“Yanquis go home!” is not an uncommon demand to see spray-painted around the city of Buenos Aires. If you refer to yourself as an American, you’ll quickly get corrected. “No, you’re estadounidense or norteamericano. We’re all Americans.” And often, the never shy Argentine opinion is offered regardless of whether or not it was solicited: “We don’t like learning English. It is required in school to learn English because President Macri has to be able to speak with people like Obama. But Obama doesn’t have to learn Spanish. No one is required to learn Spanish.”
It is amazing how much you learn about your home country when you leave it. My experiences being from the United States in Argentina have added an entirely new dimension to what I thought I would learn when abroad. From the dinner table conversations when I had to assure everyone that “No, no voy a votar por Trump” to learning about the United States' relations with countries in Latin America, it has been incredibly eye-opening to realize that the “Greatest Nation on Earth” isn’t considered so great for everyone.
During the military dictatorship that ended in 1983, Argentina experienced one of the most oppressive and violent periods of time in its troubled and complicated history. Under the guise of what was called the “Process of National Reorganization,” the military government tortured and killed over 13,000 Argentines who were thought to be a political threat. As part of an assignment for my Argentine history class, I visited the largest clandestine detention center in Buenos Aires, where over 5,000 people were interrogated, brutally tortured, and then dropped from planes into the Rio de la Plata to die. The detention center is situated very centrally in the city and operated as a school for the navy while the tortures happened simultaneously. To this day, every Thursday afternoon mothers and grandmothers march outside of Casa Rosada, where President Macri works, demanding justice for their “disappeared” children.
As I walked through the entire complex and saw where these people were detained, I felt as though I was in a concentration camp from the Holocaust, unable to fathom that these atrocities occurred only about 30 years ago. Of the innumerable questions crowding my brain, a few were the most prominent: why did I not know much about this phenomenon? Where was the United States in all of this?
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had approved of the new military rulers in Argentina during this era. The United States turned a blind eye to the “disappearances.” The government supported the participants of Operation Condor, the Latin American campaign that implemented state terror and intelligence for a few years. This incredibly large blemish on the foreign policy of the United States with Latin America is extremely glaring, yet often gets shoved under the rug. It’s no surprise that hostility remains between the United States and Latin America, and this is only one example.
I am still proud to be an American—or rather, from the United States. But pride can sometimes be blind. It can often be ignorant. It can definitely be selective. If I’ve learned anything from living abroad, it is how to value and appreciate diversity in our ideas and perspectives and to learn how to incorporate it into our lives. Doing so has never been more important than after this past year and into the near future.
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