggestion. Some of their web content is behind a pay barrier, but some good stuff isn't. A few times when I've visited the site, I had a chance to get a free day pass by sitting through a bit of advertising. When I lived in the States, I had a subscription to the print edition. They had a deal where if you bought a subscription and bought a gift subscription, the gift subscription was much cheaper. So a friend and I went in together and split the total of the two subscriptions down the middle.

The New York Times -- hardly a revelation, I know -- does a pretty good job of covering the continent, as broad a mission as that is. Larry Rohter is a machine when it comes to cranking out articles. They may not always get good play -- you may have to dig -- but off the top of my head, I'd say he gets a piece in a few times a week at minimum.

The Wall Street Journal -- another pay-to-read source -- also does a good job of covering the region, sometimes with an eye toward economics, but not to the exclusion of politics, social issues, etc.

One news aggregator that might be worth a look is South American Daily.

Those sites are all in English. There are also the newspapers in the countries themselves, of course. I'm biased by my location (Argentina), but I read Clarín and La Nación.

As an aside, it's worth mentioning that a week or two ago, Argentina's president was on the front page of the Times in an article (by Rohter, I believe) on the various ways he's consolidating power. The fact that the article got front-page play was in turn given prominent play on Clarín's web site. In other words, it's newsworthy here when someone up there pays that kind of attention.

Or . . . you could pay me to create an executive summary of the week's events! No? OK. Fine.

As for the answer to some of your other questions, the conditions vary from country to country, as does the stability of government, etc. so it's hard to provide broad answers.

There IS a lot going on down here, though, and not just in Bolivia. Chile just elected a female president, a single mom in a country where divorce wasn't even legal until a short time ago. Argentina is having a rough time keeping inflation in check, despite price control agreements in some sectors of the economy. It's made great strides in recovering from the 2001 collapse, but there are worrying signs the easy work has all been done.

Why do countries down here get ignored? Probably one reason is that they don't have the economic or military power to make themselves forces to be reckoned with. Foreign policy priorities give weight to proximity (which South America loses out on to some extent) and economic power. Plus, lack of interest/awareness of other countries on the part of people in the U.S. is hardly unique to South America -- although it's probably true that it's acute in this case.

On preview: Travel is a GREAT way to address the problem, too, I agree. I'll buy you a beer/café con leche, honeydew, if you're in Buenos Aires.
posted by veggieboy at 9:01 AM on January 23, 2006

Don't make the mistake this guy made.
posted by wsg at 9:03 AM on January 23, 2006

Mercopress covers some of the area's news in English, particularly the Mercosur countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and to a lesser extent Chile and Bolivia).

(selflinkish disclaimer: I used to write for them occasionally and am still not quite sure what their overall editorial policy is - strange mixture of worldwide stuff and South American specific, but with a strong Falklands/Malvinas weighting. Worth a look though.
posted by penguin pie at 9:19 AM on January 23, 2006

The US has a HUGE interest in S. Amer. Particularily the war on drugs and Oil (Venezuela). Colombia is heavily supported by the US (search PLAN Colombia on google). But what most Americans do not know, is Colombia has had a civil war (for the past 40 years) that the current government refuses to acknowledge. The situation with the drugs is the result of in the 70's US controlling the price of coffee which made all the coffee farmers go broke. So then they turned to the next lucrative crop, coca. Unemployment there is very high now and the situation turns more depressed each year. Yet you will never hear about it in the news.

Also, take a look at what is happening with the upcoming elections. Another issue the US on S. America is it is heading left. All the central ameican countries are big US allies and much more conservative. One thing you can take a look at is the new political map that is being drawn.
posted by _zed_ at 9:23 AM on January 23, 2006

Oh, and its a great time to start looking South, Honeydew, a huge proportion of South America will be electing new leaders this year, and with Morales and Bachelet already enthroned in Bolivia and Chile respectively, we look to be on the brink of an interesting era.
posted by penguin pie at 9:32 AM on January 23, 2006

I second going there.

I found the Economist formula of foreign reporting pretty monotonous, particularly when it comes to South America. "X leader won in a hotly contested election, promising sweeping reforms. A fractious congress may frustrate his plans for modernization. Are his plans too ambitious? Time will tell." That summarizes about 80% of them.

Anyway, sounds like you want contemporary info, but a good history of the colonial era is Liberators.

Don't overlook the significance of the Monroe Doctrine, either.
posted by Brian James at 10:08 AM on January 23, 2006

As far as travel information or just general country/place information is concerned, nothing beats the Footprint South American Handbook.
posted by keijo at 10:23 AM on January 23, 2006

There is definitely much going on in the other Americas than gets picked up by the major US news outlets. Part of the reason is that much of what happens is behind a language barrier that the average person in the US can’t understand.

As a first step you may want to become familiar with the continent so that you know which countries are which, how big they are and other physical characteristics that may define them. I would also suggest digging around in National Geographic for other recent articles about the countries to gain a relatively unbiased understanding of their current cultural climate.

Politics is hard for outsiders to get a handle on because there is always going to be some bias in everything you read. The Economist gives a good middle of the road view. There seems to be a leftist or centrist shift that is going on in several countries. Venezuela is a prime example and is an interesting place to keep track of.
posted by JJ86 at 10:24 AM on January 23, 2006

I third (fourth?) visiting - I've been to Argentina and Uruguay - great countries, and very affordable (for people from the US) once you are there. It also changed the way I think about South America, for sure. The Buenos Aires Herald is a good English language newspaper that covers the region well.
posted by drobot at 10:39 AM on January 23, 2006

Many good suggestions above, especially for getting up to speed on what's current. I'm also a fan of Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America. For a historical perspective. Packed with as much info as a textbook, but a surprisingly fun, readable, will give you the basics of Latin America's journey in the last 500 years.
posted by donpedro at 10:50 AM on January 23, 2006

Donpedro's book recommendation made me think of a book I liked: The Heart that Bleeds, by Alma Guillermoprieto. It's a collection of her New Yorker articles. Not quite current events at this point, more very recent history.

Brian James, it's kind of true what you say re: the Economist's reporting 80% of the time. But part of me wants to say, at least part of the time, that really IS the story.
posted by veggieboy at 11:05 AM on January 23, 2006

'What are civil rights like? How does the history of revolution etc relate to the modern problems? '
FWIW, most southamericans would be hard pressed to give cogent answers beyond their own countries (or cities).

Regarding civil rights, they're fair-to-middling. Most SA countries don't have the same concept of civil rights as the US does, that is there's a smattering of legislation on the subject but no overarching concept of Civil Rights. In Chile, a few years ago, a Journalist published a tell-all book on the corruption in the Supreme Court, and was promptly outlawed by the Supreme Court itself, which made it illegal to sell the book and tried to throw her in jail. She escaped the country (becoming the only exile since we threw off pinochet) and the book became a bestseller in pirated street-vendor editions. The odd thing is nobody raised much of a stink about this from a Civil Rights point of view, just some noise about how the courts need more oversight, etc.
The history of revolution relates to modern problems mainly as an undercurrent of insatisfaction running through the poorer sectors of society, especially since most of the democratic governments which followed the dictatorships which followed the revolutions promised to finally address the problems of the lower classes. The most current example of this is the populist movements in Bolivia and Venezuela, though the final outcome is not easy to predict.
posted by signal at 11:11 AM on January 23, 2006

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano

If you are interested in a history of south america from a native without the pro capitalist, pro imperialist bent this is a fantastic and eye opening read.
This is the historical perspective I never glimpsed when I studied the Americas in High School.
posted by stavx at 1:49 PM on January 23, 2006

Also, cliched as it might seem, I find that 100 años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by G. García Márquez is a good entry point into the problems and contradictions of South America.
Also read anything by Mario Vargas Llosa and Alfredo Bryce Echeñique. Avoid Isabel Allende.
posted by signal at 5:04 PM on January 23, 2006

Another Go there, but don't just stay in the cities - bus travel in the interior is cheap and a good way to meet people who will try to speak your language. I highly recommend the interior of Brazil (my experience is in Tocantins), Rio, and Uruguay. Foz do Iguacu/Puerto Iguazu are beeeauuutiful, but very touristy. If that is a path you end up on, make sure to cross into Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) too - I was amazed by how the personalities of these three countries is apparent in such a nearby trio of border towns. Buenos Aires and São Paulo I guess I don't really "get" yet, but they make a good contrast to the above.

As far as books, there are so many good ones here already but I really liked The Brazilians, and found that the history and current (well, kinda dated now) views of the country were good preparation for an extended stay there. Enough that I "got" what was going on and could ask some half-informed questions.
posted by whatzit at 7:51 PM on February 12, 2006