Saving the Americas: The Dangerous Decline of Latin America and What the US Must Do
Published in Spanish under the title Cuentos chinos (Tall Tales), this dazzling, hard-hitting polemic topped bestseller lists around Latin America. Oppenheimer, a Miami Herald columnist and the dean of U.S.-based journalists specializing in Latin America, paints utterly derisive portraits of the region's current crop of autocratic populists. He contrasts a Latin America "blinkered by ideology and obsessed with the past" with the success stories of globalization -- China, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Poland -- and urges his region (he is originally Argentine) to climb aboard the globalization train. Rejecting cultural pessimism, Oppenheimer places his faith in progressive, forward-looking leadership that can quickly turn countries around: by aspiring to global standards, attracting international capital, and committing to quality education -- in short, by making nations competitive on a global scale. Yet the sharp-eyed Oppenheimer worries about vested interests and complacent elites and toys with the idea of a European-style "Community of the Americas" whereby a group of like-minded Latin American countries would bind themselves by common rules of good behavior, with some enhancements from Washington. But the insight-laden Saving the Americas is less about sharing sovereignty or overcoming U.S. neglect than about dramatic national narratives -- and what Latin Americans must do to save themselves.
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