The ‘sacred’ U.S. elections
HAVANA – In his recent visit to Russia, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ended his press conference with a strong and clear message to the world: “Interference in American elections is unacceptable.” He then added, “Our elections are important and sacred and they must be kept free and fair and with no outside country [interfering].”
Very few Americans would contradict Pompeo’s statement regarding one of the most revered institutions in the U.S. political system. However, in practice, the number one violators of this alleged sanctity have been politicians from the North American nation.
Based on rules that legalize what in many places would be considered corruption, lobbyists and special interest groups practically bribe politicians during campaigns. Misusing their responsibilities, media outlets sell out to the highest bidder. And the social networks make use of resources that violate the privacy of people and have become the ideal means for spreading false news about other candidates.
The law is quite lax when it comes to regulating the financing of electoral campaigns and it has reached the point that the money of a few magnates is decisive in the process.
Congressional districts are designed by the party that dominates its state legislature, and we’ve seen cases where the rules that regulate the elections are designed to limit participation of minority groups. Elections are often characterized by infractions that would scandalize any ‘International Verification Commission’ often “required for other countries,” but not acceptable in the U.S.
What can one say, then, about the lack of respect the U.S. often demonstrates for elections elsewhere? The non-interference demanded by Pompeo when it comes to the U.S. apparently does not apply to their interference with elections in other parts of the world.
According to Dov H. Levin, a professor at the University of Hong Kong and a renowned expert on the causes and effects of partisan electoral interventions by the great powers, has written that the U.S. leads the list of electoral interventionists with 81 documented interventions from 1946 to the year 2000. It is followed by Russia with 36, which includes the Soviet period.
The professor may have fallen short, though. Any person more or less informed on Latin America knows that it is difficult to carry out an election in the subcontinent, without somehow the hand of the United States appearing.
Europe has not been spared from these intrusions since the 1940s, when the Marshall Plan included determining the elections of the western countries of that continent. The most notorious cases being the Italian elections.
Russia, now accused of violating the sacrosanct American political order, has more than once been a victim of U.S. intervention in its elections. In 1996, Boris Yeltsin received $10 billion from the IMF to support his candidacy, and in 2016, around the time that Pompeo accused Russia of intervening in the U.S. elections, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) invested $6.8 million in the forces against Vladimir Putin.
For a long time now the United States has not hidden these interventions. What were previously CIA covert operations are now usually presented as legitimate actions ‘promoting democracy’ around the world. The NED, USAID, the National Democratic Institute, or the Republican International Institute, all of them at least partially financed with U.S. government funds, have among their declared functions the intervention of the electoral processes of other countries.
Elections sold as a guarantee for democratic processes is an American myth. It is functional to a hegemonic system based on the manipulation of people. Only this can explain how Donald Trump, the personification of the tycoon par excellence, appears as a defender of the interests of American workers. And millions of persons believe it.
