Slast, I'm not picking on you, nor on anyone else here commenting, aside from saying that assuming that Culture X is always going to have a steep authority gradient on the flight deck is not a valid assumption.
It's just an observed tendency, not necessarily a given, that a culture of "machismo" will show that authority gradient, and it's noticeable that it was absent in that Avianca accident near JFK. The FO, for whatever reason, went his own way when speaking to ATC. One would assume that the Captain said something in Spanish about an "emergencia" and that's pretty clearly going to translate as "emergency," a word the FO never used.
Of course, one might counter-argue that the Avianca FO saw ATC as over the flight crew, as of higher authority, so that he was unduly submissive to ATC, not speaking up about their low-fuel emergency but meekly accepting those vectors away from the airport.
Another thing is that aviation is oriented towards proper behavior, towards people following the rules. When you have people exhibiting transgressive behavior, rule-breaking behavior such as deliberately ignoring fuel requirements, it's so that the system may not be geared to preventing that behavior. ATC is not primarily there to prevent us from attempting suicide-murder. It's not so, however, that such behavior always goes unpunished; this latest rule-breaker, or pair of rule-breakers, on the flight deck of that RJ85 got the death penalty!