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Until very recently, it was very difficult to trace and identify national attitudes towards
foreign policies given the absence of national polls. But new surveys conducted in Latin America
have shown that, in opposition to the general wisdom, Mexicans and Brazilians seem to have
similar attitudes towards the United Nations, even though different national identities prevail in
both countries. For example, in 1998 the Centro Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (the
equivalent of the US Council on Foreign Relations) conducted a survey among 149 political
leaders, including ambassadors, legislators, entrepreneurs, scholars, and journalists. While this
survey is not representative of Brazil’s political, business, and cultural leadership, it does reliably
capture a significant sector of these leaders with an interest in Brazilian foreign policy. One of
the interesting results that the survey disclosed was that a vast majority of the respondents (99%)
believe the country should be more actively involved in international issues. Consistent with
Brazil’s national identity, 76% of the interviewers believe Brazil should have a permanent seat in
the UN Security Council, while a substantial majority (88%) considers that their country should
participate in UN peacekeeping operations. Nevertheless, when asked if Brazilian soldiers should
be trained for external missions, only 49% believe that such policy should be a priority in the
nation’s foreign and defense policies. (Souza 2002, 5)
Even more interesting, however, are the findings of the national survey on Mexican
foreign policy, consisting of 1,500 interviews, conducted by the Centro de Investigación y
Docencia Económicas (CIDE.) Against expectations, Mexicans are not as inwardly focused as
advocates of national identity have come to believe. Mexicans have very favorable feelings
towards the UN. In fact, Mexicans feel more warmly toward the UN than toward any other
international institution. From a scale of 0 (cold feeling) to 100 (very warm feeling), the
organization that received the highest score was precisely the UN, with 75 points. When asked
how important the foreign policy goal of strengthening the UN should be, 60% of the
interviewers believe that it should be a very important goal, 24% say it should be somehow
important, and only 8% think it is not important at all. Even more surprising is that 79% of those
Convention