Presidential ‘pacification’ of Latin America

By Noam Chomsky

From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada

Barack Obama is the fourth U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and he joins three others in a long tradition of pacification that has always served U.S. interests.

The four presidents left their mark in “our little region over here that has never bothered anybody,” as the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, characterized the hemisphere in 1945.

Given the Obama administration’s attitude toward the elections in Honduras last November, it is worthwhile to examine the record.

Theodore Roosevelt

In his second term as president, Theodore Roosevelt said that “the expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries […] has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place” – never mind what the blacks, native Americans, Filipinos and other “benefited” people may think.

Therefore, it was “inevitable and in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans” by conquering half of Mexico. In addition, “it was out of the question to expect [the Texans] to submit to the mastery of a weaker race.”

Utilizing gunboat diplomacy to steal Panama from Colombia and dig a canal also was a gift to humanity.

Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson was the most praised Nobel laureate and arguably the worst U.S. president for Latin America. His invasion of Haiti in 1915 left thousands dead, practically restored slavery and left much of the country in ruins.

To show his love for democracy, Wilson ordered his marines to disband the Haitian Parliament at gunpoint, in reprisal for not passing a “progressive” bill that allowed U.S. corporations to buy up the Caribbean nation.

The problem was solved when the Haitians adopted a Constitution dictated by the United States and written under the guns of the marines. It was an effort that would prove “beneficial for Haiti,” the State Department assured its prisoners.

Wilson also invaded the Dominican Republic to guarantee their well-being. That nation and Haiti were left in the care of brutish civil guards. Decades of torture, violence and misery in both countries were the legacy of the “Wilsonian idealism” that became a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.

Jimmy Carter

To President Jimmy Carter, human rights were “the soul of our foreign policy.” Robert Pastor, national security adviser for Latin America, explained that there were important distinctions between rights and policy; lamentably, the administration had to back the regime of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. When this became impossible, a U.S.-trained National Guard was installed in the country, “even after it massacred the population with a brutality that a nation usually reserves for its enemy, killing some 40,000 people,” as Pastor put it.

To Pastor, the reason is elementary: “The United States did not want to control Nicaragua or other nations of the region but it also did not want developments to get out of control. It wanted Nicaraguans to act independently, except when doing so would affect U.S. interests adversely.”

Barack Obama

President Barack Obama separated the United States from almost all of Latin America and Europe when he accepted the military coup that overthrew the Honduran democracy last June.

The coup revealed “abysmal and growing political and socioeconomic divisions,” according to The New York Times. To the “reduced high society,” President Manuel Zelaya had become a threat to what that class calls “democracy,” but what in reality is the government of “the country’s strongest entrepreneurial and political forces.”

Zelaya adopted measures as dangerous as raising the minimum wage in a country where 60 percent of the population lives in poverty. He had to go.

Practically alone, the United States recognized the November elections (won by Pepe Lobo), which were held under a military government and were “a great celebration of democracy,” according to Obama’s ambassador in Honduras, Hugo Llorens.

Support for the elections also guarantees for the U.S. the use of the air base at Palmerola, on Honduran territory, whose value for the U.S. Army increases as U.S. troops are being expelled from most of Latin America.

After the elections, Lewis Anselem, Obama’s representative to the Organization of American States, advised the backward Latin Americans that they should accept the military coup and support the United States “in the real world, not in the world of magical realism.”

Obama broke new ground when he supported a military coup. The U.S. government funds the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which allegedly foster democracy.

The IRI regularly supports military coups to overthrow elected governments, as happened in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004. The NDI has held back. In Honduras, for the first time, the NDI agreed to observe the elections held under a de-facto military government, unlike the OAS and the United Nations, which continued to wander in the realm of magical realism.

Due to the close relationship between the Pentagon and the Honduran Army, as well as the enormous economic influence the U.S. has on that Central American country, it would have been a simple matter for Obama to join the efforts of Latin Americans and Europeans to defend democracy in Honduras.

But Obama opted for the traditional policy.

In his Historical Analysis of Inter-American Relations, British academician Gordon Connell-Smith writes that, “while paying lip service to the encouragement of representative democracy in Latin America, the United States has a strong interest in just the reverse, apart from procedural democracy, especially the holding of elections, which only too often have proved farcical.”

A functional democracy can respond to the concerns of the people, while “the United States has been concerned with fostering the most favorable conditions for private overseas investment”

One requires a large dose of what is sometimes called “intentional ignorance” to not see this.

Such blindness must be jealously guarded if one wishes the violence of state to follow its course and perform its function – always in favor of humanity, as Obama reminded us again in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.