In the case of Iraq, the disappearance of the Soviet deterrent was a crucial factor in the US-UK decision for war, as widely discussed. It might have been a factor in the invasion of Panama, as claimed by Reagan Latin America hand Elliott Abrams, who exulted that the US was now free to use force without fear of a Russian reaction.
Hostility to functioning democracy in Central America continued without any change. As the Berlin Wall fell, elections were held in Honduras in “an inspiring example of the democratic promise that today is spreading throughout the Americas,” in George Bush's words. The candidates represented large landowners and wealthy industrialists, with close ties to the military, the effective rulers, under US control. Their political programs were virtually identical, and the campaign was largely restricted to insults and entertainment. Human rights abuses by the security forces escalated before the election. Starvation and misery were rampant, having increased during the “decade of democracy,” along with capital flight and the debt burden. But there was no major threat to order, or to investors.
At the same time, the electoral campaign opened in Nicaragua. Its 1984 elections do not exist in US commentary. They could not be controlled, and therefore are not an inspiring example of democracy. Taking no chances with the long-scheduled 1990 elections, Bush announced as the campaign opened in November that the embargo would be lifted if his candidate won. The White House and Congress renewed their support for the contra forces in defiance of the Central American presidents, the World Court, and the United Nations, rendered irrelevant by the US veto. The media went along, continuing to suppress the US subversion of the peace process with the diligence required on important affairs of state. Nicaraguans were thus informed that only a vote for the US candidate would end the terror and illegal economic warfare. In Latin America, the electoral results were generally interpreted as a victory for George Bush, even by those who celebrated the outcome. In the United States, in contrast, the outcome was hailed as a “Victory for U.S. Fair Play,” with “Americans United in Joy,” Albanian-style, as
New York Times
headlines put it.
It is not that the celebrants were unaware of how the US victory was achieved. Rather, there was unconcealed joy at the grand success in subverting democracy.
Time
magazine, for example, was quite frank about the means employed to bring about the latest of the “happy series of democratic surprises” as “democracy burst forth” in Nicaragua. The method was to “wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves,” with a cost to us that is “minimal,” leaving the victim “with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations, and ruined farms,” and thus providing the U.S. candidate with “a winning issue”: ending the “impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua.” To appreciate the character of the political culture, it is only necessary to imagine the same story appearing in Stalinist Russia with a few names changed, an intellectual exercise far beyond the capacity of Western commissars.
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The frankness is refreshing, and reveals with exactitude just what is meant by the “Americans United in Joy” who proclaim their dedication to “democracy.”
Washington has employed similar methods to bring “democracy” to Angola; here too the country has been devastated, with a death toll reaching hundreds of thousands. From 1975, Angola was under attack by South Africa and the terrorist forces of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, operating from Namibia and then Zaire with US support. Virtually alone, the US refused to recognize the MPLA government and subjected it to economic warfare. South Africa finally withdrew after a military defeat by the Cuban forces that had resisted its aggression since 1975, and a peace agreement was signed (May 1991) calling for elections. As in Central America, the US moved at once to subvert it, continuing its support for UNITA terror. The results are described by South African journalist Phillip van Niekerk: peasants “don't like UNITA,” “But most of the people are afraid that if UNITA loses the elections, the war will go on” (quoting a Dutch development worker in the countryside).
People who are “aware of the atrocities committed by UNITA” may be “appalled” at the prospects, van Niekerk continues, but continuation of the war is more than the population can bear. The ruling MPLA “sacrificed a generation to repel the years of South African aggression and US-funded destabilization by Unita,” Victoria Brittain writes. It lost any early credibility; what it might have done without the US-South African attack is anyone's guess. A “new wave of white settlers” is “re-colonizing” Angola, van Niekerk reports, now Afrikaners, later perhaps Portuguese returning to reclaim their lands. “The only optimism,” Brittain concludes, “comes from the South African businessmen who occupy the lobbies of the newly refurbished hotels” in Luanda, where cynics say that “If Unita wins they'll have the country handed to them on a plate, if the MPLA wins they'll still have the country, for a handful of rands.”
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It is, again, only natural that at the dissident extreme, Anthony Lewis should laud the “consistent American policy” from the 1970s “to help negotiate an end to the brutal civil war” in Angola, and the successful pursuit by the Bush Administration of “a peaceful policy” aiming at “a political solution in Nicaragua.”
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The traditional attitude toward democracy was reiterated by a Latin America Strategy Development Workshop at the Pentagon in September 1990. It concluded that current relations with the Mexican dictatorship are “extraordinarily positive,” untroubled by stolen elections, death squads, endemic torture, scandalous treatment of workers and peasants, and so forth. But “a âdemocracy opening' in Mexico could test the special relationship by bringing into office a government more interested in challenging the U.S. on economic and nationalist grounds,” the fundamental concern over many years.
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Each year, the White House sends to Congress a report explaining that the military threat we face requires vast expendituresâwhich, accidentally, sustain high-tech industry at home and repression abroad. The first post-Cold War edition was in March 1990. The Russians having disappeared from the scene, the report at last recognized frankly that the enemy is the Third World. US military power must target the Third World, it concluded, primarily the Middle East, where the “threats to our interests...could not be laid at the Kremlin's door,” a fact that can now be acknowledged, the Soviet pretext having disappeared. For the same reason, the threat now becomes “the growing technological sophistication of Third World conflicts.” The US must therefore strengthen its “defense industrial base,” with incentives “to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development,” and develop further forward basing and counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict capacities.
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In brief, the prime concerns continue to be power within the rich men's club, control of the service areas, and state-organized public subsidy for advanced industry at home. Democracy must be opposed with vigor, except in the PC sense of unhampered business rule. Human rights retain their usual irrelevance. Policies remain stable, adapted to new contingencies, with parallel adjustments by the cultural managers. The points are so glaringly obvious, and made with such manic consistency, that it takes real talent to miss them.
6. The Soft Line
With the end of the Cold War, the US is more free to use force to control the South, but several factors are likely to inhibit the resort to these traditional methods. Among them are the successes of the past years in crushing popular nationalist and reform tendencies, the elimination of the “Communist” appeal to those who hope to “plunder the rich,” and the economic catastrophes of the last decade. In light of these achievements, limited forms of diversity and independence can be tolerated with less concern that they will lead to a challenge to ruling business interests. Control can be exercised by economic measures: the IMF regimen, selective resort to free trade measures, and so forth. Democratic forms are tolerable, even preferable, as long as “stability” is ensured. If this dominant value is threatened, the iron fist must strike.
Another inhibiting factor is that the domestic base for foreign adventures has eroded. An early Bush Administration National Security Policy Review concluded that “much weaker enemies” (meaning any acceptable target) must be defeated “decisively and rapidly,” because domestic “political support” is so thin.
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Another problem is that other centers of economic power have their own interests, though the Defense Planning study cited earlier is correct in noting that basic interests are shared, notably, the concern that the Third World fulfill its service function. And the increasing internationalization of the economy gives a somewhat new cast to interstate competition, as already discussed. These are factors of growing importance.
The use of force to control the Third World is a last resort. Economic weapons are more efficient, when feasible. Some of the newer mechanisms can be seen in the GATT negotiations. Western powers call for liberalization when that is in their interest, and for enhanced protection when
that
is in their interest. One major US concern is the “new themes”: guarantees for “intellectual property rights,” such as patents and software, that will enable TNCs to monopolize new technology; and removal of constraints on services and investment, which will undermine national development programs in the Third World and effectively place economic and social policy decisions in the hands of TNCs and the financial institutions of the North. These are “issues of greater magnitude” than the more publicized conflict over agricultural subsidies, according to William Brock, head of the Multilateral Trade Negotiations Coalition of major US corporations.
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In general, each of the wealthy industrial powers advocates a mixture of liberalization and protection (the Multifiber Arrangement and its extensions, the US-Japan semiconductor agreement, Voluntary Export Arrangements, etc.), designed for the interests of dominant domestic forces, and particularly for the TNCs that are to run the world economy. The effects would be to restrict Third World governments to a police function to control their working classes and superfluous population, while TNCs gain free access to their resources and monopolize new technology and global investment and productionâand of course are granted the central planning, allocation, production, and distribution functions denied to governments, unacceptable agents because they might fall under the influence of popular pressures reflecting domestic needs. The outcome may be called “free trade” for doctrinal reasons, but it might more accurately be described as “a system of world economic governance with parameters defined by the unregulated market and rules administered by supranational banks and corporations” (Howard Wachtel), a system of “corporate mercantilism” (Peter Phillips), with managed commercial interactions within and among huge corporate groupings, and regular state intervention in the three major Northern blocs to subsidize and protect domestically-based international corporations and financial institutions.
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The facts have not been lost on Third World commentators, who have been protesting eloquently. But their voices are as welcome as those of Iraqi democrats.
Meanwhile, the US is establishing a regional bloc that will enable it to compete more effectively with the Japan-led region and the EC. Canada's role is to provide resources and some services and skilled labor, as it is absorbed more fully into the US economy with reduction of the welfare system, labor rights, and cultural independence. The Canadian Labour Congress reported the loss of over 225,000 jobs in the first two years of the Free Trade Agreement, along with a wave of takeovers of Canadian-based companies (see chapter 2.5). Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean are to supply cheap labor for assembly plants, as in the maquiladora industries of northern Mexico, where harsh working conditions, low wages, and the absence of environmental controls offer highly profitable conditions for investors. Internal repression and structural adjustment will ensure ample cheap and docile labor. These regions are also to provide export crops and markets for US agribusiness. Mexico and Venezuela are also to provide oil, with US corporations granted the right to take part in production, reversing efforts at domestic control of natural resources. The press failed to give Bush sufficient credit for his achievements in his Fall 1990 tour of Latin America. Mexico was induced to allow US oil companies new access to its resources, a policy goal of a half-century. US companies will now be able “to help Mexico's nationalized oil company,” as the
Wall Street Journal
prefers to construe the matter. Our fondest wish for many years has been to help our little brown brothers; and at last the ignorant peons will allow us to cater to their needs.
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Such policies are to be extended to appropriate sectors of South America. And, crucially, the United States will attempt to maintain its dominant influence over Gulf oil production and the profits that derive from it. Other economic powers, of course, have their own ideas, and potential sources of conflict abound.
There are many familiar reasons why wealth and power tend to reproduce. It should, then, come as little surprise that the Third World continues to fall behind the North. UN statistics indicate that as a percent of developed countries, Africa's GDP per capita (minus South Africa) declined by about 50 percent from 1960 to 1987. The decline was almost as great in Latin America.
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