The Melding Americas : Education : U.S. Degrees Often Hold Key to Top Latin American Posts : Graduates’ shared view may be why closer relations among hemisphere’s nations are succeeding where earlier plans failed.

The career path to Cabinet posts and boardrooms in Latin America increasingly leads through foreign education--especially U.S. universities.

The last three Chilean treasury ministers have been graduates of U.S. schools. In Mexico, both President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid, attended Harvard.

The new generation that will lead their countries into the next century is made up of scholars like Colombia’s 28-year-old vice minister of foreign trade, Mauricio Reina, who is a Johns Hopkins graduate.

The common experience of attending U.S. graduate schools has affected not only the Latin leaders’ perception of their former host country, but also the way they relate to each other.

“There is a broad consensus on certain key issues, a shared vision,” said Terry McCoy, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “Not only do you know somebody, but you share a world view.”

That shared view, experts say, is a major reason why the latest initiatives at closer relations in the Americas--starting with the North American Free Trade Agreement--appear to be succeeding where the Kennedy Administration’s Alliance for Progress and FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy failed.

Some caution is necessary, including the danger of exaggerating how much two years in the rarefied atmosphere of a top university really teaches a foreign student about U.S. culture. Still, whether government officials, business executives or scientists, Latin Americans eager for career advancement are coming under growing pressure to earn a foreign degree.

“We expect that if someone earns a doctorate here, he will go to a foreign university for a post-doctorate,” said Marcos Moshinsky, a noted Mexican physicist.

In government, the incentive is clear: 59% of Mexico’s current Cabinet ministers, undersecretaries and chiefs of staff did postgraduate work abroad, compared to one-fourth two decades ago.

As a result, more than 3,000 students from Mexico are now studying in the United States. That is a remarkable contrast from the level two generations ago when only the wealthiest Latin Americans could aspire to a foreign degree.

The change occurred largely because Latin American governmental agencies--mainly central banks--began offering graduate fellowships to bright young bureaucrats in the early 1960s, principally in economics. One of the best investments Venezuela made with its oil bonanza is considered to be the money put into fellowships for foreign study.

The foreign-trained economists went into government and onto university faculties when they returned home. At first, the young Turks faced an uphill battle in their efforts to introduce free-market economic reforms, said Sergio Ghigliazza, director of the organization of Latin American central banks and a Yale graduate.

Then the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s discredited the old economic theories at the same time that foreign-educated economists were reaching the point in their careers that they could have a significant influence on public policy.

University of Chicago graduates turned Chile into a laboratory for the monetarist theories of their mentor, Milton Friedman.

“Yale probably exerted more influence over economic policy in Mexico than any other foreign institution,” said Roderic Camp, a Tulane University professor who has compiled a biographical dictionary of influential Mexicans.

The governor of Mexico’s central bank, a former treasury minister and President-elect Ernesto Zedillo, who is also a former budget minister, are among the key figures in the Mexican government who attended Yale.

Throughout Latin America, foreign-trained economists began negotiating the debt deals that included economic adjustments with the free-market reforms they had been advocating all along. At the same time, young executives whose corporations and families had sent them to the United States for MBAs began taking over businesses. The result was a radical change of view about how government, businesses and countries in general should be run.

“Based on hundreds of interviews, I can say that Mexicans in general feel that education played a critical role in their values, not only the books they read, but their contacts with students and professors outside the classroom,” Camp said.

Colombian sociologist Agustin Lombana recalled his graduate study at Stanford as crucial to his view of life.

“I thought I was going there to obtain formulas to use for the rest of my professional life,” said Lombana, who now represents the Fulbright program in Colombia. “Instead, I was left with a series of questions. After five months at Stanford, I felt overwhelmed by research in a field that I thought I had mastered. This shook me out of static thought into dynamic thought.”

That sort of experience is why graduate study abroad has affected Latin leaders so profoundly, he said.

“You can easily access the Harvard library on Infonet,” Lombana explained, “but that is not the same as living the reality of a foreign culture.”

However, Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego, cautioned that the reality for foreign graduate students is often quite insular.

“They come to the United States to acquire a tool kit that will enable them to advance professionally back home,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily translate into a better understanding of the United States.” In fact, he added, “what they could have learned by osmosis may actually be quite wide of the mark.”

Most of the potential Latin leaders who have attended the San Diego center’s summer seminar in U.S. studies over the last six years had already completed graduate work in the United States, Cornelius added. Nevertheless, he said, “it’s always very interesting to me to see the scales falling from the eyes as people find they harbor a set of stereotypes they weren’t aware of until they began a rigorous course of academic work.”

However, Arcadio Diaz-Quinones, former director of Latin American studies at Princeton, is worried that the young Latin scholars also become alienated from their own culture.

“This creates an international professional culture that allows for understanding between (leaders in different) countries,” he said. “But they end up talking to each other, not the people they represent.

“There is a danger of establishing a new elite,” he said, “of widening the gap between the elite and the people.”

If Diaz-Quinones is right, there is a scramble among Latin American students to make sure they land on the elite side of the gap by studying abroad.