Presidential ‘Peacemaking’ in Latin America
Noam Chomsky
Given the Obama administration’s stance toward the elections in
Honduras, it may be worthwhile to examine the record of each
Nobel-winning U.S. president. Barack Obama, the fourth U.S. president to
win the Nobel Peace Prize, joins the others in the long tradition of
peacemaking so long as it serves U.S. interests.
All four presidents left their imprint on “our little region over
here that has never bothered anybody,” as U.S. Secretary of War Henry L.
Stimson characterized the hemisphere in 1945.
Given the Obama administration’s stance toward the elections in
Honduras in November, it may be worthwhile to examine the record.
Theodore Roosevelt In his second term as president, Theodore Roosevelt
said, “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,” despite what Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos and other
beneficiaries might mistakenly believe.
It was therefore “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 and, “It
was out of the question to expect (Texans) to submit to the mastery of
the weaker race.”
Using gunboat diplomacy to steal Panama from Colombia to build the
canal was also a gift to humanity.
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson is the most honoured of the presidential laureates and
arguably the worst for Latin America.
Wilson’s invasion of Haiti in 1915 killed thousands, restored virtual
slavery and left much of the country in ruins.
Demonstrating his love of democracy, Wilson ordered his Marines to
disband the Haitian parliament at gunpoint for failing to pass
“progressive” legislation that allowed U.S. corporations to buy up the
country.
The problem was remedied when Haitians adopted a U.S.-written
constitution, under Marine guns. The achievement would be “beneficial to
Haiti,” the State Department assured its wards.
Wilson also invaded the Dominican Republic to ensure its welfare.
Both countries were left under the rule of vicious national guards.
Decades of torture, violence and misery there come down to us as a
legacy of “Wilsonian idealism,” a leading principle of U.S. foreign
policy.
Jimmy Carter For President Jimmy Carter, human rights were “the soul
of our foreign policy.”
Robert Pastor, Carter’s national security advisor for Latin America,
explained some important distinctions between rights and policy:
Regretfully, the administration had to support Nicaraguan dictator
Anastasio Somoza’s regime, and when that proved impossible, to maintain
the U.S.-trained National Guard even after it had been massacring the
population “with a brutality a nation usually reserves for its enemy,”
killing some 40,000 people.
To Pastor, the reason is elementary: “The United States did not want
to control Nicaragua or the 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 by accepting the military coup that overthrew
Honduran democracy last June.
The coup reflected a “yawning political and socioeconomic divide,”
The New York Times reported. For the “small upper class,” Honduran
President Manuel Zelaya was becoming a threat to what they call
“democracy,” namely, the rule of “the most powerful business and
political forces in the country.”
Zelaya was initiating such dangerous measures as a rise in the
minimum wage in a country where 60 percent live in poverty. He had to
go.
Virtually alone, the United States recognized the November elections
(with Pepe Lobo the victor) held under military rule - “a great
celebration of democracy,” according to Hugo Llorens, Obama’s
ambassador.
The endorsement also preserved the use of Honduras’ Palmerola air
base, increasingly valuable as the U. S. military is being driven out of
most of Latin America.
After the elections, Lewis Anselem, Obama’s representative to the
Organization of American States, instructed the backward Latin Americans
that they should recognize the military coup and join the United States
“in the real world, not in the world of magical realism.” Obama broke
ground in supporting the military coup. The U.S. government funds the
International Republican Institute and the National Democratic
Institute, which are supposed to promote democracy.
The IRI regularly supports military coups to overthrow elected
governments, most recently in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004.
But the NDI has held back. In Honduras, for the first time, Obama’s
NDI agreed to observe the elections under military rule, unlike the OAS
and the United Nations, still wandering in the world of magical realism.
Given the close connections between the Pentagon and the Honduran
military, and the enormous U.S. economic leverage in the country, it
would have been a simple matter for Obama to join the Latin
American/European effort to protect Honduran democracy.
But Obama preferred the traditional policy.
In his history of hemispheric relations, British scholar Gordon
Connell-Smith writes, “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.”
Functioning democracy may respond to popular concerns, while “the
United States has been concerned with fostering the most favourable
conditions for her private overseas investment.” It takes a large dose
of what has sometimes been called “intentional ignorance” not to see the
facts. Such blindness must be guarded zealously if state violence is to
proceed on course-always for the good of humanity, as Obama reminded us
again in his Nobel Prize address.
Courtesy: Democracy Now |