Ambassador Patrick Duddy

Patrick Duddy, a retired American diplomat, is the director of Duke University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.  From 2007 to 2010 he served as the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela.  On September 11, 2008 he was expelled from Venezuela by then President Hugo Chavez.  In July of 2009 He returned to Venezuela as President Obama’s emissary.  

OPINION — This year’s commemoration of 9/11 did not resonate in Latin America in the same way it did in the United States.  That is not just because the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened in the U.S. and not in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico or some other country in the Western Hemisphere.

Many in the region also remember, somewhat ruefully, that it was on the very day of the attacks that all 34 active member nations of the Organization of American States (OAS) signed the InterAmerican Democratic Charter.  The charter established democracy as a necessary precondition for full participation in the Inter-American system. Because of the United States’ strong support for adoption of the charter, Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Lima, Peru when the 9/11 attacks occurred.

Adoption of the charter was a source of deep satisfaction in Latin America.  Many hoped it would usher in an era of greater cooperation and more productive relations between the U.S. and the rest of the American Republics.  Unfortunately, it was, understandably, eclipsed by the terrorist attacks in the U.S.

To be sure, the horror of those attacks was felt sharply by the overwhelming majority of the U.S.’s Western Hemisphere neighbors.  Citizens from throughout the Americas died in the two towers.  The United States has long been a magnet for the people of the region notwithstanding their deeply rooted ambivalence about U.S. foreign policy and resentment of U.S. interventionism.  Indeed, Venezuela’s opposition leader and interim but legitimate (albeit dispossessed) president, Juan Guaido, reflecting on the memorial events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, called the United States a beacon (faro in Spanish) for democracy and human rights.