The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (20 page)

“I’m afraid things are rarely that exciting around here,” he said, lifting a forkful of rice.

“Well, except maybe when they PNGed the ambassador,” Lawson said.

“Oh yeah,” said Carrington between chews. “That was exciting, but that doesn’t happen very often.”

It really doesn’t, which is why it was a big deal when President Correa expelled US ambassador Heather Hodges in 2011, declaring her persona non grata (or “PNGing” her, in diplomat-speak) in retaliation for a WikiLeaked cable in which she accused Correa of condoning police corruption. After announcing her expulsion, Correa declared indignantly, “Colonialism in Latin America is finished.” Only six US ambassadors have been PNGed from their host countries in the last forty years, and three of those have been in the so-called Bolivarian states of the Andes. In Bolivia, the US ambassador was booted in 2008, accused by leftist-populist president Evo Morales of fomenting political unrest. Venezuela’s Chávez PNGed his US ambassador the very next day. It’s a symbolic gesture, but a serious one. The ambassador and his or her family have just seventy-two hours to leave the
country, which accounted for a lot of the temporary excitement around the Quito embassy. Diplomatic relations continue in the ambassador’s absence, with a chargé d’affaires filling his or her shoes, but relations are often strained. When I visited Quito, the embassy was still working without an ambassador. A new one was reinstated three months later, and negotiations are still ongoing to restore full ties with Venezuela and Bolivia.

In the wake of the expulsion, Carrington’s team had a media circus on their hands, but ordinarily life around the PAS offices moves at about the same pace as your average small Manhattan PR firm—and with significantly less glamour. The international propaganda biz has changed somewhat since the fall of communism, and today’s heirs to the USIS are as much administrators and event promoters as artful spin doctors. Sure, disseminating news from a US perspective is still part of the job. Public Affairs officers issue press releases to the Ecuadorian media just like any other organization, and the embassy distributes an in-house newsradio show,
Reportajes
, to some 120 stations across the country. I listened to a couple of episodes and found the stories “not so much slanted as selected,” as Thompson described similar USIS efforts in 1962. There was a piece about Hugo Chávez returning to Cuba for further cancer treatment, a story that Venezuelan officials regularly played down. There was coverage of Drug War negotiations at the then-ongoing Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia—an event that only garnered coverage in the United States thanks to a titillating Secret Service prostitution scandal. Meanwhile, quite apart from the embassies, the DC-based, semi-independent Voice of America networks broadcast radio and TV programs in forty-three languages on a worldwide network of transmitting stations.

But to hear my hosts tell it around the lunch table, managing the news is less important to the mission of public diplomacy than it once was.

“We’ve had a big shift of emphasis over the years to language and exchange programs,” explained Swenarski, the cultural affairs officer. These days, she said, a lot of the bureau’s money and manpower goes into supporting public and private English-language learning centers, sending students and professionals to study in the United States, and hosting American speakers and performers in Ecuador. The USIS in Thompson’s story brought a commie radio station to its knees. The PAS in Quito recently brought an alt-country band to the Amazon.

Without any Cold War antagonists to outfox, today’s battle for hearts and minds seems less like an ideological contest and more like a slightly crunchy outreach campaign. The bulk of the PAS’s efforts are actually built around the rather simple and charming notion that the more foreigners know about the United States, the more they will like us. So the agency sponsors a vast network of cultural centers and “American corners”—libraries and community spaces with English-language books and movies, occasional free lectures, and cultural displays. Come for the free Internet, stay for the exhibit on civil rights! Lawson mentioned working with administrators and student groups at local universities, trying to drum up support for American studies curricula. Swenarski described a few of the PAS’s cultural programs, an impressive slate of tours, exhibits, and performances that pivot around annual themes. Last year’s “Rural America” theme, for example, brought in bluegrass musicians and school presentations about the rodeo. The year before had a black culture motif, with New Orleans brass brands and step-dancing troupes. Programs like these, it seemed to me,
still followed rather literally what had been the old tagline of the USIS: “Telling America’s story to the world.”

International exchanges, meanwhile, are arguably at the heart of the PAS’s mission. Youth ambassador and leadership programs send Ecuadorian students to workshops and conferences in the United States. Similar programs for adults target leaders in business, government, education, and media. To fully grasp the potential payoff of these field trips, consider that four justices on the Ecuadorian equivalent of the Supreme Court are alums of such programs, as are some three hundred heads of state or cabinet-level ministers worldwide. It’s a forward-looking strategy, one that banks on the notion that today’s familiarity with American culture will translate into tomorrow’s support for American policies.

“The generation that knows you and loves you won’t always be around,” Swenarski said. “I’d say fifteen to twenty-five is the target age that we’re trying to reach.”

Of course, even the kinder, gentler face of soft power still has its turf wars. Around the world, for instance, Confucius Institutes sponsored by the Chinese government are increasingly muscling in on cultural territory dominated by PAS-backed language programs and community centers. The first one in Ecuador opened at Quito’s Universidad San Francisco in 2010, and seeing as how China has invested more than $8 billion in the country since 2009, a
quiteño
could be forgiven for wanting to pick up some Mandarin. That undermines the PAS mission, Swenarski explains, since every hour that an Ecuadorian spends learning tea ceremonies at a Confucius Institute is an hour she’s not learning the similarly delightful traditions of the supposed Yankee imperialists.

Unlike the USIS and its America-bashing broadcaster, the PAS is not likely to torpedo the Universidad San
Francisco for hosting a Chinese public diplomacy arm. Very much like their predecessors, however, today’s democracy-nudgers still pay close attention to how the United States is represented in local media. After lunch, the two junior diplomats excused themselves, and Carrington led me upstairs to a nondescript door at the edge of a cubicle complex.

“This is the monitoring room,” he said, “probably the only place in the building that has a little bit of a secret-agent vibe.”

Inside was a fluorescent-lit room with cheap office furniture, utility shelves, and a half dozen PCs. Nothing particularly glamorous about it. It reminded me of the ammonia-stink janitor’s closet that my high school handed over to the AV club, except that my AV club never had a seventy-two-inch monitor on the wall with inlaid screens simultaneously airing every Ecuadorian TV network.

“Usually we’ve got a couple of guys in here,” Carrington said, “monitoring for any mentions of the US or US policy. I guess they’re at lunch.”

I stared at the grid of talking heads and
telenovelas
. It was a bit hypnotic, like the flickering, towering displays at an appliance store. “I know a couple of news junkies who could really get into this,” I said.

“Yeah, mostly we get former radio and TV guys. Of course, we watch the newspapers and the Web too. Did you know three different papers reprinted that
New York Times
editorial about Correa this morning?”

The week before, Ecuador’s National Court of Justice had upheld a conviction in a libel suit brought by Correa against the directors and a former editor of
El Universo
, the country’s largest paper. The journalists were fined $42 million and sentenced to three-year prison terms for publishing an editorial that called Correa a “dictator” and alleged he had put
civilians in danger by ordering troops to open fire during a 2010 police rebellion.
“Ha brillado la verdad,”
Correa had announced from the steps of the courthouse.
The truth has shone through
. It was his biggest lawsuit against journalists, although not his first. The trial was full of abnormalities, and the
New York Times
echoed other media outlets and watchdog groups when it called the ruling “a staggering, shameful blow to the country’s democracy.” Under heavy pressure, Correa issued a pardon a couple of weeks later.

“So, what do you do with everything you find?” I asked Carrington.

“Sort it by topic and organize it into a daily dossier, available for other diplomats and policymakers. I can get you a copy.” He motioned for me to follow him to his office.

We walked through a dense jungle of cubicles, quiet but for the hum of monitors, the clacking of keyboards, and the occasional muffled whiff of phone conversation. Framed pictures of national parks and other American landmarks hung on the walls at regular intervals. The whole place had a very corporate vibe. If this was telling America’s story, I thought, then storytelling had become rather systematized.

Carrington’s office was clean and simple—a few crowded bookshelves, pictures of his kids, a framed map of Chesapeake Bay. On a wall-mounted flat-screen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was giving a speech in London. For a moment, I thought maybe the State Department had an all-Hillary channel, à la
The Truman Show
, but it was just CNN.

“It’s a particularly fat one today on account of the
El Universo
ruling,” Carrington said, handing me a thick folder of photocopied news articles. We took a seat as I leafed through. It was divided into sections, with headings like “Coverage of Outreach Efforts,” “Economic News and Opinion,” “Counternarcotics,” and “Freedom of the Press.” Many of the
headlines trumpeted Correa’s refusal to stay the
Universo
sentences, as requested by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Correa had countered that the commission was dominated by “certain hegemonic states,” a not-so-subtle jab at supposed US meddling.

On the TV, Hillary was offering condolences on the deaths of two journalists, a reporter and a photographer who’d snuck into Syria, covering the uprising there in defiance of that country’s government. Carrington and I had both turned to listen when a loud buzz from the PA drowned out the television. Suddenly, a man’s recorded voice filled the room—calm, but with a no-bullshit tone of authority.

“Duck and cover,” the voice announced, pronouncing the space between each word. “Get away from the windows and await instructions.”

The buzzing echoed again, seemingly louder and across the entire floor. Instinctively, I glanced at the window next to me, then looked at Carrington.

“Bomb drill,” he said calmly. “This happens sometimes. It’ll probably be over in just a minute.”

We waited another ten or fifteen seconds for the buzzing to stop. Then the man’s voice came on once more.

“Duck and cover. Get away from the windows and await instructions.”

The buzzing continued, and Carrington’s brow began to furrow. I stupidly peered out the window, expecting to see—what? Masked guerrillas? Government troops? It occurred to me again that I wasn’t clear who the bad guys were in Ecuador, or whether there even were any.

“All right, then,” Carrington said, sounding more confused than alarmed. “I guess we should probably duck and cover.”

He started lowering himself out of his chair, and I followed
suit. I realized that, while I’ve heard the phrase a lot, I didn’t really know what ducking and covering looked like. Absurdly, I wondered whether Thompson, a child of the 1950s, had ever had to crawl underneath his school desk, like in all those old Civil Defense PSAs. I was gauging whether there was enough space under Carrington’s desk for the both of us when the voice abruptly came back over the PA.

“This has been a drill,” it announced, and the buzzing ceased. A muffled wave of chatter broke out over the cubicles outside. On TV, Hillary had finished speaking and was shaking hands with men in suits. We both slid back into our seats, and Carrington grinned at me a little sheepishly.

“Well, that doesn’t happen every day,” he said, straightening his tie. “I guess you got to see something exciting after all.”

Public Diplomacy Officer Jennifer Lawson didn’t come to the Foreign Service via the usual channels. She and I were headed back to the Plaza Grande in a government SUV—jet-black with tinted windows, a beefy driver in a dark suit, the works. We were tagging along with PAS intern Liz Mayberry, a chipper Minnesotan who’d invited us to sit in on her weekly after-school English class at one of the embassy’s “American corners.” The resource hub was actually in a wing of the same cultural center where I’d seen the Quito photo exhibit a week before.

Lawson’s first love was modern dance. She’d studied it at Mount Holyoke College in the late 1980s, and she’d toured abroad with various dance companies before founding her own troupe in the mid-1990s. Her sister was an enthusiastic Foreign Service officer, and after years of her urging, Lawson took the Foreign Service exam on something of a
whim. At the time, the pass rate for candidates was between 25 percent and 30 percent, and when Lawson saw that she’d passed, she opted to trade in her ballet flats for a pair of sensible diplomat’s heels.

“I’d been to these amazing arts festivals all over the world,” she said, “and after a while it dawned on me: government can make these cool, life-changing events happen.”

She was blond, in her early forties, and she still had a dancer’s slight build. The enormous purse on her lap made her look even smaller as she slouched in the backseat of the SUV.

“That might be a more popular idea in Ecuador than it is in the US,” I said. “Not a lot of people at home these days are crowing about the wonderful role that government can play in our lives.”