Two weeks after 9/11, Los Angeles Times reporter Hector Tobar and his family moved to Latin America. When they moved back home permanently this summer, he writes, “I discovered a country different than the one I left behind.” In a fascinating essay, Tobar compares the turmoil in the young democracies and banana republics he’s spent the last seven years covering as a journalist with recent turmoil in the United States.

In Argentina, Mexico and other places I lived and visited as a foreign correspondent, people asked me if my country had gone crazy. I listened to taxi drivers in Buenos Aires rail against “the imperialist Bush.” In Mexican villages, farmers asked me: “Why does everyone over there hate us so much?”…

If I could meet those Buenos Aires taxi driver drivers again, those Mexican farmers, I would say:

“The United States is a lot like your country. We’re going through a rough time. We speak a lot of Spanish. And we’re wondering how safe it is to keep our money in the bank.”

When I lived in Argentina, I watched the middle class disappear in a whirlpool of bank failures. People rioted and attacked bankers in the Buenos Aires financial district. I interviewed a 59-year-old woman who had poured alcohol over her head and set fire to herself in the lobby of her bank. Her failed suicide — “a moment of madness,” she called it — came after she lost most of her life savings.

This October, three blocks from my daughter’s new preschool in Pasadena, a 53-year-old woman set fire to a foreclosed home from which she was about to be evicted. Then she shot and killed herself. Today, in our suffering United States, too many of us know someone who’s been laid off, someone in danger of losing their home.

On a plane trip last month, I sat next to a Texas bank executive, a man in his 50s whose job consisted of visiting “clusters” of foreclosed properties around the country. “You see the things people leave behind in their houses,” he told me. “Like the overdue bills for their kid’s dance class in the mailbox.”

He grew quiet, with a faraway look that suggested the toll that came with seeing so much loss. One week later, federal regulators closed the executive’s bank.

Read the rest of Tobar’s worthwhile reflection here.