Training the new face of the right
By Cole Stangler — Features, Front Page
There are three natural states in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a promotional video made in 2007 for Georgetown’s Global Competitiveness Leadership Program.
The first of them is the mythical “El Dorado,” a female voice says in Spanish, as the video shows stunning images of forests, lakes, and beaches. Next comes a second state, characterized by the “vendors of dreams,” who use the “populist” promise of El Dorado to sustain their power.
A series of images and videos glide across the screen: Bolivian President Evo Morales, former Cuban President Fidel Castro, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and ex-Argentine President Nestor Kirchner. El Dorado, and its “promises of a better tomorrow” have not yet arrived from the politicians who promise it.
The music reaches a crescendo before we are introduced to the final natural state: the “desperation of the people.”
The video explains that in this state there is “chaos” and “the ideologization of the region.” An image shows indigenous activists carrying a banner asking for “land and liberty.” The people are impoverished; there is unemployment, illiteracy, and infant mortality. Democracies are unstable. Citizens lack faith in the political system. Yet, there is still hope that the people will “wake up.” It’s only a matter of unleashing their ambition.
That’s where Georgetown comes in. With White-Gravenor Hall in the background, former Spanish President José María Aznar appears on screen to tell us there are new leaders who can solve these monumental problems—and the Latin American Board’s Global Competitiveness Leadership Program is here to train them.
The video’s abridged narrative of Latin American history appears to reduce the region’s immense structural problems to a singular failure to embrace the free market. It is a vision for development and governance that has the institutional support of Georgetown University’s Latin American Board, an organization founded in 2006 and chaired by Aznar.
Like many other business schools across the country, the McDonough School of Business hosts certificate programs in addition to its more intensive degree programs. But under Aznar’s watch, Georgetown’s Latin American Board has been marked by an ideological slant in its operations and has generated an active alumni network, which makes it unlike any other certificate-granting program at the school.
The Board’s main activity is the Global Competitiveness Leadership Program, which brings 35 to 40 students from Spain, Portugal and Latin America to Georgetown for a four-month certificate program in “Global Leadership.” GCL aims to train future political, business and social leaders affecting change in Latin America. The program has brought in speakers such as the philosopher Francis Fukuyama, famously aggressive Cuban embargo-supporter Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R. – FL), conservative Peruvian writer Álvaro Vargas Llosa, and Aznar himself. The program’s syllabus, guest speakers and visits suggest an aggressively pro-business vision of development and governance.
It is a vision that hearkens back to the 1980’s and 1990’s, when nearly every government in the region looked to the Washington Consensus for guidance as they implemented policies of trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation on a massive scale. When a wave of progressive and centre-left reformist governments came to power, these policies were brought to a halt—in large part because politicians campaigned on promises to roll back unpopular neoliberal reforms.
“There’s been a big break from traditional parties … in Latin America. It’s been occurring in South America, but also Central America, where the traditional parties were discredited because of their systematic application of neoliberal policies,” said Alex Main, policy analyst at the Washington-based Center for Economic Policy and Research, who suggested that these policies remain quite unpopular to this day. “These traditional parties were swept off the map to a larger extent. And you had new movements gain power.”
So while the kind of rhetoric employed by the Latin American Board—extolling the virtues of the free-market and its apparently self-evident links to liberty and democracy—may be commonplace in the United States, the Board’s talk about training future leaders in “competitiveness” is unquestionably directed at the current political situation in Latin America. In most cases, the preferred kinds of leaders are not in power.
“We’re just trying to promote certain ideals—the importance of liberty and the importance of democracy. We’ve noticed there’s a lack of certain ideals in current leadership in Latin America,” GCL Academic Coordinator Diane Garza said. “[The GCL students] are already leaders. We just want to polish them. How can we prepare them? Give them tools and knowledge, take them outside of their bubble and send them back.”
Not every GCL alumnus becomes immediately involved in political activities upon returning. There are even a few who engage in social entreprenuership. But a disproportionate number have taken up leading roles in neoliberal think tanks in the region, many of which are affiliated with the Fundación para el Análisis de los Estudios Sociales, a think tank chaired by Aznar and funded by the Spanish Partido Popular. Others have created similar leadership programs based in Bolivia and Ecuador.
Several Spanish GCL graduates from the program’s early years are now involved with FAES and the Partido Popular. Prominent graduates include the current PP international relations advisor, the current head of the secretary for international relations for the PP (who also serves as coordinator for the program of global issues for FAES), and a PP advisor in the lower-house of Spanish Parliament (who was president of iClass, the GCL alumni association, for 2009-10.)
Pia Greene, a 2007 alumnus from Chile, is FAES coordinator for the country and also works at the neoliberal Fundación Libertad. Greene notably penned a piece for the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research entitled “To be or not to be pro Pinochet,” in which she concludes, “At the end of the day, Chile and the whole world learned that societies require the biggest dose of liberty to prosper: Pinochet’s government was not an exception, since they were the ones who planted the seed of a big success.” The article is accompanied by a video featuring a montage of photos of Pinochet set to Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”
Alejandro Barja, a 2007 alumnus from Bolivia, went on to found a replica of the GCL program in Bolivia—the Bolivian Foundation of Leadership for Global Competitiveness, or FUNBOLIDER—which aims to train leaders to build a nation that is “just, competitive, open to the markets and lives in harmony.”
GCL graduates are also particularly involved in Ecuador. Pablo Arosemena, a 2008 alumnus and FAES coordinator for Ecuador, is now executive director of Fundación Ecuador Libre, a think tank which also employs several other Ecuadorian GCL graduates. The president of the foundation is Guillermo Lasso, a bank executive and executive board member of the Latin American Board. Arosemena initially agreed to do an interview and asked to see a list of sample questions, but then did not respond to an email that included a list of questions about the Board and its relationship to FAES and his foundation.
Under the leadership of Lasso and other GCL alumni affiliated with the Fundación Ecuador Libre, Ecuador’s Competitiveness Leadership Program was first held in 2009. Students who apply are selected by the think tank to participate.
The Latin American Board is ultimately about magnifying and extending the Georgetown name in Latin America, according to co-founder and Managing Director Ricardo Ernst.
“I think Georgetown has a great opportunity of owning the Latin American region,” said Ernst, who is also deputy dean of the McDonough School of Business. “One of the challenges that [Georgetown President John] DeGioia [often talks about] is how do we make Georgetown a global university … We would argue that through the initiatives and the work of the Board, plus the GCL, plus the networks and all the things we are doing—we are helping to define what a global university is all about.”
A loose alumni network called the Latin American Alliance had existed in the years prior to the Board’s inception in 2006, but Ernst said that he and Alberto Beeck, another member of the executive board, thought that the University should make a deeper investment in the region. When Aznar arrived at Georgetown, the three were able to pool together their resources and contacts to create the GCL program and assemble an impressive collection of business leaders to serve on the executive board.
GCL’s mission calls for “a new generation of emerging leaders with the essential tools in order to promote competitiveness, progress, regional integration and the insertion of the region into the global agenda.” This year’s GCL program features students from 16 different countries spread across Latin America, Central America, and the Iberian Peninsula. In order to apply, GCL aspirants must be between 24 and 34 years old, residents of “Ibero-America,” speak English, and possess an undergraduate university degree.
Felipe Dib, a GCL participant this year from Brazil, said that he noticed a certain ideological perspective to the program, but that it didn’t diminish its value.
“It has a liberal aspect. A right side—if we have to say left, right, center,” Dib said. “We listen, we have to judge from that perspective. I agree with many points; I disagree with some.”
The GCL syllabus benefits from its relative institutional free rein. As an advisory board to the Office of the President and the Provost, the Latin American Board is required to meet with the President and Provost only once a year. And because the Latin American Board is a certificate-granting program, the GCL syllabus is not reviewed in the same way as the syllabus of a typical degree-granting program at Georgetown.
Provost James O’Donnell said that this is, in fact, a fairly common arrangement. For instance, Georgetown’s School for Continuing Studies grants certificates, not degrees. For the University’s many certificate-granting programs, responsibility for oversight and quality control lies with the faculty who administer it. In the case of GCL, this means Ernst, who along with Diane Garza effectively designs and approves the syllabus each year.
Ernst emphasized that the GCL program is not ideologically biased, and stressed that he has brought GCL participants to meet the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian ambassadors in years past to challenge the students’ views.
“Neoliberal, neoconservative, all this stuff … it’s a set of rules that people want to assign labels to them,” Ernst said. “At the end of the day, what do we believe? In freedom of expression, freedom of beliefs, and the fact that the market is very strong.”
Of those three beliefs, one seems to stands out above the others in the mission statement of the Board’s academic journal, the Journal on Globalization, Competitiveness and Governability. The mission statement calls for a “re-conceptualization” of the State.
In order to ensure integration into the global economy, its final paragraph reads in Spanish, “It is necessary to abandon protectionism and isolationism, and substitute them with processes of liberalization and deregulation.” And then even more bluntly, “In this context, the State renounces its primary role in the development of the country, limiting itself to establishing the appropriate bases so that economic agents can reach the levels of efficiency necessary to compete in a globalized market.”
“In the beginning we had a lot of criticism. All these neoliberals …” Ernst said as his voice trailed off. “I said [to the critics] publish in it. Publish in it. If you have a paper that describes [a topic] with academic rigor, why would we not publish it?”
The academic journal’s advisory board boasts an impressive array of high-profile names: five ex-Presidents from the 1990s and early 2000s (Aznar, Fernando Henrique Cardoso from Brazil, Vicente Fox from Mexico, Ricardo Lagos from Chile, and Andrés Pastrana Arango from Colombia), a former director of the International Monetary Fund (Rodrigo Rato) and the current president of the Inter-American Development Bank (Luis Alberto Moreno). The editorial board is filled with a slew of well-known economists and regional experts as well.
The first issue, released in 2007, also included Aznar’s “Latin American Agenda for Freedom,” which was also printed by his think tank and has become kind of mission statement of FAES in the region.
“It’s a little bit naïve to pretend, well, I don’t have a philosophy, [that] I just move through the world without having one,” Ernst said. “I would argue that we believe in the Jesuit tradition of let’s have a debate, let’s talk about it … We believe that by having a conversation with people who do not [agree with you], there is a possibility of you changing your view or you reinforcing your own belief. And that’s why we’re 100 percent open, 100 percent open to any type of conversation or discussion.”
Fr. Dean Brackley, S.J., who is a professor of theology at the Universidad de Centroamerica in El Salvador—where he has taught since 1989, after volunteering to fill the position of one of the six Jesuits massacred by the right-wing military—remained unconvinced by this claim.
“If the Board really embraces ‘debate and dialogue,’ they might broaden the participant field,” Brackley wrote in an e-mail. “Maybe they could invite President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who explicitly espouses Catholic social teaching. Maybe they could invite ex-President [of Honduras] Manuel Zelaya, presently in exile in the Dominican Republic. Maybe they could invite Nobel Peace Prize winners Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina or Rigoberta Menchú of Guatemala. They could invite any number of eloquent victims of human rights abuses in Latin America.”
Fr. John Dear, S.J., a priest, activist and writer nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also disputed Ernst’s appropriation of Jesuit values.
“I don’t know any Jesuit thing about being open for ‘debate,’” Dear wrote in an e-mail. “We are on the side of Jesus, who was against all oppression, poverty, war and empire.”
The GCL program is split up into four leadership modules—political, business, social and personal leadership—and the syllabus is structured so that different weeks in the program are focused on one module at a time. Each module features lectures, presentations, speakers, and sometimes includes visits to institutions in Washington. This year’s participants have already toured Capitol Hill and met with a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They have also visited the Gallup Poll headquarters, the Brookings Institute, the Organization of American States, and the Pentagon. Visits to the State Department, the CATO Institute, and the National Democratic Institute—a conservative think tank based in Arlington, Va.—are planned.
In addition to lectures related to each module, guest speakers come in to give non-academic lectures. Because the GCL program also focuses on “social leadership,” there are some notable exceptions to the standard fare of powerful business figures or right-wing political leaders. This year’s program, for instance, includes a visit from Felipe Vergara, the CEO of Lumni Inc., a company that offers scholarships to students in exchange for a percentage of their future income.
But that isn’t to say that GCL shies away from speakers with a political agenda. In the first week, there were guest lectures from Orlando Gutierrez, professor and co-founder of the Directorio Democrático Cubano, an anti-Castro group, and Patricio Walker, a senator from the conservative Christian Democrat Party of Chile.
There was also a guest lecture on “Personal Leadership” from Pedro Burelli, a Venezuelan oilman, investment banker, and fierce critic of President Chavez. Burelli colorfully recounted a conversation he had with Chavez as he was considering a run for the presidency. Burelli told the students Chavez was “absolutely devoid of any factual knowledge.”
“That’s an incredible phenomenon—that this guy had nothing in his head,” Burelli said. “… [He is] completely irresponsible. He’s talking, making statements based on things that he had no clue [of]. And that, sad to say, is a very potent combination to win an election.”
Burrelli added that the widespread support that propelled Chavez to power was a direct result of mismanagement by the previous administration.
Aznar himself also delivered an address—but a photographer for Counterpoint was barred from entering because the former President’s security team did not authorize photos, according to Garza. The address was then deemed to be off-the-record for press.
Another guest speaker was Pablo Casado, an up-and-coming star in Spain’s Partido Popular and personal advisor to Aznar. Casado, a former representative in the Madrid Assembly and current president of the Madrid branch of his party’s “Nuevas Generaciones” faction, is probably best known for a memorable address at his party’s 2008 convention.
While Casado might seem like an odd choice next to the other higher profile names who visited the program, Ecuadorian journalist and sociologist Decio Machado wasn’t surprised at all by Casado’s presence. In fact, Machado said that Casado is emblematic of FAES’ larger strategy for training political leaders for Latin America.
Machado, who helped found the Madrid-based political newsmagazine Diagonal, argued that Aznar’s FAES has developed a political strategy in Latin America based on the Partido Popular’s dominance of the Madrid Assembly. Young, articulate, foreign-educated men and women with backgrounds in business, like Casado, have re-energized the party and come to comprise a majority of the representatives in Madrid.
Machado said that FAES is trying to import this successful model to Latin America, where the organization is training a new generation of leaders to present a coherent alternative to the progressive or populist-leaning governments that hold power.
“There’s a formation of new political cadres with a new ideological basis that is as much from the entrepreneurial world, the business world, as it is from the political world,” Machado said in Spanish. “What they’re doing strategically is [building] a new line of young neoliberals that can take up the old right.”
After years of operating self-sufficiently, there seems to be a recent effort on behalf of the Board and for the GCL to engage more with the Georgetown community.
“When I came in to work with this, it was at the point at which this was very much under the radar because nobody had taken the time, or had the vision to say, hey, let’s promote this,” Diane Garza said.
Garza, who has been the GCL academic coordinator two years, said that she is now making a concerted effort to publicize the Board’s activities—in marked contrast to years past. Although publicized events used to be few and far between, Garza said she is now trying to coordinate an event this month with CLAS. Additionally, the Latin American Board and CLAS are also now sharing event calendars, and Ernst said that he was trying to coordinate a meeting with School of Foreign Service Dean Carol Lancaster, CLAS Acting Director Erick Langer, and other faculty who study Latin America.
Langer declined to comment on specifics on the Latin American Board but said that he wanted to improve the relationship between both organizations.
“When I started, one of my first efforts was to clear the air and get everybody on the same wavelength,” Langer said. “I’ve been working very hard to open things up and make sure we coordinate.”
Despite these small steps, there remains a remarkable lack of awareness of the Board’s presence and its activities among some of Georgetown’s most senior faculty in the government and Latin American studies departments.
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for Spanish and Portuguese Gwen Kirkpatrick said that she first learned of the Board when it was mentioned in a Latin American Studies executive committee meeting this year.
Multiple faculty members said they were unfamiliar with the Board’s specific activities, but they expressed concern about the choice of speakers for the GCL program and its limited interactions with the rest of the University. They declined to speak on the record.
This lack of familiarity with the Board stands in stark contrast to the way Ernst characterizes the relationship.
“We have been trying from the very beginning to actually cooperate with them … our idea is, to what extent can we outreach and make this one voice for Latin America?” Ernst said.
Kirkpatrick characterized the relationship differently.
“This is not the face of the whole university in its relation to Latin America,” Kirkpatrick said. “There’s a whole dimension of research and teaching that goes on that isn’t reflected in it … There’s a whole lot of social justice and cultural exploration that’s done at Georgetown that’s not reflected here.”
Joanne Rappaport, professor of anthropology, remains concerned about the Board’s lack of transparency—and suggested that the University’s “contents initiatives” should be aired in public and undergo the scrutiny of specialists. In the Board’s case, this means CLAS.
“Such programs should not compete for limited funding and spaces … with regular academic programs such as Latin American Studies, which is what has happened with the Latin American Board,” Rappaport wrote in an e-mail. “As much as outreach is important at a university like Georgetown, these activities should not cut into or detract from the fundamental objectives of our university, which are academic in nature.”
A particularly telling example of the Board’s institutional isolation is its reaction to a long-term community service project led by Veronica Salles-Reese, associate professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and director of the Latin American Studies Certificate.
Salles-Reese’s project, the Georgetown Community Andean Education and Leadership Project, calls for greater University assistance to students who benefit from the Indigenous and Afro-Latino Scholarship Program.
The IALS program, funded in part by Georgetown, finances educational opportunities at small universities in Latin America and community colleges in the United States for 80 students hailing from rural parts of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Salles-Reese’s proposal aims to engage Georgetown undergraduates in the IALS students’ home communities once the scholarship students return, and calls for Georgetown to match up IALS students’ with NGOs in their countries so that they can implement projects in their communities. Salles-Reese also wants to establish a “buddy system” linking Georgetown undergraduates with IALS scholars, and wants financial support for IALS students to install water-purifying plants in their communities.
Salles-Reese, who is taking an unpaid leave of absence to work on the project, said she had contacted Ernst and attempted to obtain financial support from the Board, but that he had never gotten back to her.
“The students that come here to the Board are usually entrepreneurial, they are leaders, and they’re upper-class,” Salles-Reese said. “I presented [the proposal], but I have had no support. No answer. And I gave it to Ernst a long time ago when I started the project.”
The Board’s lack of support for the project appears to contradict both the social leadership aspect of its GCL program and its efforts to work together more with the rest of the University.
Ernst doesn’t see it that way. He said that he met with Salles-Reese and circulated the proposal among the executive board, but it didn’t receive enough support.
“One thing [the board] is not is a bank,” he said. “It’s not a bank to finance any and every single proposal.”
He added that the executive board is mostly focused on funding the scholarships for GCL students. The investment in GCL students is one that theoretically pays off long after the students complete the four-month program.
GCL participants pledge that they will return to their home country to apply the knowledge and experience obtained from the program—or the Board reserves the right to rescind the certificate. This pledge for students to return to their countries of origin is, in effect, at the heart of the Latin American Board project.
“If at the end of the day, we want to change the region and make it more competitive … how can we do it if we take [only] 30 students a year? That’s too slow of a program, too slow of a process,” Ernst said. “That’s when we decided, let’s multiply it and created the underlying principle of the multiplier effect.”
The multiplier effect, or the idea that alumni start up projects in their home country when they return—to train “even more leaders” and “catalysts for change,” the website explains—has resulted in the extensive network of GCL alumni that exists today.
It would be a vast oversimplification to assume that the Latin American Board is simply a political project of President Aznar. There are GCL students this year like Felipe Dib, who wants to create an educational institute in his native Campo Grande to better train public school teachers. Dib wants to reverse what he called the “paradox” of the Brazilian educational system, in which wealthier private school students are able to take advantage of the tuition-free, academically superior public universities, forcing poorer students to pay the cost of a private university education. There are also graduates like Roberta Machado, who looked to a GCL graduate’s organization in Chile as a model to found CREA + Brazil, an organization that provides extracurricular activities to middle-school-aged kids.
But the board also seems to expect something else from its “multiplier effect.” The 2011 GCL program hosts Felipe Algorta, a current Uruguayan parliamentarian of the conservative Partido Nacional, Carmen Iglesias, a Spanish member of FAES, and Victor Lopez Torrents, a member of the Partido Popular’s Nuevas Generaciones.
In Ecuador, for instance, the “multiplier effect” has created a group of GCL alumni affiliated with the neoliberal Fundación Ecuador Libre, which could have very real political ramifications come the next presidential election in 2013.
With President Correa’s opposition weak and fragmented, Ecuadorean journalist Decio Machado suggested that Guillermo Lasso, who is a Latin American Board member, executive president of Banco Guayaquíl, and president of the FAES-affiliated Fundación Ecuador Libre, could make for a strong dark-horse challenge from the right. There would certainly be no shortage of bureaucrats for his administration.
“Lasso is surrounded not by the traditional politicians, but by a new generation of technocrats formed in this new line of young politicians with elite academic backgrounds who have studied at foreign universities,” Machado said in Spanish. “This new generation of conservatives is the strategy of FAES.”
Machado argued that the influence of FAES is part of a growing trend in the region. Amid the backdrop of progressive or center-left governments rising to power and leaving traditional political parties in the dust, foreign think tanks and NGOs are playing an increasingly important role in rebuilding an alternative to the economic and social policies they see as backward, anti-competitive, and in some cases, anti-American.
Of course, foreign think tanks and NGOs have long supported policy or regime change in Latin America. Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University, pointed to the practice of “democracy promotion” carried out through groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, which receives funding from Congress. He highlighted that the political objectives of such groups are often couched in vague rhetoric that celebrates the virtues of freedom and democracy.
“It’s using the rhetoric of the free market as proxy for freedom in general,” Grandin said. “It’s an ideological campaign to promote a definition of democracy as indistinguishable from free markets.”
Grandin cited the failed 2002 coup against Chavez, the 2004 coup in Haiti, and the 2009 coup in Honduras as examples of foreign-funded groups helping to overthrow governments in the region.
“[The coups] are really carried out by these NGOs that are funded through these democracy promotion networks. They’re unaccountable,” Grandin said. “They will fund another group and another group. It’s a way of creating parallel organizations that may remain inactive until they’re needed.”
Evo Morales blamed foreign-funded NGOs—and FAES specifically—for fueling the 2008 unrest in Bolivia, which stemmed from an internationally-condemned autonomy referendum in the natural gas-rich province of Santa Cruz.
And in Venezuela, the Latin American Board has more than a few intimate connections to the opposition.
Rosa Rodriguez, who served as associate director for the Board and academic coordinator for GCL from 2006 to early 2009, was also serving at the time as a representative to the United States for SUMATE, a self-described “pro-democracy non-governmental organization.” However, the group is widely referred to in the international press as an “opposition organization” and has received funding from the NED. Rodriguez, who is now an independent consultant and no longer works for SUMATE, writes on her LinkedIn resume that part of her job with SUMATE was to “develop strategic relationships with U.S. government officials and agencies.” She was also responsible for posting the 2007 promotional video online. Rodriguez initially agreed to answer questions by email only, but then did not respond to a list of questions sent to her.
And on the executive board sits the powerful Gustavo Cisneros—a Venezuelan media mogul who was the wealthiest man in Latin America, according to a 2006 Forbes ranking. Cisneros’ political views are no secret, and neither is his backing of the failed coup in April 2002—so much so that Newsweek said Cisneros was “at the vortex of the whole mess.” His private television station Venevisión broadcasted a firmly anti-Chavez line in the days leading up to the coup, and he allegedly used his offices to host the interim government that fell after two days.
Certainly, the Latin American Board has not engaged in anything resembling a coup since its inception. But the kinds of speakers and visits that comprise the GCL program, the Board’s explicit objective of creating and training leaders who interact in a massive network of alumni with seemingly similar political views, and some members’ informal relationships with think tanks and FAES suggest that the Board is very serious about combating current political trends in the region—even if the political leadership component is not the only dimension of its flagship program.
At the moment, the University appears unconcerned about its support for what has developed into a much larger network of individuals, organizations, and political connections.
Provost James O’Donnell said that because GCL is ultimately a Georgetown program, the University expects the faculty who administer it to engage in quality control. He also emphasized that Georgetown is always sure to maintain its institutional oversight.
“We are very careful that donors do not define or manage our academic program,” O’Donnell said.
But this refers only to the GCL program. On its website, the Board advertises the leadership programs in Bolivia and Ecuador, which can and do pursue donors without the oversight of the University. The program in Bolivia displays the Georgetown name and logo on its website. O’Donnell said that these splinter programs have not come up in conversation.
“The University is pleased with the work of the group and the input they provide regarding important issues related to Latin America,” University spokesperson Julie Bataille wrote in an email. “Georgetown is appreciative of President Aznar’s involvement and support.”
Perhaps the University is unaware of the deeper irony—that exactly two hundred years after independence for most South American countries, the head of Georgetown’s Latin American Board is a Spaniard.
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