Out of Ecuador: Another U.S. Ambassador Bites the WikiDust

Tim Padgett
Time
April 6, 2011

...Ousting an ambassador is a serious diplomatic gesture that, if done impulsively, can cost you relationships abroad in the long run. “It risks making these Presidents look excessively thin-skinned and capricious,” says Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas in New York.

That said, however, Sabatini thinks it's not so surprising to see this reaction from Latin America to the WikiLeaks cables. For one thing, the region has a “long, proud tradition of beating up on U.S. ambassadors,” he argues, a sort of defense mechanism against Washington's often imperious hegemony in the western hemisphere. Even as U.S. hegemony has waned, the yanqui envoy-bashing has continued – especially among leftist governments opposed to the U.S., like Venezuela and Bolivia, which expelled its U.S. ambassador in 2008 and has yet to welcome another – as a way to assert independence from Washington and to let the Obama Administration know, fairly or not, that it hasn't done much more than its predecessors to improve U.S.-Latin American relations. “WikiLeaks,” says Sabatini, “has simply given Latin governments new fodder.”

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