Latin America: America's Stepping Stone

Latin America: America's Stepping Stone
[Interview] Professor Greg Grandin on the historical legacy of U.S. in the region
Michael Werbowski (minou)
Published 2007-02-06 03:54 (KST)

Professor Greg Grandin lectures on Latin American History at New York University and authored most recently "Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the rise of the new Imperialism." He has also previously written "The Last Colonial Massacre" and the award-winning "The Blood of Guatemala." Grandin is a 2004 recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship. He served on the United Nations truth commission investigating the Guatemalan civil war. Grandin's articles have appeared in Harper's, The Nation and The New York Times. He lives in New York.

How does Washington in your view, see the recent reelection of the Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega and former Sandinista? What does his return to power mean for U.S. Central American relations?

Obviously it is a challenge, both because of the history between the U.S. and Nicaragua, and because of Latin America's current politics, which has included the election of leftists and nationalists sharply critical, or at least politically independent, of Washington. In terms of the first, in the 1980s, the U.S. spent millions of dollars and patronized anti-communist mercenaries who killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans in order to destabilize the Sandinista government and make its attempt at creating a more humane society untenable.

The U.S. promised Nicaragua -- and indeed all of Central America -- that life within its sphere of influence, both in terms of politics and economics, would be better than the policy of non-alignment and social-democratic economics that the Sandinistas offered. But here we are 16 years after the Sandinistas were voted out of power -- worn down and exhausted by fighting a war against the most powerful nation in the history of the world -- and Nicaragua is a basket case, the second poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti.

That Nicaraguans withstood intense pressure and re-elected Ortega demonstrates the absolute failure of U.S. foreign policy to provide a decent life to even a small country of a few million people -- so what are the chances the U.S. would be able to do so in a region like the Middle East? That the Sandinistas remain the single most popular party in Nicaragua is evidence of the limits of U.S. power, especially when it is exercised purely in military terms, which is, after all, the favorite exercise of the neocons. A country as poor as Nicaragua, in a region long locked into the United States' sphere of influence, bucking Washington's diktats is an intolerable embarrassment.

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans killed in the 1980s, tens of thousands of them disappeared, another hundred thousand tortured, and millions more driven into exile, and Nicaragua still refuses to genuflect to Washington's commands.

In terms of contemporary politics, Ortega's victory is the closest to the U.S. border of Latin America's so-called "pink tide," and Ortega has made no secret of his alliance with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. If you think about it in geographic terms, the countries of Southern South America have recently demonstrated a remarkable degree of political and economic independence -- even a country like Chile, considered to be a model of responsible reformism allied with Washington, has refused to support the invasion of Iraq and refused to isolate Chavez. Further north, in the Andes, the region is up for grabs, with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador led by leftists, and Peru and Colombia remaining in the U.S. camp. But Mesoamerica -- Mexico and Central America -- have remained secure, so far, bound to the U.S. by free-trade agreements.

Ortega's election could begin the thawing of this glacial hold the U.S. has on the region.

What are the chances that the former Guatemalan President and strongman Rios Montt who oversaw the military’s brutal campaign in the 1970s and 80s against Guatemala's indigenous population might one day be held accountable for his crimes?

I would say that question would best be answered by an insurance agent's actuarial table -- like Pinochet before his recent death, Rios Montt is of advanced age. I don’t know what the odds are of his surviving long enough to hold him accountable. While there has been some strengthening of the judicial process in Guatemala, there has not been the political will to bring him to justice.

Will the recent releases from prison of the deposed Panamanian President Manuel Noriega heal the wounds created by the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1990?

For wounds to heal, they have to be identified and exposed to air and light. That has yet to happen in the case of Panama, where the U.S. committed atrocities on a mass scale ? namely the brutal bombing of the poor neighborhoods of Corillo and San Miguelito, which were described by Panamanians as indiscriminate. The U.S. still claims only a few hundreds civilians died, but human rights organizations on the ground reported the killing of thousands, along with the creation of over 10,000 homeless. No white or rich neighborhoods in Panama City were bombed.

What is the significance of the rising tide of popularity of the "21st century Socialism" in Latin America? Is this an ideology or a real socio-political phenomenon with "grass roots" support or simply a populist ploy to consolidate power?

What you are seeing in Latin America, particularly in Venezuela, but elsewhere as well, is the return of the developmentalist state but now linked not so much to affiliated unions or peasant organizations but to the myriad "civil society" organizations that emerged in the 1990s to turn Latin America into the vanguard of the world’s anti-corporate social justice movement. There is a real synergy between, say, Evo Morales in Bolivia, or Chavez in Venezuela, and these diverse grassroots groups. I wouldn't describe it as a ploy at all -- and that Chavez notably refuses comparisons with someone like Juan Peron in Argentina is a good sign. In fact, whenever there has been a conflict between the official party and social-movement groups in Venezuela, Chavez has consistently sided with the latter.

Please briefly explain what role policy makers in Washington who masterminded the "Iran contra affair" in the 1980s under President Reagan played in orchestrating the military offensive against and occupation in Iraq?

There have been an untold number of books published on U.S. "regime change" in Latin America, and I didn't want "Empire's Workshop"--the book where I make this argument -- to be yet another.

I instead intended to examine the importance of Latin America in the formation of America's two great twentieth-century political coalitions, the New Deal and the New Right. The first chapter looks at how the ideas and institutions that came to define American multilateral "soft power" were first worked out in Latin America, largely as a result of local resistance to U.S. militarism. The rest of
the book focuses on the New Right's assault on these ideas and institutions in the wake of Vietnam.

And this is where Central America--and Iran-Contra -- comes in: Reagan's policy there served as the crucible where the alliances, ideas, and tactics that make up the modern New Right first fully took shape. I want to be clear that I am not saying Central America was more important to U.S. interests than, for instance, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, or Western Europe. On the contrary, its very unimportance allowed Reagan, even as he moved with moderation, even vacillation, in other parts of the world, to give the region as a cheap gift to movement conservatives. Their hard-line there was a form of wish fulfillment, how they hoped Washington would act against the USSR and other third-world hot spots.

In turn, a bellicose stance in Central America helped smooth over a number of potentially debilitating differences among the diverse groups that made up the gathering New Right, between, say, secular neocons and evangelical Christians.
Reagan's patronage of anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua and death-squad states in El Salvador and Guatemala did more than just rehabilitate American "hard power"--it justified that power in evermore idealistic terms. This corresponded to the New Right's attempt to reclaim the diplomatic moral high ground, in response to both Kissinger's realpolitik and Carter's human rights diplomacy. It was in Central America where the Republican Party first fully embraced the language of human rights and democratization.

An instructive comparison is to Vietnam. There, as the war dragged on and atrocities were revealed, Washington gave up any pretense of idealism to justify its involvement. In Central America, the exact opposite occurred. Even after the press reported on Salvadoran and Contra carnage, even after the Iran-Contra story broke, Reagan upped the rhetorical ante, casting support for Contras as keeping faith with America's revolutionary heritage. This, I believe, is the most immediate antecedent to what some neocons like to call "hard Wilsonianism," or, as I put it in the book, Bush's "punitive idealism."

The role of neocons in this "remoralization" of American diplomacy has been widely noted. But Empire’s Workshop sheds light on the Christian Right's contribution as well. Again, Central America proved key. Republicans mobilized their fundamentalist base to check the anti-interventionist movement and to provide crucial "private" aid to anticommunist allies. This mobilization, in turn, both increased evangelical involvement in foreign policy and helped fuse the religious and secular branches of the New Right. Evangelicals shared with neocons a sense that America had grown dangerously weak, and that only a rebirth of political will, or spiritual renewal, would save it.

Their understanding of themselves as a persecuted people engaged in an end-time struggle between good and evil mapped easily onto the millennialism of anti-communist militarists, particularly those involved in Central America, many of whom, such as William Casey and Oliver North, were themselves ultraconservative Christians. One aspect of the Central American wars largely overlooked is the importance of Liberation Theology, along with the Christian humanism of the domestic solidarity movement, in united the New Right. Well before radical Islam, Liberation Theology was the "political religion" the Reagan Revolution squared off against. It provided a powerful ethical challenge to both mainstream conservative theologians and fundamentalists, who responded by reestablishing the link between free markets and morality and reaffirming America as a "redeemer nation."

So when Jeane Kirkpatrick remarked that the three U.S. nuns raped, mutilated and murdered by Salvadoran security forces in 1980 were "not just nuns, they were political activists," she was being more than cruel. She was signaling her disapproval of a particular kind of peace Christianity.

There's no space to go into it here, but "Empire's Workshop" also details how Central America provided the New Right an opportunity to rehearse the tactics that has led to today's restoration of the imperial presidency -- this is what the Iran-Contra scandal was really about, figuring out ways to bypass Congress to wage an aggressive, unaccountable war. The inter-agency war party built by the first generation of neocons in the 1980s set the stage for today's Office of
Special Plans in the Pentagon. Likewise, there is a direct line connecting Otto Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy -- which brought together PR experts with "grassroots" conservative organizations to manipulate media, congressional, scholarly, and public opinion -- to this administration's use of firms like the Rendon Group to sell the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.

Now that it is out, Empire's Workshop could be read as a compliment to studies that look at the domestic roots of the modern conservative movement, such as Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" some of which suggest that if "value" issues could just be neutralized, evangelicals would support a return to New Deal economics. This, I argue in the book, misses the role conservative Christian intellectuals played in laying the groundwork for today's embrace of
free-market empire as America's national purpose. "Empire's Workshop" can also be read as a missing link connecting books that focus on one or another conservative group to explain Bush's foreign policy -- Fukuyama on the neocons, for example, or Kevin Phillips on the fundamentalists -- but overlook the deeper history of the Salvadorization of American diplomacy.

Is the rise of Chavez's popular brand of socialism somewhat linked to or a backlash against the neo liberal policies in Latin America which originated with Milton Friedman and the other economist know as the "Chicago boys"?

Yes, you can't understand the rise of the New Latin American Left, unless you understand the absolute failure of radical free-market policies in Latin America over the last two decades. Between 1980 and 2000, the region grew cumulatively by only 9 percent in per capita terms. Compare that with the 82 percent expansion of the previous two decades, and add to it the financial crises that have rolled across Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina over the past 15 years, sweeping away accumulated savings, destroying the middle class, and wrecking the agricultural sector, and you will get a sense of why voters have turned left.

Please explain to us what the "Buenos Aires Consensus" is and how it may impact U.S Latin American relations?

The BAC is the term that the leaders of those countries have used to contrast their policies to those of the Washington Consensus -- the euphemism for the punishing mix of financial austerity, privatizations, and free-trade that has been imposed on Latin America. There are many policy differences among Latin America's new reformers, but they all share a commitment to diversify sources of investment and integrate Latin American markets (as a way of weakening their dependence on the U.S.) and of making the lessening of inequality -- as opposed to the generation of economic growth -- the primary goal of development.

Is America losing its hegemonic dominance in Latin America to China?

Not just China -- China does serve as an important source of capital investment, thus giving Latin American economies other options besides U.S. banks and the IMF to capitalize investment. But significant stores of capital has been built up throughout Asia, along with Russia and the Middle East, that has allowed leaders like Morales and Chavez, along with Kirchner in Argentina and now Rafael Correa in Ecuador, to have more leverage in their dealings with U.S. corporations.