Yankee Go Home & The American Dream? Confronting the Puzzling Coexistence of Anti-American Elite Rhetoric and Pro-American Public Opinion in Latin America

YANKEE GO HOME & THE AMERICAN DREAM? CONFRONTING THE PUZZLING COEXISTENCE OF ANTI-AMERICAN ELITE RHETORIC AND PRO-AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION IN LATIN AMERICA David Cupery Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts In September, 2013, 84% of Ecuadorian respondents told pollsters they had a positive opinion of the United States.1 However, in the months before, Ecuador’s popular President, Rafael Correa, had publicly railed against United States hypocrisy, meddling, and respect for human rights on numerous occasions. In one speech, Correa rejected US trade preferences , labeling them as blackmail and offering to use the money Ecuador gained from the preferences to provide human rights training to the US government (Correa 2013a). Correa’s direct criticism of the regional hegemon was not new. The South American leader has often been labeled anti-American by western journalists and pundits (for example, see Gupta 2013). How do we reconcile the coexistence of a Latin American public that largely views the US favorably and regional leaders who don’t skip over a chance to point out any of El Norte’s sins or shortcomings? Past research provides a partial answer. Latin American public opinion toward foreign powers is more consistently influenced by objective experiences with economic exchange than by elite rhetoric (Baker and Cupery 2013). However, what about mass influence on elite rhetoric? Why would a popularlyelected leader give so much attention to a position that his people appear not to share? This paper addresses this puzzle by describing and explaining Latin American elite political rhetoric towards the United States. Two primary research questions are addressed. First, what does elite rhetoric look like in a region commonly-assumed (e.g. Sweig 2006) to be anti-American? What trends can be identified with regards to favorability, level of attention, and substantive focus? Second, in the absence of widespread mass antipathy toward the US, what explains elite criticisms of the country? Is this criticism still predominantly responding to pressure from the electorate? Does it involve top-down efforts to change the views of voters so that they are more in line with those of the speaker? I argue that while focusing on bottom-up pressures provides little leverage, top-down motivations for elite rhetoric towards the U.S. only make sense if we expand the strategic playing field to include external (i.e. non-domestic) audiences. I examine the validity of this argument with extensive original analysis of one of the region’s C  2016 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/tla.12093 473 The Latin Americanist, December 2016 more interesting cases, Ecuador. Then, I explore the generalizability of my findings with more limited analysis of two cases that introduce variation across important independent variables. In doing so, I aim to shed light on the strategic motivations behind Latin American elite portrayals of the region’s most important external power, while also contributing to a better understanding of the complex relationship between elite rhetoric and public opinion. The paper proceeds as follows. I first provide my explanation for why critical elite rhetoric would coexist with largely favorable public opinion. Second, after explaining my case selection, I introduce the data from my original content analysis for Latin American political elites. Third, I present the results of this content analysis for my in-depth study of Ecuador. I conclude by using the results of more limited analysis of Chile and Argentina to discuss the generalizability of my arguments for the region as-a-whole. Latin American elite political rhetoric: a strategic choice As highlighted in Figure 1, positive opinions towards the United States are surprisingly prevalent among the Latin American masses. However, one is not hard pressed to find direct criticisms of ‘El Norte’ among the rhetoric of the region’s political elite (Bowman 2006; McPherson 2006). Very visible forms of critical elite rhetoric date back to the Latin American independence period and have been present throughout the past 200 years (Britton 2006, Dorn 2006). Most recently, public criticism of the ‘El Imperio’ has been most definitive for the political leaders of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA) bloc. This bloc – including (but not limited to) Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador...