Scum rises to the top

MIAMI – The worst journalist in Miami is Andrés Oppenheimer. He is also arguably the most successful. He has his own television show. His columns appear in many newspapers in Latin America. And, as an as an acquaintance in the publishing business gushed, his books sell!

“He writes well, doesn’t he?” she added.  I scoffed. His writing is at best pedestrian, but that’s another topic.

The reason I think Oppenheimer is the worst journalist in Miami has nothing to do with what a mutual friend told me Andrés imagines are my reasons: sour grapes, envy. No. I cannot possibly envy someone who has built a career by doing the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do: Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. He is the best example I know of top-down journalism.

I honestly cannot recall a single column where he has descended into the Brazilian favelas to find out why people there would vote massively for Lula da Silva or scaled the hillsides around Caracas to find out why they supported Hugo Chavéz. To him, anything that departs from the Hernando de Soto brand of neoliberalism is just cheap populism, a term of derision in his vocabulary.

But aren’t democratically elected leaders supposed to respond to the popular will? Or are they instead obliged to fall in line with the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States government, or Wall Street creditors?

A decade or so ago, faced with the choice of forcing his people to descend deeper into an economic abyss to meet the terms of international creditors or defy the big boys, Argentina’s president Nestor Kirchner decided to spare his people further suffering and instead give the IMF and their brethren the middle finger.

I don’t recall what Andresito wrote at the time, but I would be thunderstruck if he cheered that move. Regardless, the facts speak for themselves. The wrath of the god Capital didn’t pulverize Argentina’s economy. In fact, its economy grew at a fast clip.

Argentina, moreover is not unique. As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, among others, have shown countries such as India that did not passively submit to the IMF script generally did better than those that did.

I don’t want to focus this commentary exclusively on Oppenheimer. although he irks me to no end. When I think of a true Latin American journalist writing in the United States, I always recall the journalism of José Martί. Martί’s celebrated America’s democratic vein and its technical accomplishments, in particular the building of the Brooklyn bridge, which he witnessed. But he also soon saw the dark side, including the Oklahoma land rush that led to the massive seizure of Native American lands and, especially, this country’s imperial pretensions to extend Manifest Destiny deep into the Caribbean and Latin America.

Where Martί tried to explain the United States to Latin America so that the south could defend itself, Oppenheimer’s mission is to comfort two kinds of audiences: Latin American elites who hate the rise of “populism” in Latin America (because it threatens their often ill-gotten privileges) and Americans who think Latin America’s problems are all its damned fault.

For the record, Andrés, I don’t envy your “sucksess” one tiny bit. It’s not hard to succeed by kissing up and pissing down. That’s what you do. I could have had the same or more if I had been willing to stoop to your level. No thanks. Dignity is worth more than acclaim or money, for me at least.

The case of scum rising to the top is not unique to Oppenheimer. Alberto Ibarguen is an even better example. Under his watch, El Nuevo Herald published a series of stories in the late 1990s featuring a neurosurgeon who claimed to have treated Fidel Castro who was nearly on his deathbed. Every alleged fact in the story was proved to be false. While Ibarguen could not have micro-managed every story, the least the paper could have done is to offer an apology to readers and an in-depth analysis of how it was duped by a failed nursing student posing as a neurosurgeon. That never happened.

Ibarguen, however, was on the ball when Jorge Mas Canosa, who had engineered a vicious campaign against the then-publisher of the Miami Herald David Lawrence, as well as the paper itself, died. The paper put out a special edition befitting the death of a U.S. president featuring every column ever written praising Mas. Almost all the liberal columnists except two or three were there. Somehow, they could not find any column under the byline Max Castro.

I could fill three columns describing Ibarguen’s crimes against honest journalism. The point, though, is that he was rewarded for all that by being named the publisher of the Miami Herald and later the head of the Knight Foundation. Today he is receiving numerous accolades and awards. The bigger the scum, the higher it rises.

This phenomenon is not limited to Miami, of course. The Washington-based “scholar” who wrote the book “The Case for Invading Iraq” landed on his feet at a think tank, despite being 100 percent wrong on everything.

“Castro’s Final Hour”? A Castro still presides in Havana, but I don’t want to go back to that.

When I was at the University of Miami, I spoke on a panel that included several dear colleagues that subsequently died and one conservative student. It was a few months before Pope John Paul II’s scheduled visit to Cuba. Another professor at UM who is still very much alive and kicking today structured his presentation around three predictions. The Pope will never go to Cuba because Castro won’t dare let him. There will be a wave of terrorism directed from Cuba toward Latin America. There will be a massive migration of Cubans to the United States via the Guantanamo naval base.

None of this made any sense for reasons I don’t have space to go into here. In fact, what happened was the exact opposite. The Pope went to Cuba and Castro treated him with all due respect. There was a wavelet of terrorism against Cuba from Latin America but directed and financed by Cuban exiles based in the United States and Central America. There was no mass exodus through Guantanamo. The 1994 U.S.-Cuba immigration agreement continued to be observed.

The next thing I knew was that the sage that made those crazy predictions was promoted to founding director of UM’s newly-created Center of Cuban and Cuban American Studies, a slap in the face at the academic sear committee that had ranked two other candidates ahead of the one anointed by the top brass at UM.

I was shocked but not surprised. The reign of error is more common than the reign of terror. Scum rises to the top when the flow of power and dollars goes in that direction.