Obama in the Backlands

In Brazilian Portuguese there’s an evocative word sertão, meaning “backlands.” It refers to the Northeastern interior, calling up images of cracked earth and cacti, vaqueros and bandits and vast blue sky. The region was the site of the epic 19th-century War of the Canudos—a rebellion against the government by sertanejos led by a Messianic preacher; it’s been the subject of books ranging from João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands to one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s most famous novels; it’s where “life is dusty and wears,” as one poet immortalized it. To the public imagination in cosmopolitan São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, while the sertão possesses an acknowledged swathe of rich dance and storytelling traditions, it remains primarily a place of poverty and instability—a slightly terrifying land where ghosts wander, leaders rise up full-formed from the ashes of poverty, and in the deep orange twilight anything can happen.

The U.S. media this week was dominated for obvious reasons by events in Libya and Japan, but much was happening south of our nation as well. Obama’s five-day tour of Latin America, which took him to Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador, drew Wednesday to a close. A Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out the “surreal” quality of the situation: while the família Obama was soaking up the sun in shorts and bare legs, the United States was undertaking intensive missile-based intervention in the Middle East. To many newspaper readers here, the entire region from Mexico to Cape Horn can seem at the moment to appear like a sideshow, a flamboyant but untrustworthy neighbor—in a word, a backlands.

At times Obama’s visit, too, seemed to treat the countries this way. When Obama—pausing to take photos with children kicking around a soccer ball—visited the Rio slum Cidade de Deus, subject of a sentimental 2008 Fernando Meirelles film, inhabitants expressed some annoyance their city was being treated as a shantytown worth a feel-good photo-op. In the city centers, Obama pushed his policies: after a few brief remarks commending Brazilian forays into clean energy, he reiterated to President Roussef and the audience that America would help Brazil develop and refine its off-shore oil, so American companies could later import it.

Roussef maintained a strained smile throughout many of the talks, partly because of Obama’s subtle but firm resistance to Brazil’s entreaties for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, partly because Obama should really have made the trip to see her country’s ordem e progresso before now. Brazil is an economic giant—in 2010 Newsweek predicted “Brazil Is the New China,” and its economy is growing at a staggering nine percent per year. Previous President Lula—himself from the town of Caetés, in the backlands—is responsible for many of the economic reforms, but he made it clear he was independent of U.S. views, recognizing Palestine as a state and refusing to blockade Iran. Roussef’s Brazil appears to be taking a similar line, seeking alliance with the U.S. while maintaining its own trajectory.

Obama went on to visit Chile and El Salvador, which retain ties while remaining suspicious of the United States. One can see symbols of inter-Latin American solidarity too in Mexico City’s elegant Palacio de Bellas Artes, where the current exhibition highlights a flag made of femur bones from Pinochet’s Chilean victims. On the walls alongside, however, much political artwork takes up the perennial theme of perceived U.S. hypocrisy. Indeed, Mexican nerves have been frayed more than usual in the past few weeks. A long, complicated history of resentment was bolstered by an inflammatory Wikileaks release resulting in the resignation of the U.S. diplomat to Mexico. This week, while Obama toured South America, The New York Times reported that the U.S. government had begun a drone program, sending in Predators—invisible from the ground—to collect intelligence for the drug wars. Whether or not these drones should be deployed is equivocal—if the U.S. maintains its current drug policy, no better alternative may exist. But because the drone program, long in the works, is now the most visible U.S. sign of involvement there, and because it is run out of American-dominated “fusion centers” in Mexico City filled with staffers who do not always speak fluent Spanish, Mexican perceptions of the U.S. as unsympathetic or incompetent intruders are understandable. Much work needs to be done in repairing these relations.

Forty-five minutes from Mexico City by bus is the town of Cuernavaca, a weekend oasis for those making their living in the sprawling metropolis. Exploring the area over holiday, my sister and I came up without warning against a number of strange white structures, half-domes in the midst of the plaza. The words “Cinema Planeta” were printed outside the tents, but no one seemed to know what was inside. A line stretched round the block for entrance. When we were finally ushered in through two vacuum-sealed doors, abstract silent films were being projected on the ceiling; hundreds of people lay on the ground watching. Sounds of footsteps and fragments of Spanish echoed in the darkness. The next morning, the structures had disappeared. The films were supposed to teach environmentalism, I later learned, but no content was immediately clear. It was a moment of grand metaphor, and pure art—a repudiation of explicit meaning in favor of the mysterious gesture, something like Maupertuis’ imagined amphitheatre of mirrors.

But this was not politics. Politics, too, is built on the calculated gesture, but its business is at least the pretense of directness and sincerity. Obama’s Latin American tour, while an admirable start, came off as too self-serving, and not interested enough in his host nations, to be clearly convincing. To many living in Brazil and Chile, in Mexico and El Salvador, despite the economic and cultural strength of their nations, the perception remains that to our country they are a mere backlands—a haunting but inconsequential desert, a vast canvas with infinite spaces, a place to be plundered but also forgotten.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.