Candace

Talmadge

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December 31, 2007

Expat’s Book Reveals Much That’s Wrong in U.S.

For as long as I have known him (two-plus decades), Bob Whitt has always been a marvelous raconteur. Throughout the years of our association, he has offered up amazing stories about his action-packed life as the publisher of a U.S. news magazine in South America.

Now Bob has taken his sagas and fleshed them out for a memoir called “Expat: Survival of an Expatriate in Latin America” by Robert Ampudia Whitt III (Tate Publishing & Enterprises).

The book is compelling not simply because I know the author and know that it reads exactly like he talks – including his dryly humorous observations about cross-cultural miscues between Norte Americanos and their southern counterparts.

No, “Expat” held me in its grip for two reasons. First, the author’s recollections about his work and life in South America are fascinating and well told. When I read them, I was there, inside what has to have happened because it’s too strange for fiction, sometimes biting my nails even though the narrator obviously lived to tell the tale. He goes through many adventures, like witnessing a peaceful coup d’etat, outmaneuvering corrupt government and union functionaries and living through one of Colombia’s notorious executive kidnappings. It’s all in a day’s work for this news magazine publisher.

Second, the portrait he paints of living and doing business in South America increasingly resembles what the United States is turning into, such as lack of transparency in government (Bush administration ultra-secrecy) and business (corporations going private by the cartload). Such as private mercenaries (Blackwater in Iraq and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) and widespread corruption (billions in war profiteering; the subprime mortgage meltdown; endemic, widespread Medicare billing fraud; baseball steroids scandal; football cheating; etc.).

This is not a mirror into which most U.S. citizens care to gaze, because we are in denial about how much has gone astray in our nation. With almost three decades of free-market, anti-regulation ideology in control of this country’s policies and politics, the gap between the income of Bush’s self-proclaimed base – “the haves and the have mores” – and the rest of the country is getting to be as wide as the vast economic gulf that has always existed in South America between the oligarchs and the impoverished masses.

Even more ominous, the U.S. middle class is now as beleaguered and endangered as that of many a South American country. U.S. blue-collar workers have been taking it on the economic chin since the 1970s. U.S. workers of any level simply cannot compete with low-wage counterparts in India, China, the Philippines and other developing countries. The resulting economic instability that invariably follows the demise of a nation’s middle class may soon show up in this country as the kind of political instability that has plagued South America for centuries. Like their South American equivalents, U.S. politicians are too beholden to moneyed interests to do anything to reverse the situation.

Despite growing similarities between the United States and nations in South America, there are still plenty of differences between cultural and business norms and expectations between the two continents. Anyone trying to get a realistic and useful understanding about living and working in South America would do well to read this book. With Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, reading between the lines also aids in comprehending why there is so much public resentment of the United States in South America, and why socialism is so attractive to certain segments of the population. 

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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