The Correa-Obama Bout

The Correa-Obama Bout at the Summit

Gabriel Marcella

Retired Professor and Director of the Americas Studies

US Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

The Seventh Summit of the Americas held in Panama on April 10-11 will be remembered for the good vibrations between President Barack Obama and Raúl Castro on the promise of normalization of relations with Cuba. Overlooked, however, was a teachable moment about the encounter between Obama and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa. The incident went largely unreported by the American media, which suffers attention deficit disorder on Latin America. It’s worth reviewing it in order to understand contrasting views on the nature of democracy—the checks and balances of American democracy versus the guided democracy of Latin America where the executive is powerful, at times authoritarian.

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is exemplar of the latter. The loquacious Correa represents a blend of liberation theology, anti-Americanism, hyper-nationalism, and anti-democracy that appeals to the Ecuadorean underclass because his government has delivered in reducing poverty. Since 2006 he has amassed powerful control over the nation’s politics, with little regard for democratic procedures, including a continuing assault on the media. At the Summit he delivered an impassioned address directed at President Obama in which he summarized his political philosophy and his perspective on U.S. policy in Latin America, blaming it for practicing new interventions in Latin America in the name of human rights, supporting bloody dictators, holding on to Guantanamo, invading Panama to remove a dictator, being badly informed about Latin America, for pursuing its interests, and supporting “the elites” who have done so much “damage.” He also attacked what he called the very bad Latin American press, “la muy mala prensa,” which he regarded as “mortal for democracy.”

To solidify his definition of democracy he lectured constitutional scholar Obama about Thomas Jefferson, the American Declaration of Independence, and Abraham Lincoln. His performance in Panama is 180 degrees removed from his 2010 speech at the University of Illinois, where he received a Ph.D. in economics in 2003: “If we make a mistake in Latin America, we throw stones at the U.S. Embassy… We even invented a whole theory to blame others for our poverty...we are poor because you are rich.”[1]By charming his audience he was urging Latin Americans to take responsibility instead of blaming the United States. Yet in Panama he did the opposite, blaming the United States for a litany of offenses. His attack on the United States follows a pattern which has included declaring the American ambassador to Quito persona non grata, not renewing the bilateral agreement for American counternarcotics flights to use Manta air base, and other actions, such as forcing the US Agency for International Development to leave Ecuador and expelling other diplomats.

President Obama retorted:

“I always enjoy the history lessons I am receiving here. I am a student of history and I am the first to recognize that the application by the United States of human rights has not always been consistent. And I am very aware of the fact that there are dark chapters in our own history, in which we have not observed the principles and ideals upon which our country was founded…I would only say that we can waste a lot of time speaking of past grievances and I suppose that it’s possible to use the United States as a handy excuse every so often for political problems that may be occurring domestically. But that will not bring us progress, that will not solve the problem of children who can’t read and don’t have enough to eat, and that will not make our countries more productive and competitive in a global economy.

I want to make it very clear that when we speak out on something like human rights it does not mean that we believe that we are perfect but it is because we think that the ideal of not jailing people if they disagree with you is the right idea.

Perhaps President Correa has more confidence than I do in distinguishing between bad press and good press… the press continues to speak in the United States because I don’t trust a system where one person makes that determination. I think that if we believe in democracy it means that everybody has a chance to speak out... We will continue to speak out on those issues, not because we are interested in meddling but because we know from our own history that we are imperfect.”

The Summit of the Americas demonstrated some of the cleavages that define Inter-American relations. One of them is clearly the distance between democracy and authoritarianism.