Even more TIMTOWTDI. The core module List::Util has some handy utilities for common list operations:

use strict;
use warnings;
use List::Util qw(first);

my @countries = qw(India America Germany Austria);
my $country   = 'America';
print "True\n" if first { $_ eq $country } @countries;
[download]

That being said, I still think the hash solutions are better.