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Title: The Victors Author: Noam Chomsky Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: cold war Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199011__/ Notes: From Z Magazine, November, 1990; January, 1991; and April, 1991
November, 1990
At any historical moment, we are likely to find a conventional
interpretation of the state of the world and our role within it, often
gaining the force of unchallenged doctrine. Another near truism is that
reality tends to depart from established Truth. The present period is no
exception.
That significant, even momentous, changes are underway in the world is
clear enough, and has been so for many years. The conventional
interpretation need not be elaborated at length; open an arbitrary
journal, and it is laid out before you. The U.S. has won the Cold War.
Righteousness has triumphed over evil with the victory of democracy,
free market capitalism, justice and human rights. As standard bearer of
the cause, the United States now leads the way to a New World Order of
peace, economic development, and cooperation among those who have seen
the light, virtually everyone except for some holdouts like Cuba which
still complains irrationally that the Third World isn’t getting its due
— or Saddam Hussein, despite our dedicated efforts to improve his
behavior by the carrot rather than the stick, an error of judgment soon
to be rectified by the sword of the righteous avenger.
There are various ways to assess the validity of this inspiring picture.
One is to have a look at the traditional domains of the U.S. (and the
West generally), and ask how their people fare at this historic moment,
as they celebrate the victory of their side, a triumph of liberal
capitalism and democracy so final and conclusive, some feel, that we
have reached “the end of history,” after which we sink into a sad state
of boredom, relieved only by the occasional technical manipulations
needed to deal with questions at the margin.
The concern that the fun might be over is not quite as novel as Francis
Fukuyama and other devotees of the Hegelian Spirit suggest. At his first
meeting with John F. Kennedy in 1958, Walt Rostow, later to become a top
adviser of the Kennedy administration, warned — perhaps a shade
prematurely — that after the astonishing domestic successes achieved by
“the nation’s creativeness and idealism over the past ninety years, …we
run the danger of becoming a bore to ourselves and the world.” In
Rostow’s picture of the world (shared with Kennedy, according to his
account), the basic problems of American society were then approaching
full resolution. No real barriers stood in the way of economic progress
without serious cyclic disorders, “social equity” for minorities, “the
provision of equal educational opportunity,” and “the equitable
distribution of income.” We knew what was needed, and agreed that it
should be done. The consensus was so broad and the conclusions so
well-founded as to signal “the end of ideology,” it was widely held.
Like Kennedy, Rostow felt that with the problems of domestic society
largely behind us, “the great revolutionary transformations going
forward in the underdeveloped world” should now absorb our energies and
revitalize “those basic spiritual qualities which have been historically
linked to the nation’s sense of world mission.”[1]
The Third World was soon to experience, once again, these “basic
spiritual qualities,” now with the special cast given them by the
knights-errant of Camelot.
Not everyone feels confident that the nature and proper goals of human
society are fully understood, and the problems at home so close to
resolution that only some minor tinkering remains, just as not all share
Tom Wolfe’s appreciation of the past decade as “one of the great golden
moments that humanity has ever experienced.” One need hardly go as far
as a Black teenager in Harlem to find a slightly different sense of
current realities. And even the most cursory look beyond the borders
will locate voices that are not raised in joy and acclaim for the
triumph of their champions — Central American human rights workers and
priests, for example — and do not join the meaningless game of comparing
Eastern and Western Europe, or the USSR and the United States, but
rather choose, more realistically and more honestly, to compare the
current state of regions that were at similar levels of economic and
sociopolitical development, with similar endowments and prospects, not
many years ago. And despite much curious rhetoric in media and other
circles, some perceive that the past years hardly illustrate the thesis
that democracy and the free market are the decisive conditions for
economic success — in Japan and the Four Tigers in its periphery, to
take the obvious (but not only) example.
Let us survey — all too briefly — some of the daily experience of those
who should be savoring the fruits of victory. The reasonable course is
to begin the inquiry close to home, in the domains where U.S. influence
has been so overwhelming that the contours of the triumph must be
shatteringly clear. In this first section, I will keep to that, turning
in subsequent articles to a broader view, and to some comments on
meaningful comparisons that would be made, and studies that would be
pursued, if human concerns animated the odes to our virtue that
accompany the triumph. I would also like to consider the shape of the
New World Order and the U.S. role within it as seen from a perspective
that departs from reigning conventions, attending to features of the
contemporary world that suggest a rather different conception of where
we are and where we are heading.
Few regions of the world have been so dominated by a great power as
Central America, which emerged from its usual oblivion in the 1980s,
moving to center stage as the traditional order faced an unexpected
challenge with the growth of popular movements, inspired in part by the
new orientation of the Church toward “a preferential option for the
poor” (Puebla Conference of Bishops, 1979). After decades of brutal
repression and the destructive impact of the U.S. aid programs of the
1960s — an “economic miracle” by statistical measures, a disaster for
most of the population — the ground was prepared for meaningful
democracy and social change. The mood in Washington darkened further
with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship and the defeat of his
murderous National Guard despite the best efforts of the Carter
administration, until the end, to ensure that it would retain effective
power.
The reaction was vigorous and swift: violent repression, which decimated
popular organizations. The ranks of the small guerrilla organizations
swelled as state terror mounted. “The guerrilla groups, the
revolutionary groups, almost without exception began as associations of
teachers, associations of labor unions, campesino unions, or parish
organizations….” with practical and reformist goals, ex-Ambassador
Robert White testified before Congress in 1982. The same point has been
made by the assassinated Salvadoran Jesuit intellectual Father Ignacio
Martin-Baro, among many others.
A decade later, the United States and its local allies could claim
substantial success. The challenge to the traditional order was
effectively contained. The misery of the vast majority had deepened
while the power of the military and the privileged sectors was enhanced
behind a facade of democratic forms. Some 200,000 people had been
killed, most of them slaughtered outright in a paroxysm of sadistic
terror conducted by the forces armed, trained, and advised by the United
States. Countless others were maimed, tortured, “disappeared,” driven
from their homes. The people, the communities, the environment were
devastated, possibly beyond repair. It is truly a grand victory.
Elite reaction in the United States is one of gratification and relief.
“For the first time, all five of the countries are led by presidents who
were elected in contests widely considered free and fair,” Washington
Post Central America correspondent Lee Hockstader reports from Guatemala
City, expressing the general satisfaction over the victory of
“conservative politicians” in elections which, we are to understand,
took place on a level playing field with no use of force and no foreign
influence. It is true, he continues, that “conservative politicians in
Central America traditionally represented the established order,”
defending the wealthy “despite their countries’ grossly distorted income
patterns.” “But the wave of democracy that has swept the region in
recent years appears to be shifting politicians’ priorities,” so the bad
old days are gone forever.[2]
The student of American history and culture will recognize the familiar
moves. Once again, we witness the miraculous change of course that
occurs whenever some particularly brutal excesses of the state have been
exposed. Hence all of history, and the reasons for its persistent
character, may be dismissed as irrelevant, while we march forward,
leading our flock to a new and better world.
The Post news report does not merely assert that the new conservatives
are dedicated populists, unlike those whom the U.S. used to support in
the days of its naivete and inadvertent error, now thankfully behind us.
Serious journalistic standards require evidence for this central claim,
and it is indeed provided. The shift of priorities to a welcome populism
is demonstrated by the outcome of the conference of the five presidents
in Antigua, Guatemala, just completed. The presidents, all “committed to
free-market economics,” have abandoned worthless goals of social reform,
Hockstader explains. “Neither in the plan nor in the Declaration of
Antigua’ was there any mention of land reform or suggestion of new
government social welfare programs to help the poor.” Rather, they are
adopting “a trickle-down approach to aid the poor.” “The idea is to help
the poor without threatening the basic power structure,” a regional
economist observes, contemplating these imaginative new ideas on how to
pursue our vocation of serving the suffering masses.
The headline reads “Central Americans to use Trickle-down Strategy in
War on Poverty.” Quite properly, the headline captures the basic thrust
of the news story and the assumption that frames it: aiding the poor is
the highest priority of this new breed of populist conservatives, as it
always has been for Washington and the political culture generally. The
only question is how to achieve this noble aim. That this has always
been our fervent commitment is a doctrine so obviously valid that it
need not be supported with any evidence or argument, or even formulated
explicitly. It is merely presupposed, and we go on from there. What is
newsworthy, and so promising, is the populism of the conservatives we
support, and their ingenious and startlingly innovative approach to our
traditional commitment to help the poor and suffering: a trickle-down
strategy of enriching the wealthy — a “preferential option for the
rich,” overcoming the errors of the Puebla Conference of Bishops.
One participant in the meeting is quoted as saying that “These past 10
years have been gruesome for poor people, they’ve taken a beating.”
Putting aside the conventions, one might observe that the political
outcomes hailed as a triumph of democracy are in no small measure a
tribute to the efficacy of U.S. terror, and that the presidents who hold
formal power, and their sponsors, might have had something other than a
war on poverty in mind. There is also a history of trickle-down
approaches to relieving poverty that might be explored. Such an inquiry
might lead us to expect that the next 10 years will be no less gruesome
for the poor. But that path is not pursued, here or elsewhere in the
mainstream.
The Post story captures well the character and dimensions of the U.S.
victory. The satisfaction among the important people is readily
understandable.
While the three-day conference of populist conservatives was taking
place in Antigua, 33 tortured, bullet-riddled bodies were discovered in
Guatemala. They did not disturb the celebration over the triumph of
freedom and democracy, or even make the news.
Nor did the rest of the 125 bodies, half with signs of torture, found
throughout the country that month, according to the Guatemalan Human
Rights Commission. The Commission identified 79 as victims of
“extrajudicial execution” by the security forces. Another 29 were
kidnapped and 49 injured in kidnap attempts. The report comes to us from
Mexico, where the Commission is based so that human rights workers can
survive now that the U.S. has succeeded in establishing democracy in
Guatemala.[3]
In the Costa Rican journal Mesoamerica, a report on the Antigua meeting
observes that “Now that the Sandinistas have been successfully booted
out of office, the pervading attitude among regional and U.S. leaders
with respect to the Esquipulas peace mission accomplished’.” The core
sections of the Central America accords that call for social justice and
respect for human rights had been long been consigned to the ashcan, as
intended by Oscar Arias and his U.S. sponsors in high places, who, along
with the elite political culture generally, revealed by their actions
their actual attitudes towards the savage atrocities conducted under the
aegis of those with the right priorities.[4]
The U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL)
reports that the percentage of the Guatemalan population living in
extreme poverty increased rapidly after the establishment of democracy
in 1985, from 45% in that year to 76% in 1988. A study by the
Nutritional Institute of Central America and Panama (INCAP) estimates
that half the population live under conditions of extreme poverty, and
that in rural areas, where the situation is worse, 13 out of every 100
children under five die of illnesses related to malnutrition. Other
studies estimate that 20,000 Guatemalans die of hunger every year, that
more than 1000 children died of measles alone in the first four months
of 1990, and that “the majority of Guatemala’s four million children
receive no protection at all, not even for the most elemental rights.”
The Communique of the January 1990 Conference of Guatemalan Bishops
reviews the steady deterioration of the critical situation of the mass
of the population as “the economic crisis has degenerated into a social
crisis” and human rights, even “the right to dignity,” “do not
exist.”[5]
Throughout the region, the desperate situation of the poor majority has
become still more grave with the progress of democracy, American-style.
Three weeks before the Antigua conference, in his homily marking the
completion of President Alfredo Cristiani’s first year in office,
Archbishop Rivera y Damas of San Salvador deplored the policies of his
administration, which have worsened the already desperate plight of the
poor; the conservative populist so admired in Washington and New York
“is working to maintain the system,” the Archbishop said, “favoring a
market economy which is making the poor yet poorer.”[6]
In the neighboring countries, the situation is much the same. A few days
after the encouraging Washington Post report on the Antigua meeting, an
editorial in a leading Honduran journal appeared under the headline
“Misery is increasing in Honduras because of the economic adjustment,”
referring to the new trickle-down strategy that the Post found so
promising — actually the traditional strategy, its lethal features now
more firmly entrenched. The main victims are “the usual neglected
groups: children, women, and the aged,” according to the conclusions of
an academic seminar on “Social Policy in the Context of Crisis,”
confirmed by “the Catholic Church, the unions, several political
parties, and noted economists and statisticians of the country.”
Two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line, over half of
these below the level of “dire need.” Unemployment, undernourishment,
and severe malnutrition are increasing.[7]
The Pan American Health Organization estimates that of 850,000 children
born every year in Central America, 100,000 will die before the age of
five and two-thirds of those who survive will suffer from malnutrition,
with attendant physical or mental development problems. The
Inter-American Development Bank reports that per capita income has
fallen to the level of 1971 in Guatemala, 1961 in El Salvador, 1973 in
Honduras, 1960 in Nicaragua, 1974 in Costa Rica, and 1982 in Panama.[8]
Nicaragua was an exception to this trend of increasing misery, but the
U.S. terrorist attack and economic warfare succeeded in reversing
earlier gains. Nevertheless, infant mortality halved over the decade,
from 128 to 62 deaths per thousand births; “Such a reduction is
exceptional on the international level,” a UNICEF official said in 1989,
“especially when the country’s war-ravaged economy is taken into
account.”[9]
Studies by CEPAL, the World Health Organization, and others “cast
dramatic light on the situation,” Mexico’s leading daily reports.
They reveal that 15 million Central Americans, almost 60% of the
population, live in poverty, of whom 9.7 million live in “extreme
poverty.” Severe malnutrition is rampant among children. 75% of the
peasants in Guatemala, 60% in El Salvador, 40% in Nicaragua, and 35% in
Honduras lack health care. To make matters worse, Washington has applied
“stunning quotas on sugar, beef, cocoa, cheese, textiles, and limestone,
as well as compensation laws and antidumping’ policies in cement,
flowers, and operations of cellulose and glass.” The EEC and Japan have
followed suit, also imposing harmful protectionist measures.[10]
The environment has shared the fate of those who people it.
Deforestation, soil erosion, pesticide poisoning, and other forms of
environmental destruction, increasing through the 1980s, are traceable
in large measure to the development model imposed upon the region and
U.S. militarization of it in recent years. Intense exploitation of
resources by agribusiness and export-oriented production have enriched
wealthy sectors and their foreign sponsors, and led to statistical
growth, with a devastating impact on the land and the people. In El
Salvador, large areas have become virtual wastelands as the military has
sought to undermine the peasant base of the guerrillas by extensive
bombardment, and by forest and crop destruction. There have been
occasional efforts to stem the ongoing catastrophe. Like the Arbenz
government overthrown in the CIA-run coup that restored the military
regime in Guatemala, the Sandinistas initiated a series of environmental
reforms and protections. These were desperately needed, both in the
countryside and near Managua, where industrial plants had been permitted
to dump waste freely. The most notorious case was the U.S. Penwalt
corporation, which poured mercury into Lake Managua until 1981.[11]
As in Guatemala 30 years before, these efforts to depart from what the
Washington Post approvingly calls “the Central American mode” were
satisfactorily overcome by U.S. terror and economic warfare.
The foreign-imposed development model has emphasized “nontraditional
exports” in recent years. Under the free market conditions approved for
defenseless Third World countries, the search for survival and gain will
naturally lead to products that maximize profit, whatever the
consequences. Coca production has soared in the Andes and elsewhere for
this reason, but there are other examples as well. After the discovery
of clandestine “human farms” and “fattening houses” for children in
Honduras and Guatemala, Dr. Luis Genaro Morales, president of the
Guatemalan Pediatric Association, said that child trafficking “is
becoming one of the principal nontraditional export products,”
generating $20 million of business a year. The International Human
Rights Federation (IHRF), after an inquiry in Guatemala, gave a more
conservative estimate, reporting that about 300 children are kidnapped
every year, taken to secret nurseries, then sold for adoption at about
$10,000 per child.
The IHRF investigators could not confirm reports that organs of babies
were being sold to foreign buyers. This macabre belief is widely held in
the region, however. A few weeks earlier, the Honduran journal Tiempo
reported that the Paraguayan police rescued 7 Brazilian babies from a
gang that “intended to sacrifice them to organ banks in the United
States, according to a charge in the courts.” The same journal reported
shortly after that an Appeals Judge in Honduras ordered “a meticulous
investigation into the sale of Honduran children for the purpose of
using their organs for transplant operations.” A year earlier, the
Secretary General of the National Council of Social Services, which is
in charge of adoptions, had reported that Honduran children “were being
sold to the body traffic industry” for organ transplant. “Fattening
houses” for children had been found in San Pedro Sula and elsewhere.[12]
A Resolution on the Trafficking of Central American Children, approved
by the European Parliament two months later (November 1988), alleged
that near a “human farm” in San Pedro Sula, infant corpses were found
that “had been stripped of one or a number of organs.” At another “human
farm” in Guatemala, babies ranging from 11 days old to four months old
had been found. The director of the farm, at the time of his arrest,
declared that the children “were sold to American or Israeli families
whose children needed organ transplants at the cost of $75,000 per
child,” the Resolution continues, expressing “its horror in the light of
the facts” and calling for investigation and preventive measures.[13]
As the region sinks into further misery, these reports continue to
appear. In July 1990, a right-wing Honduran daily, under the headline
“Loathsome Sale of Human Flesh,” reported that police in El Salvador had
discovered a group, headed by a lawyer, that was buying children to
resell in the United States. An estimated 20,000 children disappear
every year in Mexico, the report continues, destined for this end or for
use in criminal activities such as transport of drugs “inside their
bodies.” “The most gory fact, however, is that many little ones are used
for transplant [of organs] to children in the U.S.,” which may account
for the fact that the highest rate of kidnapping of children from
infants to 18-year-olds is in the Mexican regions bordering on the
United States.[14]
The one exception to the Central America horror story has been Costa
Rica, set firmly on a course of state-guided development by the Jose
Figueres coup of 1948, with welfare measures combined with harsh
repression of labor, and virtual elimination of the armed forces. The
U.S. has always kept a wary eye on this deviation from the regional
standards, despite the welcome suppression of labor and the favorable
conditions for foreign investors. In the 1980s, U.S. pressures to
dismantle the social democratic features and restore the army elicited
bitter complaints from Figueres and others who shared his commitments.
While Costa Rica continues to stand apart from the region in political
and economic development, the signs of what the Central Americanization’
of Costa Rica” are unmistakeable.[15]
Under the pressure of a huge debt, Costa Rica has been compelled to
follow “the preferential option for the rich”: the IMF model of free
market capitalism designed for the Third World, with austerity for the
poor, cutback in social programs, and benefits for domestic and foreign
investors. The results are coming in. By statistical measures, the
economy is relatively strong. But more than 25% of the population —
715,000 people — live in poverty, 100,000 in extreme poverty, according
to a study published by the ultra-right journal La Nacion (one feature
of Costa Rican democracy being a monopoly of the Spanish language media
by the extreme right sectors of the business community). A study by the
Gallup office in Costa Rica published in Prensa Libre gives even higher
figures, concluding that “approximately one million people cannot afford
a minimum diet, nor pay for clothing, education or health care.”[16]
The neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s increased social
discontent and labor tensions, Excelsior reports, evoking an “intense
attack by unionists, popular organizations,” and others against the
Arias administration, which has implemented these measures in conformity
with U.S. demands and the priorities of privileged sectors. Church
sources report that “the belt-tightening measures of the 1980s, which
included the elimination of subsidies, low interest credit, price
supports and government assistance programs, have driven many campesinos
and small farmers off their land,” leading to many protests. The Bishop
of Limon issued a pastoral letter deploring the social deterioration and
“worsening of the problems” to which “banana workers, in great majority
immigrants from rural settings where they were property owners, have
been subject.” He also deplored the harsh labor code and government
policies that enabled the growers to purge union leaders and otherwise
undermine workers’ rights, and the deforestation and pollution the
companies have caused, with government support.[17]
Environmental degradation is serious here as well, including rapid
deforestation and sedimentation that has severely effected virtually
every major hydroelectric project. Environmental studies reveal that 42%
of Costa Rica’s soil shows signs of severe erosion. “Top soil is Costa
Rica’s largest export,” the Vice-Minister of Natural Resources
commented. Expanding production for export and logging have destroyed
forests, particularly the cattle boom of the 1960s and 1970s promoted by
the government, international banks and corporations, and the U.S. aid
program, which also undermined food production for domestic needs, as
elsewhere in Central America. Environmentalists blame government and
business for “ecological illiteracy” — more accurately, pursuit of
profit without regard for externalities, as prescribed in the capitalist
model.[18]
Submissiveness to these demands has yet to meet the exacting standards
of the international guardians of business rights. The IMF suspended
assistance to Costa Rica in February 1990, cancelling credits. U.S. aid
is also falling, now that there is no longer any need to buy Costa
Rica’s cooperation in the anti-Sandinista jihad.[19]
Economic constraints and foreign pressures have narrowed the political
system in the approved manner. In the 1990 elections, the two candidates
had virtually identical (pro-business) programs, in accord with “Central
American mode” approved by U.S. liberal doctrine, and were highly
supportive of U.S. policies in the region (“right on the mark,” the
eventual victor, Rafael Angel Calderon, declared in a debate sponsored
by the business federation). The Central Americanization of Costa Rica
is also revealed by the increasing repression through the 1980s. From
1985, the Costa Rican Human Rights Commission (CODEHU) reported torture,
arbitrary arrest, harassment of campesinos and workers, and other abuses
by the security forces, including a dramatic rise in illegal detentions
and arrests. It links the growing wave of abuses to the increasing
militarization of the police and security forces, some of whom have been
trained in U.S. and Taiwanese military schools. These charges were
supported further when an underground torture chamber was found in the
building of the Costa Rican Special Police (OIJ), where prisoners were
beaten and subjected to electric shock treatment, including torture of a
pregnant woman who aborted and electric shock administered to a
13-year-old child to elicit a false confession. CODEHU alleges that 13
people have died in similar incidents since 1988. “Battered by charges
of corruption and drug trafficking, the Arias administration receives
another blow to its diminishing reputation as a bulwark of democracy”
from these revelations, the Central America Report observed.[20]
Arias’s image “is about to be tarnished” further, according to reports
from San Jose that investigators of the Legislative Drug Commission
discovered that he had received a check for $50,000 for his campaign
fund from Ocean Hunter Seafood, but had put it in his personal bank
account. This Miami-based company and its Costa Rican affiliate,
Frigarificos de Puntarenas, were identified by U.S. Congressional
investigators as a drug trafficking operation.[21] I leave it to the
reader to imagine Mark Uhlig’s sardonic story in the New York Times if
something similar were hinted about a minor Sandinista official, however
flimsy the evidence.
According to official government figures, the security budget increased
15% in 1988 and 13% in 1989 (spending on education rose less than half
that much). The press has reported training of security officers in Fort
Benning, Georgia, and U.S. bases in Panama, and a Taiwanese military
academy, as well as by Israeli secret police, the army of El Salvador,
the Guatemalan army special forces, and others. Fifteen private
paramilitary, vigilante, and security organizations have been
identified, with extreme nationalist and right-wing agendas. A member of
the special commission of the legislature set up to investigate these
matters described the police as an “army in disguise…out of control.”
The executive secretary of Costa Rica’s Human Rights Commission, Sylvia
Porras, noted that “the psychological profile of the police has changed
as a result of military training,” adding that “we cannot talk any
longer of a civilian police force. What we have now is a hidden
army.”[22]
Annual U.S. military aid in the 1980s shot up to about 18 times what it
had been from 1946 through 1979. U.S. pressures to rebuild the security
forces, reversing the Figueres reforms, have been widely regarded as a
factor in the drift towards the Central American mode. The role of Oscar
Arias has evoked particular ridicule South of the border. After an Arias
article in the New York Times piously calling on Panama to follow the
Costa Rican model and abolish the army, the well-known Mexican writer
Gregorio Selser published a review of some Costa Rican realities,
beginning with the violent repression of a peaceful demonstration of
landless campesinos in September 1986 by Arias’s Civil Guard, with many
serious injuries. The absence of an army in Costa Rica, he alleges, has
become largely a matter of semantics; different words for the same
things. He cites an Arias decree of August 5, 1987 — just at the moment
of the signing of the Esquipulas accords that brought him a Nobel Peace
prize — establishing a professional army in all but name, with the full
array of ranks and structure; and a 1989 CODEHU report on the training
of hundreds of men in military academies of the U.S., Taiwan, Honduras,
Guatemala and Panama.[23]
Little of this has ever reached the United States, except far from the
mainstream. In the context of the Drug War, however, some notice has
been taken. An editorial in the Miami Herald on “Costa Rica’s anguish”
cites the comments by Sylvia Porras quoted above on the effects of U.S.
military training, which has changed the “psychological profile” of the
civilian police, turning them to “a camouflaged army.” The judgment is
not “hyperbole,” the editorial concludes, attributing the rapid growth
of the army and the recent killing of civilians by the security forces
to the Nicaraguan conflict and the drug war — but with no mention of
U.S. pressures, following the norms of the Free Press.[24]
We may conclude this survey of the triumph of free market capitalism in
Central America with a look at Panama, recently liberated by Operation
Just Cause.
In the months following the liberation, the successful affair largely
disappeared from view,[25] the normal pattern. U.S. goals had been
achieved, the triumph had been properly celebrated, and there was little
more to say except to record subsequent progress towards freedom,
democracy, and good fortune — or, if that strains credulity, to produce
occasional musings on how the best of intentions go awry when we have
such poor human material to work with.
Central American sources continued to give considerable attention to the
impact of the invasion on civilians, but they were ignored in the
occasional reviews of the matter here. New York Times correspondent
Larry Rohter devoted a column to casualty estimates on April 1, citing
figures as high as 673 killed, and adding that higher figures, which he
attributes only to Ramsey Clark, are “widely rejected” in Panama. He
found Panamanian witnesses who described U.S. military actions as
restrained, but none with less happy tales.[26]
Among the many readily accessible sources deemed unworthy of mention in
the Times (and the media generally), we find such examples as the
following.
The Mexican press reported that two Catholic Bishops estimated deaths at
perhaps 3000. Hospitals and nongovernmental human rights groups
estimated deaths at over 2000.[27]
A joint delegation of the Costa Rica-based Central American Human Rights
Commission (CODEHUCA) and the Panamanian Human Rights Commission
(CONADEHUPA) published the report of its January 20–30 inquiry, based on
numerous interviews. It concluded that “the human costs of the invasion
are substantially higher than the official U.S. figures” of 202
civilians killed, reaching 2–3000 according to “conservative estimates.”
Eyewitnesses interviewed in the urban slums report that U.S. helicopters
aimed their fire at buildings with only civilian occupants, that a U.S.
tank destroyed a public bus killing 26 passengers, that civilian
residences were burned to the ground with many apartments destroyed and
many killed, that U.S. troops shot at ambulances and killed wounded,
some with bayonets, and denied access to the Red Cross. The Catholic and
Episcopal Churches gave estimates of 3000 dead as “conservative.”
Civilians were illegally detained, particularly union leaders and those
considered “in opposition to the invasion or nationalistic.” “All the
residences and offices of the political sectors that oppose the invasion
have been searched and much of them have been destroyed and their
valuables stolen.” The U.S. imposed severe censorship. Human rights
violations under Noriega had been “unacceptably high,” the report
continues, though of course “mild compared with the record of
U.S.-supported regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador.” But the U.S
invasion “caused an unprecedented level of deaths, suffering, and human
rights abuses in Panama.” The title of the report is: “Panama: More than
an invasion, …a massacre.”[28]
Since its topic is not Kuwait, the report passed without notice here.
Sources at the University of Panama estimated at least 5000 dead; the
head of the School of Public Administration at the University condemned
the U.S. army’s “iron control [which] will not allow access to any
Panamian institution to find out the correct number of casualties.”[29]
Physicians for Human Rights, with the concurrence of Americas Watch,
reached tentative casualty figures higher than those given by the
Pentagon but well below those of COHUDECA-CONADEHUPA and others in
Panama. Their estimate is about 300 civilians killed. Americas Watch
also gives a “conservative estimate” of at least 3000 wounded,
concluding further that civilian deaths were four times as great as
military deaths in Panama, and over ten times as high as U.S. casualties
(officially given as 23; the U.S. military estimated civilian deaths at
202). They ask: “How does ‘surgical operation’ result in almost ten
civilians killed (by official U.S. count) for every American military
casualty?” By September, the count of bodies exhumed from several of the
mass graves had passed 600.[30]
Excavation of mass graves meanwhile continues. By September, the count
of bodies found in these graves alone had reached well over 600.[31]
The COHUDECA-CONADEHUPA report emphasizes that a great deal is
uncertain, because of the violent circumstances, the incineration of
bodies, and the lack of records for persons buried in common graves
without having reached morgues or hospitals, according to eyewitnesses.
note: See CODEHUCA letter to Americas Watch, June 5, 1990, commenting on
the Americas Watch report.} Its reports, and the many others of which a
few have been cited here, may or may not be accurate. A media decision
to ignore them, however, reflects not professional standards but a
commitment to power.
On September 30, some of this information finally broke into the
mainstream media in a television report by CBS news (“60 minutes”).[32]
Pictures of mass graves were shown, and a Panamanian woman who had
worked for months to have a few of them opened and the remains
identified, exhausting her own resources in the process, estimated
civilian deaths at perhaps 4000. The CBS investigation also revealed new
information: secret U.S. army reports estimating 1000 civilians killed —
not the 202 that were officially reported — and urging that damage
claims not be considered because the number might mount too high. There
was also a (rare) report of thousands of Panamanians protesting against
the U.S. invasion and occupation.
While Larry Rohter’s visits to the slums destroyed by U.S. bombardment
located only celebrants, or critics of U.S. “insensitivity” at worst,
others found a rather different picture. Mexico’s leading newspaper
reported in April that Rafael Olivardia, refugee spokesman for the
15,000 refugees of the devastated El Chorrillo neighborhood, “said that
the El bloodbath’ during and after saw North American tanks roll over
the dead’ during the invasion that left a total of more than 2000 dead
and thousands injured, according to unofficial figures.” “You only live
once,” Olivardia said, “and if you must die fighting for an adequate
home, then the U.S. soldiers should complete the task they began” on
December 20.
The Spanish language press in the United States was less celebratory and
deferential than its colleagues. Vicky Pelaez reports from Panama that
“the entire world continues in ignorance about how the thousands of
victims of the Northamerican invasion of Panama died and what kinds of
weapons were used, because the Attorney-General of the country refuses
to permit investigation of the bodies buried in the common graves.” An
accompanying photo shows workmen exhuming corpses from a grave
containing “almost 200 victims of the invasion.” Quoting a woman who
found the body of her murdered father, Pelaez reports that “just like
the woman vox populi’ in Panama that the Northamericans used completely
unknown armaments during the 20 December invasion.” Olga Mejia,
President of Panamanian Human Rights, informed the journal that “They
converted Panama into a laboratory of horror. Here, they first
experimented with methods of economic strangulation; then they
successfully used a campaign of disinformation at the international
level. But it was in the application of the most modern war technology
that they demonstrated infernal mastery.” The CODEHUCA-CONADEHUPA report
also alleges that “the U.S. Army used highly sophisticated weapons —
some for the first time in combat — against unarmed civilian
populations,” and “in many cases no distinction was made between
civilian and military targets.”[33]
One case of “highly sophisticated weapons” did receive some attention.
F-117A stealth fighters were used in combat for the first time, dropping
2000-lb. bombs with time-delay mechanisms in a large open field near an
airstrip and barracks that housed an elite PDF battalion. The Air Force
had kept this plane under close wraps, refusing to release cost or
performance data about it. “There were conflicting reports as to the
rationale for employing the sophisticated aircraft, which cost nearly
$50 million apiece, to conduct what appeared to be a simple operation,”
Aviation Week & Space Technology reported. The Panamanian air force has
no fighters and no military aircraft were stationed permanently at the
base that was attacked. Its only known air defenses “were a pair of
aging small caliber antiaircraft guns.” An American aeronautical
engineering consultant and charter operator in Panama said he was
“astonished” to learn of the use of the F-117A, pointing out that the
target attacked did not even have radar: “They could have bombed it with
any other aircraft and not been noticed.” The aerospace journal cites
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s claim that the aircraft were used
“because of its great accuracy,” then suggesting its own answer to the
puzzle: “By demonstrating the F-117A’s capability to operate in
low-intensity conflicts, as well as its intended mission to attack
heavily defended Soviet targets, the operation can be used by the Air
Force to justify the huge investment made in stealth technology” to “an
increasingly skeptical Congress.”[34]
A similar conclusion was reached, more broadly, by Col. (Ret.) David
Hackworth, a former combat commander who is one of the nation’s most
decorated soldiers. He described the Panama operation as technically
efficient, though in his judgment “100 Special Forces guys” would have
sufficed to capture Noriega, and “this big operation was a Pentagon
attempt to impress Congress just when they’re starting to cut back on
the military.” Other evidence lends credibility to these suggestions,
including the White House National Security Strategy report presented to
Congress in March 1990.[35]
If these were indeed among the motives for the exercise, they may have
suffered a slight setback when it turned out that one of the stealth
fighter-bombers had missed its undefended target by more than 300 yards,
despite its “great accuracy.” Defense Secretary Cheney ordered an
inquiry.[36]
The nature of the U.S. victory became clearer, along predictable lines,
in the following months. Its character is described by Andres
Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald in June, under the heading “Panama
Flirts with Economic Recovery” — that is, recovery from the depths to
which it was plunged by illegal U.S. economic warfare, then invasion and
occupation. But there is a qualification: “Six months after the U.S.
invasion, Panama is showing signs of growing prosperity — at least for
the largely white-skinned business class that has regained its influence
after more than two decades of military rule,” the small minority of
important people. The luxury shops are again full of goods, and
“Panama’s nightlife is also perking up” as “foreign tourists, mostly
U.S. businessmen, can be seen most evenings sipping martinis in the
lobbies of the biggest hotels,” which are sometimes “booked solid — a
contrast to the moribund atmosphere there before the invasion.”
Newspapers are filled with ads from department stores, banks, and
insurance firms. “The upper class and the middle classes are doing
great,” a Western European diplomat observes: “They had the money in
U.S. bank accounts and are bringing it back to the country. But the poor
are in bad shape, because the government is bankrupt and can’t help
them.” “The Catholic Church has begun to denounce what it sees as a lack
of government concern for the poor,” Oppenheimer continues. An editorial
in a Church weekly “lashed out at authorities for devoting their
energies to helping the private sector while breaking their original
promises not to fire low-income public workers.”[37]
Chalk up another victory for capitalism and democracy.
On August 2, the Catholic bishops of Panama issued a pastoral letter
condemning U.S. “interference in the country’s internal affairs” and
denouncing the December invasion as “a veritable tragedy in the annals
of the country’s history.” The statement also condemned Washington’s
failure to provide aid to the people who continue to suffer from the
invasion, and criticized the government for ignoring their plight. Their
protest appears in the Guatemala City Central America Report under the
heading “Church Raises Its Voice” — though not loudly enough to be heard
in Washington and New York. The same report quotes the Mexican daily
Excelsior on U.S. military maneuvers in the mountains of Panama, and the
high visibility of U.S. troops throughout the capital and other areas of
the country.[38]
In April, President Endara had appointed a commission (the Panamanian
Commission for National Reconstruction) to deal with the problem of
reconstructing the economy that had been devastated by the U.S. economic
sanctions, then the invasion and its aftermath. Its report, issued in
August, proposed a three-point plan: a truce, political amnesty, and the
end of “occupation of the State and its territory” by U.S. troops.
Special emphasis was placed on the consequences of the U.S. invasion,
and the demand for the end to the military occupation and
reestablishment of Panamanian sovereignty.[39]
In the British journal Race and Class, Joy James reviews some relevant
history. The White (European) sector, which owns most of the land and
resources, is estimated at about 8% of the population. The “two decades
of military rule” to which the Miami Herald refers had some other
characteristics as well. The Torrijo dictatorship had a populist
character, which largely ended after his death in 1981 in an airplane
accident (with various charges about the cause), and the subsequent
Noriega takeover. During this period, Blacks, Mestizo, and Indigenous
Panamanians gained their first share of power, and economic and land
reforms were undertaken. In these two decades, infant mortality declined
from 40% to less than 20% and life expectancy increased by nine years.
New hospitals, health centers, houses, schools and universities were
built, and more doctors, nurses and teachers were trained. Indigenous
communities were granted autonomy and protection for their traditional
lands, to an extent unmatched in the hemisphere. For the first time,
Panama moved to an independent foreign policy, still alive in the 1980s
to an extent, as Panama participated in the Contadora peace efforts (one
of the main reasons why Noriega was transmuted from good guy to devil).
The Canal Treaty was signed in 1977, theoretically awarding control over
the Canal to Panama by the year 2000, though the prospects are doubtful.
The Reagan administration took the position that “when the
Carter-Torrijos treaties are being renegotiated” — an eventuality taken
for granted — “the prolongation of the US military presence in the
Panama Canal area till well after the year 2000 should be brought up for
discussion” (State Department).[40]
The post-invasion moves to place Panamanian military forces under U.S.
control may be motivated by more than just the normal commitment to this
doctrine. It will probably be argued that Panama is not in a position to
defend the Canal as the Treaty requires, so that U.S. bases must be
retained.
The U.S. sanctions largely dismantled the reforms of the Torrijo period.
Poverty rose rapidly, and the unions virtually collapsed. The invasion
and the U.S. post-invasion rule are likely to administer the coup de
grace to these populist efforts.
In August, government economists warned that more than 300,000
Panamanians are unemployed or underemployed, some 40% of the population.
One leading economist and former high government planning official
reported that 44% of the population lives in poverty, 24% in “extreme
poverty,” and that 93,800 infants and pre-school children live “in
misery,” while 35% of infants are malnourished. To check rising
unemployment, he estimates, 190,000 jobs new jobs will be needed this
year alone.[41]
The problems faced by the usual victims are described out of the
mainstream by labor journalist Daphne Wysham. She reports that the U.S.
invasion virtually completed the destruction of the Panamanian trade
unions. The general secretary of the Inter-American Regional
Organization of Workers (ORIT), Luis Anderson, condemned the invading
troops for arresting three top Panamanian labor leaders. “Many union
offices have been raided and sacked. The journalists union has been
banned.” These steps by the occupying forces are part of a more general
attack on independent politics. In an interview before the invasion, one
Panamian labor leader later detained by U.S. troops reported that he and
other union leaders were informed by the State Department that they were
on a list of people who would be eliminated if they didn’t “get their
feet in support of the opposition” to Noriega. Union activists
interviewed by Joy James report similar pre-invasion threats by the
AFL-CIO, which, they say, is now working to create a new “parallel
organization” that will be better-behaved, following its traditional
union-busting policies..
Teresa Guttierez, a spokesperson for former U.S. Attorney-General Ramsey
Clark, who heads a Panamanian inquiry commission, reports that new labor
laws disallow the right to hold union meetings, the right to protest,
and the right to strike, and that trade unionists are rounded up on a
regular basis and held without charges.[42]
The same picture emerges from the occasional reports in the mainstream
media. Pamela Constable reports that “bankers and business owners” find
that things are looking up, though “a mood of anger and desperation
permeates the underclass” in “the blighted shantytowns.” Vice-president
Guillermo Ford says that “The stores have reopened 100 percent, and the
private sector is very enthusiastic. I think we’re on the road to a very
solid future.” Under his “proposed recovery program,” public enterprises
would be sold off, “the labor code would be revised to allow easier
dismissal of workers and tax-free export factories would be set up to
lure foreign capital.”
Business leaders “are bullish on Ford’s ideas,” Constable continues. In
contrast, “Labor unions are understandably wary of these proposals,” but
“their power has become almost negligible” with “massive dismissals of
public workers who supported Noriega and the unprecedented jobless
rate.” The U.S. emergency aid package approved by Congress is intended
largely “to make back payments on Panama’s foreign debt and shore up its
creditworthiness with foreign lending institutions”; in translation: it
is a taxpayer subsidy to international banks, foreign investors, and the
important people in Panama. The thousands of refugees from El Chorillo,
now living in what some of them call “a concentration camp,” will not be
returning to the devastated slum. The original owners, who had long
wanted “to transform this prime piece of real estate into a posher
district,” may now be able to do so. Noriega had stood in the way of
these plans, allowing the poor to occupy housing there rent-free. But by
bombing the neighborhood into rubble and then levelling the charred
ruins with bulldozers, U.S. forces overcame “that ticklish legal and
human obstacle” to these intentions, Constable reports.[43]
With unemployment skyrocketing, nearly half the population cannot meet
essential food needs. Crime has quadrupled. Aid is designated for
businesses and foreign banks (debt repayment). It could be called the
“Central Americanization” of Panama, correspondent Brook Larmer aptly
observes in the Christian Science Monitor.[44]
The U.S. occupying forces continue to leave little to chance. The
Mexican journal Excelsior reports that the U.S. forces have established
direct control over ministries and public institutions. According to an
organization chart leaked to the journal by political and diplomatic
sources, U.S. controls extend to all provinces, the Indian community,
the Town Halls of the ten major cities, and the regional police offices.
“Washington’s objective is to have a strategic network in this country
to permanently control all the actions and decisions of the government.”
With the establishment of this “parallel government” closely controlling
all decision-making, “things have returned to the way they were before
1968 in Panama.” The journal scheduled an interview with President
Endara to discuss the matter, but it was cancelled without
explanation.[45]
The report provides extensive details, including names of U.S. officials
and the tasks assigned them in the organization chart. All of this could
easily be checked by U.S. reporters, if home offices were interested.
They are not. “The information that we reveal here,” Excelsior reports,
“is supposed to be known only to very restricted groups” — not including
the U.S. public.
The regime put in power is to be a well-behaved puppet, with no populist
heresies or thoughts of independence. That is the firm policy goal. It
might well have been the policy goal of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, had
international sanctions not been applied in outrage over his nefarious
aggression. The efficient way, after all, is to rule through locals who
can be trusted, with ample force on the ready, just in case.
The occupying forces are not only dedicated to restoring the rule of the
traditional European oligarchy and its foreign associates, but also to
ensuring that the project is not troubled by such irritants as freedom
of expression. Excelsior reports that “United States intelligence
services exercise control not only over local information media but also
over international news agencies,” according to the president of the
Journalist Union of Panama. He adds that the goal is to make the world
believe that there is freedom and democracy, whereas in reality
broadcast stations have been taken over and placed “in custody” and
dozens of journalists have been fired. An opposition activist alleges
that the first Panamanian publishing company, ERSA, with three daily
papers, was occupied by U.S. tanks and security forces “in order to turn
it over to a businessman who had lost it in a lawsuit,” a member of an
oligarchical family that “favors the interventionist line of the United
States.”[46]
According to Ramsey Clark’s Independent Commission of Inquiry, the
offices of the daily La Republica “were ransacked and looted by U.S.
troops the day after the newspaper reported on the large number of
deaths caused by the U.S. invasion.” Its editor was arrested and held
for six weeks by U.S. troops, then sent to a Panamanian prison without
charges. The publisher of one of the few opposition voices was arrested
in March on charges of alleged misconduct when he was a government
minister, and the government closed a radio station for broadcasting
editorials critical of the U.S. invasion and the government it
established.[47]
Miguel Antonio Bernal, a leading Panamanian intellectual and
anti-Noriega activist, writes that “freedom of press is again under
siege in Panama.” Vice-president Ricardo Arias Calderon has proposed a
new law to restrict press criticism of the government, saying that “We
will not tolerate criticism.” He has also urged stockholders of Panama’s
largest newspaper, La Prensa, to fire its editor and founder Roberto
Eisenman because of the journal’s criticism of the government, and has
called on members of his Christian Democratic Party to work for
Eisenman’s ouster. Describing such acts, the increasing terror, and the
reconstruction of the military with Noriega associates who were
implicated in drug running and corruption, Bernal asks why the U.S. is
“turning the same blind eye” as in the past to these developments.[48]
Bernal’s question is surely rhetorical. Latin Americans know the answer
very well, though the question could hardly be addressed in the
fanatically ideological intellectual culture to the North.
Not only the military, but the bankers and businessmen restored to power
in the December invasion as well had close links to the drug trade.
Justice Department and Senate inquiries had identified Panamanian banks
as major conduits for drug money in the early 1980s, when Noriega was
still a great friend, and high officials of the new government,
including President Endara, were closely involved with banks charged
with money laundering as directors or in other ways. In September, the
U.S. Embassy “implicated President Endara in a money laundering scheme”
(Central America Report, Guatemala). DEA officials accused 7 Panamanian
banks of laundering drug money and protecting the accounts of
drug-traffickers, including the Interbanco, directed by Endara until he
took over the presidency in January 1990, which was charged with
protecting millions of dollars belonging to Colombian druglord Gonzalo
Rodriguez Gacha (since killed). U.S. Ambassador Hinton charged further
that the “Colombian mafia” continues to use Panama for drug shipment to
Europe and the United States. At the heart of the controversy is a U.S.
demand for access to information about bank depositors in Panama, which
the financial community there claims would undermine the international
banking sector by eliminating confidentiality (and might be used for the
U.S. for its own purposes under a drug cover). The alleged U.S. concerns
about drug trafficking might be a bit more credible if we were to
witness raids by Delta Force on the executive headquarters of the U.S.
corporations that supply the drug cartel with the chemicals they need
for cocaine production — or if the U.S. government were not applying
strong pressures on Asian countries to remove barriers on advertising
and marketing of lethal addictive drugs produced in the United States
(tobacco, a far worse killer than cocaine).[49]
Those not restricted to the quality press here will also learn that
President Endara’s government received “one of its worst diplomatic
setbacks” on March 30, when it was formally ousted from the Group of
Eight (now Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay,
Venezuela), what are considered the major Latin American democracies.
Panama had been suspended from the group in 1988 in reaction to
Noriega’s repression, and with the further deterioration of the
political climate under foreign occupation, Panama was ousted
permanently at the March meeting of foreign ministers. The Group of
Eight, now Seven, issued a resolution stating that “the process of
democratic legitimation in Panama requires popular consideration without
foreign interference, that guarantees the full right of the people to
freely choose their governments.” The resolution also indicated that the
operations of the U.S. military are affecting Panama’s sovereignty and
independence as well as the legality of the Endara government. This
decision extends the pattern of strong Latin American opposition to the
earlier U.S. measures against Panama and the invasion, from the outset,
when the Organization of American States condemned U.S. moves by a vote
of 17–1 (U.S. opposed) in July 1987. As the media here barely noted,
President Endara’s inaugural address four weeks after the invasion was
boycotted by virtually all Latin American ambassadors.[50]
The Washington-media position is that the Endara government is
legitimate, having won the 1989 elections that were stolen by Noriega.
Latin American opinion commonly takes a different view.
In 1989, Endara was running against Noriega, with extensive U.S.
backing, open and covert. Furthermore, the elections were conducted
under conditions caused by the illegal U.S. economic warfare that was
demolishing the economy. The United States was therefore holding a whip
over the electorate. For that reason alone the elections were far from
free and uncoerced, by any sensible standards. Today, the political
scene is quite different — or would be, if the U.S. were to tolerate
political activity and free expression. On these grounds, there would be
every reason to organize a new election, contrary to the wishes of
Endara and his U.S. sponsors. Polls in Panama show that over half the
population would vote for a new party or new alliance if elections were
to be permitted.[51] The official position is offered by Michael Massing
in the New York Review of Books. Reporting from Panama, he writes that
Endara’s willingness to “go along” with the U.S. request that he assume
the presidency “has caused the leaders of some Latin American countries,
such as Peru, to question his legitimacy.” “The Panamanians themselves,
however, have few such qualms,” because his “clear victory” in the 1989
election “provided Endara with all the credentials he needs.” Citation
of Peru for dragging its feet is a deft move, since President Garcia was
an official enemy of the U.S. who had been recalcitrant about Nicaragua,
had restricted debt payment, and in general failed to observe proper
standards; best to overlook the rest of the Group of Eight, however,
among “some Latin American countries.” As for the views of “the
Panamanians themselves,” no further indication is given as to how this
information was obtained.[52]
Massing reports on the police raids in poor neighborhoods, the protests
of homeless and hungry people demanding jobs and housing, the
reconstruction of Noriega’s PDF, the restoration of the oligarchy with a
“successful corporate lawyer” at the head of a government “largely made
up of businessmen,” who receive U.S. corporate visitors sponsored by
OPIC (which ensures U.S. investments abroad) “as if they were visiting
heads of state.” The business climate is again “attractive” in this
“land ruled by merchants, marketers, and moneylenders.” “The government
is drafting plans to revive Panama’s banking industry, relax its labor
laws, expand the free trade zone, and attract foreign investors,” and to
privatize state enterprises and “radically cut public spending.”
Drawn from the “tiny white elite” of under 10% of the population, the
government has been accused of “wanting to turn the clock back to 1968,
when a small rich group ruled the country” — namely, exactly the group
now restored to power. But “the charge is unfair,” Massing comments —
much like the charge that the conservative populists swept into office
in the democratic wave of free elections in Central America might have
something on their minds other than helping the poor when they opt for a
trickle-down strategy. The proof that the charge is unfair, Massing
explains, is that when employees from Air Panama fearful of losing their
jobs held a vigil outside his office, President Endara “sent them coffee
and made a point of talking with them.” What is more, while fasting in
the Cathedral in an effort to expedite U.S. aid (or to lose weight, some
unkind locals quipped), “he invited striking sanitation workers in for a
chat and eventually negotiated a settlement.” Furthermore,
Vice-President Arias Calderon has said that he wants the government to
correct disparities created by the market. True, no projects that might
illustrate these plans “are in the works” and the Endara government
“opposes the idea” of using U.S. aid for such purposes, “determined to
leave virtually everything to the private sector.” But that proves
nothing, in the face of the powerful evidence showing that “the charge
is unfair,” just reviewed in its entirety.
Massing is not pleased with the outcome, particularly, the restoration
of Noriega’s PDF, “despite all the good intentions” of the United States
(taken as given, in accordance with the norms of the intellectual
culture), and its efforts “to atone for its past misbehavior.” The
problem does not lie in the U.S. military aid programs, which have
trained security forces that “have been guilty of horrible excesses” in
El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Noriega’s Panama (and other cases
unmentioned). Rather, the problem lies in what the U.S. “had to work
with.” It’s those folks who are bad, not us, please.
The consistent effects of our military training, the policies of which
it is a part, the documentary record explaining the reasons — all may be
put aside, irrelevant, along with all of history. We are always willing
to admit that there were aberrations in the past. But at every moment of
time, we have changed course and put the errors of the past behind us.
We are Good, our intentions are Good. Period.
January, 1991
The first part of this series (Z, November) opened with the conventional
interpretation of the past decade: the U.S. won the Cold War, a victory
for the forces of righteousness. We then turned to the question that
would at once come to the mind of anyone apart from the most fanatic
ideologue: How are the victors faring at this historic moment, as they
celebrate their triumph? We looked first at those who should be the most
overjoyed because of their unusual good fortune: our “little brown
brothers” in Central America and Panama, who have long been under the
protective wing of the leader of the crusade, becoming a foreign policy
obsession in the past decade. The conditions of their existence help us
understand why the obvious questions about the Grand Victory of
democracy and free market capitalism are so scrupulously avoided in
polite and cultivated circles. Needless to say, the beneficiaries of our
solicitude have some thoughts of their own about these matters. We will
turn in the final section to their interpretation of the triumph of
capitalism and freedom, and the nobility of their protector — thoughts
that do not penetrate the well-disciplined commissar culture at home.
Let us now extend the survey to other regions where the virtuous leaders
of the crusade for freedom and justice have long held sway and have thus
been able to realize their noble objectives with no more than marginal
interference from Communists and other evil forces, beginning with the
rest of Latin America.
A World Bank study in 1982 estimated that “40 percent of households in
Latin America live in poverty, meaning that they cannot purchase the
minimum basket of goods required for the satisfaction of their basic
needs, and…20 percent of all households live in destitution, meaning
that they lack the means of buying even the food that would provide them
with a minimally adequate diet.” The situation became far worse through
the victorious 1980s, largely because of the huge export of capital to
the West. From 1982 to 1987 this amounted to about $250 billion, 25
times the total value of the Alliance for Progress and 15 times the
Marshall Plan. The Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland
estimates that between 1978 and 1987, some $170 billion in flight
capital left Latin America, not including money hidden by falsified
trade transactions. The New York Times cites another estimate that
anonymous capital flows, including drug money and flight capital, total
$600 billion to $800 billion.
This huge hemorrhage is part of a complicated system whereby Western
banks and Latin American elites enrich themselves at the expense of the
general population of Latin America, which is saddled with the “debt
crisis” that results from these manipulations, and of taxpayers in the
Western countries who are ultimately called upon to foot part of the
bill. These are among the triumphs of free market capitalism that we now
celebrate — apart from a few perpetual complainers who are “as welcome
as gnats at a nudist party,” a New York Times reviewer comments,
referring to Murray Bookchin.
Speaking in Washington in preparation for the 1989 General Assembly of
the OAS, which he headed, Brazilian President Soares described the 1980s
as a “lost decade” for Latin America, with falling personal income and
general economic stagnation or decline. In 1988 average income had
fallen to the level of 1978. There was a further decline in 1989, and
the export of capital continued in a flood, the UN Economic Commission
for Latin America and the Caribbean reported.
According to World Bank figures, average per capita income in Argentina
fell from $1,990 in 1980 to $1,630 in 1988. Mexico’s GNP declined for
seven straight years. Real wages in Venezuela has fallen by a third
since 1981, to the 1964 level. Argentina allotted 20 percent of its
budget to education in 1972, 6 percent in 1986. David Felix, a leading
specialist on Latin American economics, writes that per capita output
and real investment per worker declined sharply in the 1980s, the latter
falling to below 1970 levels in most of the heavily indebted countries,
where urban real wages are in many cases 20 percent to 40 percent below
1980 levels, even below 1970 levels. The brain drain quickened and
physical and human capital per head shrank because of the decline of
public and private investment and collapse of infrastructure. Much of
the sharp deterioration of the 1980s, Felix and others conclude, can be
traced to the free-market restructuring imposed by the industrial
powers.
Mexicans continue to flee to the United States for survival, and macabre
stories abound, some hard to believe but important for what they
indicate about the prevailing mood. Reporting the annual meeting of the
Border Commission on Human Rights in Mexico, Mexico’s leading daily
(Excelsior) alleges that actions of the U.S. Border Patrol cause the
drowning of persons seeking to cross the river to the United States. A
representative of the regional Human Rights Committee told the session
that 1,000 people had disappeared without a trace after leaving their
homes to enter the U.S. illegally. She “also added that the
disappearance or theft of women for the extraction of organs for use in
transplants in the U.S. is common.” Others reported torture, high rates
of cancer from chemicals used in the maquiladora industries (mainly
subsidiaries of transnationals supplying U.S. factories), secret
prisons, kidnapping, and other horror stories. The journal also reports
a study by environmental groups, presented to President Salinas,
claiming that 100,000 children die every year as a result of pollution
in the Mexico City area, along with millions suffering from
pollution-induced disease, which has reduced life expectancy by an
estimated 10 years. The “main culprit” is the emissions of lead and
sulfur from operations of the national petrochemical company Pemex,
which is free from the controls imposed elsewhere — one of the
advantages of Third World production that is not lost on investors.
The Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and the Environment
described the situation as “truly catastrophic,” Excelsior reports
further, estimating that less than 10 percent of Mexican territory is
able to support “minimally productive agriculture” because of
environmental degradation, while water resources are hazardously low.
Many areas are turning into “a real museum of horrors” from pollution
because of the blind pursuit of profits on the part of national and
international private capital. The Secretariat estimates further that
more than 90 percent of industry in the Valley of Mexico, where there
are more than 30,000 plants, violate global standards, and in the
chemical industry, more than half the labor force suffers irreversible
damage to the respiratory system.
Maude Barlow, chairperson of a Canadian study group, reports the results
of their inquiry into maquiladoras “built by Fortune 500 to take
advantage of a desperate people,” for profits hard to match elsewhere.
They found factories full of teenage girls, some 14-years-old, “working
at eye-damaging, numbingly repetitive work” for wages “well below what
is required for even a minimum standard of living.” Corporations
commonly send the most dangerous jobs here because standards on
chemicals are “lax or non-existent.” “In one plant,” she writes, “we all
experienced headaches and nausea from spending an hour on the assembly
line” and “we saw young girls working beside open vats of toxic waste,
with no protective face covering.” Unions are barred, and there is an
ample reserve army of desperate people ready to take the place of any
who “are not happy, or fall behind in quotas, or become ill or
pregnant.” The delegation “took pictures of a lagoon of black, bubbling
toxic waste dumped by plants in an industrial park,” following it to
“where it met untreated raw sewage and turned into a small river running
past squatters’ camps (where children covered in sores drank Pepsi Cola
from baby bottles) to empty into the Tijuana River.”
It is more fashionable to bemoan the environmental and human
catastrophes of Eastern Europe, the results of an evil system now
happily overcome in a victory for our humane values.
Colombia is another success story of capitalist democracy, flawed only
by the drug cartels — and for some of those gnats who still fail to
appreciate the wonders of our system, by such marginal problems as the
murder of “subversives” — such as 1,000 members of the leading
opposition party and 3 of its presidential candidates — by death squads
in league with the security forces.
There is also a background, though one would be hard put to find a
discussion of it in recent commentary on U.S. efforts to aid the
Colombian military in the “war against drugs.” The topic is addressed in
a discussion of human rights in Colombia by Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa,
president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights. “Behind
the facade of a constitutional regime,” he observes, “we have a
militarized society under the state of siege provided” by the 1886
Constitution. The Constitution grants a wide range of rights, but they
have no relation to reality. “In this context poverty and insufficient
land reform have made Colombia one of the most tragic countries of Latin
America.” Land reform, which “has practically been a myth,” was
legislated in 1961, but “has yet to be implemented, as it is opposed by
landowners, who have had the power to stop it” — again, no defect of
‘’democracy,” by Western standards. The result of the prevailing misery
has been violence, including la Violencia of the 1940s and 1950s, which
took hundreds of thousands of lives. “This violence has been caused not
by any mass indoctrination, but by the dual structure of a prosperous
minority and an impoverished, excluded majority, with great differences
in political participation,” the familiar story.
The story has another familiar thread. “But in addition to internal
factors,” Vasquez Carrizosa continues, “violence has been exacerbated by
external factors. In the 1960s the United States, during the Kennedy
administration, took great pains to transform our regular armies into
counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death
squads.” These Kennedy initiatives “ushered in what is known in Latin
America as the National Security Doctrine, …not defense against an
external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters
of the game… [with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth
in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan
doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to
exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not
supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist
extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists
such as myself.”
A study by Evan Vallianatos of the U.S. government Office of Technology
Assessment amplifies the dimensions of the victory of capitalist
democracy here. “Colombia’s twentieth century history is above all
stained in the blood of the peasant poor,” he writes, reviewing the
gruesome record of atrocities and massacre to keep the mass of the
population in its place. The U.S. Aid program, the Ford Foundation, and
others have sought to deal with the plight of the rural population “by
refining the largely discredited trickle-down technology and knowledge
transfer process,” investing in the elite and trusting in “competition,
private property, and the mechanism of the free market” — a system in
which “the big fish eats the small one,” as one poor farmer observes.
These policies have made the dreadful conditions still worse, creating
“the most gross inequalities that the beast in man has made possible.”
It is not only the rural poor who have suffered beyond endurance. To
illustrate the kind of development fostered by the multinational
corporations and the technocrats, Vallianatos offers the example of the
small industrial city of Yumbo, “rapidly becoming unfit for human
habitation” because of uncontrolled pollution, decay, and “corrosive
slums” in which “the town’s spent humanity has all but given up.”
Another victory for our side.
Brazil is another country with rich resources and potential, long
subject to European influence, then U.S. intervention, primarily since
the Kennedy years. We cannot, however, simply speak of “Brazil.” There
are two very different Brazils. In a major scholarly study of the
Brazilian economy, Peter Evans writes that “the fundamental conflict in
Brazil is between the 1, or perhaps 5, percent of the population that
comprises the elite and the 80 percent that has been left out of the
‘Brazilian model’ of development.” The Brazilian journal Veja reports on
these two Brazils, the first modern and westernized, the second sunk in
the deepest misery. Seventy percent of the population consumes fewer
calories than Iranians, Mexicans, or Paraguayans. Over half the
population have family incomes below the minimum wage. For 40 percent of
the population, the median annual salary is $287, while inflation
skyrockets and necessities are beyond reach. A World Bank report on the
Brazilian educational system compares it unfavorably to Ethiopia and
Pakistan, with a dropout rate of 80 percent in primary school, growing
illiteracy, and falling budgets. The Ministry of Education reports that
the government spends over a third of the education budget on school
meals, because most of the students will either eat at school or not at
all.
The journal South, which describes itself as “The Business Magazine of
the Developing World,” reports on Brazil under the heading “The
Underside of Paradise.” A country with enormous wealth, no security
concerns, a relatively homogeneous population, and a favorable climate,
Brazil nevertheless has problems: “The problem is that this cornucopia
is inhabited by a population enduring social conditions among the worst
in the world. Two-thirds do not get enough to eat. Brazil has a higher
infant mortality rate than Sri Lanka, a higher illiteracy rate than
Paraguay, and worse social indicators than many far poorer African
countries. Fewer children finish first-grade school than in Ethiopia,
fewer are vaccinated than in Tanzania and Botswana. Thirty-two percent
of the population lives below the poverty line. Seven million abandoned
children beg, steal and sniff glue on the streets. For scores of
millions, home is a shack in a slum, a room in the inner city, or
increasingly, a patch of ground under a bridge.”
The share of the poorer classes in the national income is “steadily
falling, giving Brazil probably the highest concentration of income in
the world.” It has no progressive income tax or capital gains tax, but
it does have galloping inflation and a huge foreign debt, while
participating in a “Marshall Plan in reverse,” in the words of former
President Jose Samey, referring to debt payments.
For three-quarters of the population of this cornucopia, the conditions
of Eastern Europe are dreams beyond reach, another triumph of the Free
World.
A UN “Report on Human Development” ranks Brazil, with the world’s
eighth-largest economy, in 80^(th) place in general welfare (as measured
by education, health, and hygiene), near Albania, Paraguay, and
Thailand. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced on
October 18 that more than 40 percent of the population (almost 53
million people) are hungry. The Brazilian Health Ministry estimates that
840,000 children aged 1–4 and 420,000 newborns will die of hunger this
year.
Here too it is widely alleged that babies are sacrificed for organ
banks, a belief that can hardly be true but that reveals much about the
conditions under which it can take root. The Honduran press reported
that Brazilian babies had been rescued from a gang that “intended to
sacrifice them to organ banks in the United States, according to a
charge in the courts.” Brazil’s Justice Ministry ordered federal police
to investigate allegations that adopted children are being used for
organ transplants in Europe, a practice “known to exist in Mexico and
Thailand,” the London Guardian reports, adding that “handicapped
children are said to be preferred for transplant operations” and
reviewing the process by which children in Brazil are kidnapped,
“disappeared,” or given up by impoverished mothers, then adopted or used
for transplants.
It would only be fair to add that the authorities are concerned with the
mounting problem of homeless and starving children and are trying to
reduce their numbers. Amnesty International reports that death squads,
often run by the police, are killing street children at a rate of about
one a day, while “many more children, forced onto the streets to support
their families, are being beaten and tortured by the police” (Reuters,
citing AI). “Poor children in Brazil are treated with contempt by the
authorities, risking their lives simply by being on the streets,” AI
alleges. Most of the torture takes place under police custody or in
state institutions. There are few complaints by victims or witnesses
because of fear of the police, and the few cases that are investigated
judicially result in light sentences.
Recall that these are the conditions that hold on the 25^(th)
anniversary of “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the
mid-twentieth century” (Kennedy Ambassador Lincoln Gordon), that is, the
overthrow of parliamentary democracy by Brazilian generals backed by the
United States, which then praised the “economic miracle” produced by the
neo-Nazi national security state they established. In the months before
the generals’ coup, Washington assured its traditional military allies
of its support and provided them with aid, because the military was
essential to “the strategy for restraining left-wing excesses” of the
elected Goulart government, Gordon cabled the State Department. The U.S.
actively supported the coup, preparing to intervene directly if its help
was needed for what Gordon described as the “democratic rebellion” of
the generals. This “de facto ouster” of the elected president was “a
great victory for the free world,” Gordon reported with joy, adding that
it should “create a greatly improved climate for private investment.”
U.S. labor leaders also demanded their proper share of the credit for
the overthrow of the parliamentary regime, as the new government placed
in power by the generals proceeded to smash the labor movement and
subordinate poor and working people to the overriding needs of business
interests, primarily foreign. Secretary of State Dean Rusk justified
U.S. recognition for the obviously illegal regime on the grounds that
“the succession there occurred as foreseen by the [Brazilian]
Constitution,” which had just been blatantly violated. The U.S.
proceeded to provide ample aid as torture and repression mounted, the
relics of constitutional Government faded away, and the climate for
investors improved under the rule of what Washington hailed as the
“democratic forces.”
These events in Latin America’s most powerful state initiated a domino
effect throughout the continent, leading to an unprecedented plague of
repression under the National Security doctrines crafted by the military
and political leaders of the hemisphere and their U.S. advisers.
The circumstances of the poor in Brazil continue to regress as austerity
measures are imposed on the standard International Monetary Fund formula
in an effort to deal somehow with this catastrophe of capitalism. The
austerity measures initiated by President Collor de Mello were initially
described as “populist,” harmful mostly to the wealthy. Predictably,
reality took a different course. Ken Silverstein reports that half a
year after the measures were inaugurated, “the rich are reassured.” The
IMF measures primarily harmed the poor, while wealthy individuals and
large companies were able to find ways to enrich themselves by
exploiting measures that in theory were devised to impose the main
burden on them. A study by the J. Walter Thompson agency concluded that
“Collor’s policies are not a threat to the wealthy…. The rich are now
leading absolutely normal lives” (agency vice-president Celia
Chiavolle). Businessmen, bankers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
express their pleasure in the course of policy, while “the working class
has been pushed to the wall,” Silverstein adds, with hundreds of
thousands fired and purchasing power reduced to a historic low, well
below minimal needs for about half the population.
The situation is similar in Argentina, where the Christian Democratic
Party called on its members to resign from the cabinet in March “in
order not to validate, by their presence in the government, the
anti-popular [economic] measures of the regime.” In a further protest
over these measures, the Party expelled the current Minister of the
Economy. Experts say that the socioeconomic situation has become
“unbearable.”
The terrible fate of Argentina is addressed in a report in the
Washington Post by Eugene Robinson. One of the ten richest countries in
the world at the turn of the century, with rich resources and great
advantages, Argentina is becoming a Third World country, Robinson
observes. About one-third of its 31 million inhabitants live below the
poverty line. Some 18,000 children die each year before their first
birthday, most from malnutrition and preventable disease The capital,
once considered “the most elegant and European city this side of the
Atlantic,” is “ringed by a widening belt of shantytowns, called villas
miserias, or ‘miseryvilles,’ where the homes are cobbled- together huts
and the sewers are open ditches.” Here too the IMF-style reforms “have
made life even more precarious for the poor”
Robinson’s article is paired with another entitled “A Glimpse Into the
Lower Depths,” devoted to a mining town in the Soviet Union Subtitled “A
mining town on the steppes reveals ‘the whole sick system’,” the article
stresses the comparison to capitalist success. The article on Argentina,
however, says nothing about any “sick system.” The only hint of a reason
for the catastrophe in Argentina, or the general “economic malaise” in
Latin America, is in a statement by a planning minister that “we
destroyed ourselves” by “economic mismanagement.” Again the usual
pattern: their crimes reveal their evil nature, ours are the result of
personal failings and the poor human material with which we are forced
to work in the Third World.
David Felix concludes that Argentina’s decline results from “political
factors such as prolonged class warfare and a lack of national
commitment on the part of Argentina’s elite,” which took advantage of
the free-market policies of the murderous military dictatorship that
were much admired here. These led to massive redistribution of income
towards the wealthy and a sharp fall of per capita income, along with a
huge increase in debt as a result of capital flight, tax evasion, and
consumption by the rich beneficiaries of the “sick system” —
Reaganomics, in essence.
In oil-rich Venezuela, over 40 percent live in extreme poverty according
to official figures, and the food situation is considered
“hyper-critical,” the Chamber of Food Industries reported in 1989.
Malnutrition is so common that it is often not noted in medical
histories, according to hospital officials, who warn that “the future is
horrible.” Prostitution has also increased, reaching the level of about
170,000 women or more, according to the Ministry of Health. The Ministry
also reports an innovation, beyond the classic prostitution of women of
low in-come. Many “executive secretaries and housewives and college
students accompany tourists and executives during a weekend, earning at
times up to [about $150] per contact.” Child prostitution is also
increasing and is now “extremely widespread,” along with child abuse.
Brutal exploitation of women is a standard feature of the “economic
miracles” in the realms of capitalist democracy. The huge flow of women
from impoverished rural areas in Thailand to service the prostitution
industry — one of the success stories of the economic takeoff sparked by
the Indochina wars — is one of the many scandals that escape notice in
the admiration for the Free World triumph. The savage conditions of work
for young women largely from the rural areas are notorious; >young<
women, because few others are capable of enduring the conditions of
labor, or survive to continue with it.
Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship is another famous success story.
Under the heading “Tyrant’s ‘Success’ Leaves 7 of 12 Million Chileans
Poor,” Antonio Garza Morales reports in Excelsior that “the social cost
which has been paid by the Chilean people is the highest in Latin
America,” with the number of poor rising from 1 million after Allende to
7 million today, while the population remained stable at 12 million.
Christian Democratic Party leader Senator Anselmo Sule, returned from
exile, says that economic growth that benefits 10 percent of the
population has been achieved (Pinochet’s official institutions agree),
but development has not. Unless the economic disaster for the majority
is remedied, “we are finished,” he adds. According to David Felix,
“Chile, hit especially hard in the 1982–84 period, is now growing faster
than during the preceding decade of the Chicago Boys,” enthralled by the
free market ideology that is, indeed, highly beneficial for some: the
wealthy, crucially including foreign investors. Chile’s recovery, Felix
argues, can be traced to “a combination of severe wage repression by the
Pinochet regime, an astutely managed bailout of the bankrupt private
sector by the economic team that replaced the discredited Chicago Boys,
and access to unusually generous lending by the international financial
institutions,” much impressed by the favorable climate for business
operations.
Environmental degradation is also a severe problem in Chile. The Chilean
journal Apsi devoted a recent issue to the environmental crisis
accelerated by the “radical neoliberalism” of the period following the
U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the parliamentary democracy. Recent
studies show that about half the country is becoming a desert, a problem
that “seems much farther away than the daily poisoning of those who live
in Santiago,” the capital city, which competes with Sao Paolo (Brazil)
and Mexico City for the pollution prize for the hemisphere (for the
world, the journal alleges). “The liquid that emerges from the millions
of faucets in the homes and alleys of Santiago have levels of copper,
iron, magnesium and lead which exceed by many times the maximum
tolerable norms.” The land that “supplies the fruits and vegetables of
the Metropolitan Region are irrigated with waters that exceed by 1,000
times the maximum quantity of coliforms acceptable,” which is why
Santiago “has levels of hepatitis, typhoid, and parasites which are not
seen in any other part of the continent” (one of every three children
has parasites in the capital). Economists and environmentalists
attribute the problem to the “development model,” crucially, its
“transnational style,” “in which the most important decisions tend to be
adopted outside the ambit of the countries themselves,” consistent with
the assigned “function” of the Third World: to serve the needs of the
industrial West.
The fashion at home, as noted, is to attribute the problems of Eastern
Europe to the “sick system” (quite accurately), while ignoring the
catastrophes of capitalism or, on the rare occasions when some problem
is noticed, attributing it to any cause other than the system that
consistently brings it about. Latin American economists who have
attributed the problems of the region to the “development model” are
generally ignored, but some of them have been useful for ideological
warfare and therefore have attained respectability in the U.S. political
culture. One example is Francisco Mayorga, a Yale Ph.D. in economics,
who became one of the most respected commentators on the economic
affairs of Nicaragua in the 1980s because he could be quoted on the
economic debacle caused by the Sandinistas. He remained a U.S. favorite
as he became the economic Czar after the victory for the U.S. candidate
in the February 1990 election, though he disappeared from view when he
was removed after the failure of his highly-touted recovery policies
(which failed, in large part, because of U.S. foot-dragging, the UNO
government being nowhere near harsh and brutal enough for Washington’s
tastes).
But Mayorga was never quoted on what he actually wrote about the
Nicaraguan economy, which is not without interest. His 1986 Yale
doctoral dissertation is a study of the consequences for Nicaragua of
the development model of the U.S.-backed Somoza regime, and of the
likely consequences of alternative policy choices for the 1980s. He
concludes that “by 1978 the economy was on the verge of collapse”
because of the “exhaustion of the agroindustrial model” and the
“monetarist paradigm” that the U.S. favored. This model had led to huge
debt and insolvency, and “the drastic downturn of the terms of trade
that was around the corner was clearly going to deal a crucial blow to
the agroindustrial model developed in the previous three decades,”
leading “inexorably” to an “economic slump in the 1980s.” The immense
costs of the U.S.-backed Somoza repression of 1978–9 and the contra war
made the “inexorable” even more destructive. Mayorga estimates capital
flight from 1977 to 1979 at $500 million, and calculates the “direct
economic burden” of war from 1978 to 1984 at more than $3.3 billion.
That figure, he points out, is one and a half times the “record GDP
level of the country in 1977,” a year of “exceptional affluence” because
of the destruction of the Brazilian coffee crop, hence regularly used by
U.S. propagandists (including some who masquerade as scholars) as a base
line to prove Sandinista failures. The course of the economy from 1980,
Mayorga concludes, was the result of the collapse of the agroindustrial
export model, the severe downturn in the terms of trade, and the
unbearable burden of the 1978–9 war and then the contra war (his study
ends before the U.S. embargo exacerbated the crisis further). Sandinista
policies, he concludes, were ineffective in dealing with the
“inexorable” collapse: they “had a favorable impact on output and a
negative effect on rural wages and farming profits,” favoring industrial
profits and redistributing income “from the rural to the urban sector.”
Had there been “no war and no change in economic regime,” his studies
show, “the Nicaraguan economy would have entered a sharp slump.”
These conclusions being useless or worse, Mayorga’s actual work on the
Nicaraguan economy passes into the same oblivion as all other inquiries
into the catastrophes of capitalism. The example is noteworthy because
of Mayorga’s prominence, at the very same time, insofar as he could
serve a propaganda function for the media.
Brazil and Chile are not the only countries to have basked in praise for
their achievements after U.S. intervention set them on the right course.
Another is the Dominican Republic. After the latest U.S. invasion under
Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and a dose of death squads and torture,
democratic forms were established, and U.S. commentators have expressed
much pride in the peaceful transfer of power — or better, governmental
authority, power lying elsewhere. The economy is stagnant and near
bankrupt, public services function only intermittently, poverty is
endemic, malnutrition is increasing, and the standard of living of the
poor continues its downward slide. In the capital city, electricity
supply is down to four hours a day; water is available for only an hour
a day in many areas. Unemployment is rising, the foreign debt has
reached $4 billion, the 1989 trade deficit was $1 billion, up from $700
million the year before. Estimates of the number who have fled illegally
to the U.S. range up to a million. Without the remittances of Dominicans
working in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland — illegally for the most
part — “the country could not survive,” the London Economics reports.
U.S. investors, assisted by Woodrow Wilson’s invasion and its aftermath,
later Johnson’s, had long controlled most of the economy. Now foreign
investment in 17 free trade zones is attracted by 15-year tax holidays
and average wages of 65 cents an hour. Some “remain upbeat about the
Dominican Republic’s situation,” the Business Magazine of the Developing
World (South) reports, citing U.S. ambassador Paul Taylor, who described
the new free trade zones as an economic miracle in a talk to the chamber
of commerce. There are some objective grounds for Taylor’s cheerful view
of the prospects, South observes: “Optimists point to the political and
labour harmony in the Dominican Republic, the substantial pool of cheap
workers and the transport, banking and communications services as
continuing strong incentives to investors. Indeed, as a Dominican
factory manager notes: ‘Anyone who gets involved in unions here knows
that they’ll lose their job and won’t work in the free trade zone any
more.’ ”
As in Brazil and elsewhere, the American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO foreign affairs arm supported by the
government and major corporations, “has been instrumental in
discouraging hostile [sic] union activity in order to help U.S.
companies maximise their profits,” South reports. With friends like
these, Dominican workers have little to fear.
A more recent beneficiary of U.S. invasion, Panama, also has its share
of optimists, as discussed in the first part of this series, notably the
tiny white minority now restored to power and the U.S. businesspeople
who have revived Panama City’s night-life. As elsewhere in Latin
America, the plight of the unimportant people is deplored by sections of
the Church who persist in their old-fashioned “preferential option for
the poor,” not understanding the merits of the promising new “trickle
down” techniques of raising them from their misery.
Elsewhere in the Caribbean basin, we find much the same picture,
including Grenada, also liberated by U.S. benevolence, then restored to
its proper status (see my article in Z, March 1990). The U.S. pursued a
different path to ensure virtuous behavior in the case of Jamaica.
Upstarts led by the social democrat Michael Manley and his People’s
National Party (PNP) sought to explore the forbidden path of independent
development and social reform in the 1970s, eliciting the usual
hostility from the United States and sufficient pressures to achieve an
electoral victory for U.S. favorite Edward Seaga, who pledged to put an
end to such nonsense. Seaga’s pursuit of proper free market principles
was lauded by the Reagan administration, which announced grandly that it
would use this opportunity to create a showcase for democracy and
capitalism in the Caribbean. Massive aid flowed. USAID spent more on
Jamaica than on any other Caribbean program. The World Bank also joined
in to oversee and expedite this estimable project. Seaga followed all
the rules, introducing austerity measures, establishing Free Trade Zones
where non-union labor, mostly women, work in sweatshops for miserable
wages in foreign-run plants subsidized by the Jamaican government, and
generally keeping to the IMF prescriptions.
There was some economic growth, “mainly as a result of laundered ‘ganja’
dollars from the marijuana trade, increased tourism earnings, lower fuel
import costs, and higher prices for bauxite and alumina,” the North
American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) reports. The rest was the
usual catastrophe of capitalism, including one of the highest per capita
foreign debts in the world, collapse of infrastructure, and general
impoverishment. According to USAID, by March 1988, along with its
“crippling debt burden,” Jamaica was a country where economic output was
“far below the production level of 1972,” “distribution of wealth and
income is highly unequal,” “shortages of key medical and technical
personnel plague the health system,” “physical decay and social violence
deter investment,” and there are “severe deficits in infrastructure and
housing.” The assessment was made six months before hurricane Gilbert
dealt a further blow.
At this point, Michael Manley, now properly tamed, was granted the right
to return to power to administer the ruins, all hope for constructive
change having been lost. Manley “is making all the right noises” to
reassure the Bank and foreign investors, Roger Robinson, World Bank
senior economist for Jamaica, said in a June 1988 pre-election
interview. He explained further that “Five years ago, people were still
thinking about ‘meeting local needs,’ but not any more. Now the lawyers
and others with access to resources are interested in external export
investment. Once you have that ingrained in a population, you can’t go
back easily, even if the PNP and Michael Manley come in again. Now
there’s an understanding among individuals who save, invest, and develop
their careers that capital will start leaving again if the PNP, or even
[Seaga’s] JLP, intervenes too much.”
Returned to office, Manley recognized the handwriting on the wall,
outdoing Seaga as an enthusiast for free market capitalism. “The old
gospel that government should be operated in the interests of the poor
is being modified, even if not expressly rejected, by the dawning
realization that the only way to help the poor is to operate the
government in the interest of the productive!” the journal of the
Private Sector of Jamaica exulted — here the term “productive” does not
refer to the people who produce, but to those who manage, control
investment, and reap profits. The public sector is “on the verge of
collapse,” the Private Sector report continues, with schools, health
care and other services rapidly declining. But with the “nonsensical
rhetoric of the recent past” abandoned, and privatization of everything
in sight on the way, there is hope — for “the productive,” in the
special intended sense.
Manley has won new respect from the important people now that he has
learned to play the role of “violin president,” in Latin American
terminology: “put up by the left but played by the right.” The
conditions of capital flight and foreign pressures — state, private, and
international economic institutions — have regularly sufficed to bar any
other course.
Turning to Asia, a serious inquiry into the victory of freedom,
capitalism, and democracy will naturally begin with the Philippines,
which has benefited from U.S. solicitude for close to a century. The
desperate state of Filipinos is reviewed in the Far Eastern Economic
Review, firmly dedicated to economic liberalism and the priorities of
the business community, under the heading “Power to the plutocrats.” Its
reports conclude that “Much of the country’s problems now…seem to be
rooted in the fact that the country has had in its entire history no
form of social revolution.” The consequences of this failure include
“the jinxed land reform programme,” a failure that “profoundly affects
the prognosis for the incidence of poverty” among the 67 percent of poor
Filipino families living in rural areas, condemning them to permanent
misery, huge foreign debt, “massive capital flight,” an increase in
severe malnutrition among pre-school children since the Aquino
Government took power, widespread underemployment, and survival for many
on incomes far below Government-defined poverty thresholds, “the growth
of a virtual society of beggars and criminals,” and the rest of the
familiar story. Government and academic experts expect things to get
considerably worse. For the “rapidly expanding disadvantaged,” the only
way out is to seek work abroad: “legal and illegal workers from the
Philippines now comprise the greatest annual labour exodus in Asia.”
With social programs abandoned, the only hope is if “the big-business
elite, in a situation of little government interference, foregoes the
Philippine elite traditional proclivity towards conspicuous consumption,
and instead use profits both for their employees’ welfare and to
accumulate capital for industrial development.”
Their failure to do so can perhaps be explained by the fact that the
United States has had so little time to exercise its tutelage; only 90
years, after all. That its ministrations might have something to do with
what we find is a possibility not to be addressed. In the real world,
these desperate conditions can be traced in no small measure to the U.S.
invasion at the turn of the century with its vast slaughter and
destruction, the long colonial occupation, and the subsequent policies
including the postwar counterinsurgency campaign and support for the
Marcos dictatorship as long as it was viable. But the Philippines did
gain the (intermittent) gift of democracy. In the same business journal,
a columnist for the Manila Daily Globe, Conrado de Quiros, reflects on
this matter under the heading “The wisdom of democracy.” He compares the
disaster of the Philippines to the economic success story of Singapore
under Lee Kuan Yew, whose harsh tyranny is another of those famous
triumphs of democracy and capitalism. De Quiros quotes the Singapore
Minister of Trade and Industry, Lee’s son, who condemns the U.S. model
imposed on the Philippines for many flaws, the “worst crime” being that
it granted the Filipinos a free press; in his own words, “An
American-style free-wheeling press purveyed junk in the marketplace of
ideas, which led to confusion and bewilderment, not to enlightenment and
truth.” With a better appreciation of the merits of fascism, his
Singapore government is too wise to fall into this error.
The Americans did introduce a form of democracy, de Quiros continues.
However, it “was not designed to make Filipinos free but to make them
comfortable with their new chains.” It may have given the Filipinos more
newspapers, but “it has given them less money with which to buy them. It
has made the rich richer,” with “one of the world’s worst cases of
inequity in the distribution of wealth,” according to the World Bank.
Democracy “was an instrument of colonisation,” and was not intended to
have substantive content: “For most Filipinos, American-style democracy
meant little more than elections every few years. Beyond this, the
colonial authorities made sure that only the candidates who represented
colonial interests first and last won. This practice did not die with
colonialism. The ensuing political order, which persisted long after
independence, was one where a handful of families effectively and
ruthlessly ruled a society riven by inequality. It was democratic in
form, borrowing as many American practices as it could, but autocratic
in practice.
That these were indeed the policy goals is a rational conclusion in the
light of historical practice and the documentary record. We may then
describe the Philippines as another success story of democracy and
capitalism, and number its people too among the victors in the Cold War.
Under Philippine democracy, most of the population is not represented.
The politicians are lawyers or wealthy businessmen or landowners. As the
political structure bequeathed to the Philippines by the American
occupation was reconstituted after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed
dictator by “people power,” Gary Hawes writes in the scholarly journal
Pacific Affairs, “it is only those with money and muscle who can be
elected.” Candidates are mainly “former elected officials, relatives of
powerful political families and/or members of the economic elite,”
unrepresentative of the rural majority or even “the citizens who had
demonstrated to bring down Marcos and who had risked their lives to
protect their ballots for Corazon Aquino.” There was a party (PnB) based
on the popular organizations that arose against the dictatorship, with
broad support from the peasantry, the labor force, and large reformist
sections of the middle class, but it was to have no political role. In
the elections, PnB was outspent by the traditional conservative parties
by a ratio of up to 20 to 1. Its supporters were subjected to
intimidation and threats of loss of jobs, housing, and city licenses.
The military presence also served to inhibit PnB campaigning. Interviews
with poor farmers and workers revealed a preference for PnB candidates,
but a recognition that since the military and the rural elite opposed
them, “the next best choice was to take the money or the rewards and
vote for the candidates endorsed by the Aquino government.
The playing field having been properly levelled, our celebrated
“yearning for democracy” is satisfied.
Under the reconstituted elite democracy, Hawes continues, “the voices of
the rural dwellers” — almost two-thirds of the population — “have seldom
been heard,” and the same is true of the urban poor. The cure for
agitation in the countryside is militarization and the rise of
vigilantes, leading to a record of human rights violations “as bad as,
if not worse than, during the time of Marcos,” a 1988 human rights
mission reported, with torture, summary executions, and forced
evacuations. There is economic growth, but its fruits “have seldom
trickled down to the most needy.” Peasants continue to starve while
paying 70 percent of their crop to the landlord. Agrarian reform is
barely a joke. Support for the National Democratic Front (NDF) and its
guerrillas is mounting after years of rural organizing.
De Quiros suggests that there has been “substantive democracy in the
Philippines — despite colonialism and elite politics.” “This is so
because democracy took a life of its own, expressing itself in peasant
revolts and popular demand for reforms.” It is just this substantive
democracy that the United States and its allies are dedicated to repress
and contain. Hence the absence of any social revolution of the kind that
he and several other commentators in this most respectable business
journal see as sorely lacking in the Philippines — though if it can join
the club of “capitalist democracies” of the Singapore variety, the tune
will likely change.
Meanwhile, Survival International reports that tribal peoples are being
attacked by the private army of a logging company, which, in a six month
campaign of terror, has killed and tortured villagers, burned down
houses, destroyed rice stores, and driven thousands from their homes.
The same tribal people are among the many victims of bombing of villages
and other practices of the government counterinsurgency campaigns.
Appeals to the Aquino government have been ignored. An appeal to the
U.S. government, or Western circles generally, cannot be seriously
proposed. The same is true in Thailand, where the government announced a
plan to expel six million people from forests where it wants to
establish softwood plantations.
Miracles of capitalism are also to be found elsewhere in Asia. Charles
Gray, responsible for Asian affairs in the pro-business AFL-CIO foreign
affairs branch (AIFLD), observes in the Far Eastern Economic Review that
transnational corporations “generally insist the host government
suppress the right of workers to organise and join unions, even when
that right is guaranteed in the country’s own constitution and laws.”
The organization that coordinates trade in the Free World (GATT) does
not have a single rule that “covers the subsidies that transnational
corporations get though pressures on Third World governments to permit
19^(th) century-type exploitation of labour.” In Malaysia, “U.S. and
other foreign corporations forced the Labour Ministry in 1988 to
continue the government’s long-standing prohibition of unions in the
electronics industry by threatening to shift their jobs and investments
to another country.” In Bangladesh, contractors for the transnationals
“discriminate against women and girls by paying them starvation wages as
low as 9 U.S. cents an hour.” In China’s Guangdong province, when the
government found that “the factory of a leading toy manufacturer was
engaged in labour law violations — such as 14-hour workdays and 7-day
workweeks — it approached the managers to ask them to respect the law.
The managers refused, and said that if they were unable to operate the
way they wanted they would close their Chinese factories and move to
Thailand,” where there are no such unreasonable demands.
Low prices for imported toys have doubtless brought much Christmas cheer
in the industrial West.
The scene in Africa is worse still. To mention only one small element of
a growing catastrophe, a study of the U.N. Economic Commission for
Africa estimates that “South Africa’s military aggression and
destabilization of its neighbors cost the region $10 billion in 1988 and
over $60 billion and 1.5 million lives in the first nine years of this
decade.” Such figures are considered too insignificant to merit notice
in the Newspaper of Record, which avoided the matter. Congress imposed
sanctions on South Africa in 1986 over Reagan’s veto, but their impact
has been limited. The American Committee on Africa reports that only 25
percent of U.S.-South African trade has been affected, and that iron,
steel, and (until late 1989) half-finished uranium continued to be
imported. After the sanctions were put in place, U.S. exports to South
Africa increased from $1.28 billion in 1987 to $1.71 billion in 1989,
according to the U.S. Commerce Department.
While the South African government and the minority White groups it
represents face mounting problems, they may see some rays of hope as
well. New diplomatic ties between South Africa and Hungary, now that it
has achieved independence, may prove to be “the wedge that breaks trade
sanctions and the international isolation of the South African
government,” the Christian Science Monitor reports in a lead story,
citing an economist at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who foresees
expanding trade between South Africa and Eastern Europe.
The economic catastrophe of much of Africa is commonly attributed to
“socialism,” a term used freely to apply to anything we are not supposed
to like. But there is an exception, “an island of freewheeling
capitalism in a sea of one-party socialist states,” Africa correspondent
Howard Witt of the conservative Chicago Tribune writes. He is referring
to Liberia, which, like the Philippines, can attribute its happy state
to the fact that it was “America’s only toehold on the African
continent” — for a century and a half, in this case. Liberia took on
special significance during the Cold War years, Witt continues,
particularly after President Samuel Doe, a “brutish, nearly illiterate
army sergeant…seized power in 1980 after disemboweling the previous
president in his bed” (more recently suffering a similar fate himself),
and proceeded to elevate his fellow tribesmen — 4 percent of the
population — into a new ruling elite, and to persecute and savagely
oppress the rest of the population. The Reagan administration, much
impressed, determined to turn Liberia, like Jamaica, into a showcase of
capitalism and democracy. In the first six years of Doe’s regime, the
U.S. poured military and economic aid into “the backward country,” “even
as evidence mounted that Doe and his ministers were stealing much of the
money, and after he “brazenly stole” the 1985 election with Washington’s
approval, in a replay of the Noriega story a year earlier. A “respected
expatriate Liberian dissident and former government minister,” Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf, says: “At the time, an American official told me
bluntly, ‘Our strategic interests are more important than democracy’.”
The results of the aid are evident, Witt writes: “The soldiers of
President Samuel Doe’s army wear the uniforms of American GIs as they go
about their business murdering Liberian civilians on the streets of the
capital, Monrovia,” named after President Monroe, and “the bodies of
many of the civilian victims are dumped in the morgue at the
American-built John F. Kennedy Hospital,” where “combat-hardened
doctors” say “they have never witnessed such brutality.” Monrovia is a
death trap, Witt writes. Those who are not struck down by starvation,
cholera, or typhoid try to escape the army or the rebel forces under
Charles Taylor, a former Doe aide — or later, those under the command of
a breakaway unit led by Prince Johnson.
The results of the U.S. aid became even clearer when reporters entered
Monrovia with the African peacekeeping force after Doe was tortured and
murdered by Johnson’s guerrillas. They found “a bloody legacy” of the
“10 years in power” of the U.S. favorite, UPI reporter Mark Huband
writes: piles of bleached bones and skulls, many smashed; “half-clothed,
decomposed heaps of flesh…littered with millions of maggots”; “contorted
bodies…huddled beneath church pews” and “piled up in a dark corner
beside the altar”; bodies “rotting into their mattresses”; “a large
meeting hall for women and children [where] clothes clung to the
skeletons of female and underaged victims.”
Not everyone, of course, has suffered in this “island of freewheeling
capitalism.” For a century and a half, the oligarchy of freed American
slaves and their descendants “oppressed and exploited the indigenous
population,” while “the U.S. looked the other way.” And lately, the
Reagan favorites did quite well for themselves until their turn came to
be dispatched. Others merely benefited, escaping any such unpleasant
fate: “U.S. corporations like Firestone and B.F. Goodrich made healthy
profits from the expansive Liberian operations,” Witt observes, proving
that freewheeling capitalism has its virtues. The U.S. built a huge
Voice of America transmitter in Liberia, perhaps to broadcast the happy
message of what can be achieved under capitalist democracy. We can chalk
up another victory for the Free World.
Current U.S. policy, Johnson-Sirleaf says, is “a lack of policy.” “It’s
kind of, ‘Oh, those Africans are at it again. Let them fight, and may
the best man win’.” To judge by the commentary on all of this, there is
nothing here to teach us anything about ourselves, our legendary
benevolence, or the marvels of freewheeling capitalism.
Behind the “lack of policy,” there is, however, the usual policy toward
the Third World, which we can trace back as usual to the early postwar
period when the global order was being shaped in the interests of the
rich and powerful in the West. Like other parts of the Third World,
Africa had its “function.” It was to be “exploited” for the
reconstruction of Europe, George Kennan explained in a major State
Department study on the international order. He added that the
opportunity to exploit Africa should provide a psychological lift for
the European powers, affording them “that tangible objective for which
everyone has been rather unsuccessfully groping….” History might have
suggested a different project: that Africa should “exploit” Europe to
enable it to reconstruct from centuries of devastation at the hands of
European conquerors, perhaps also improving its psychological state
through this process. Needless to say, nothing of the sort was remotely
thinkable, and the actual proposals have received little notice,
apparently being regarded as uncontroversial.
In discussion of African policy particularly, the element of racism
cannot be discounted. Dean Acheson warned the former Prime Minister of
the racist government of Rhodesia in 1971 to beware of the “American
public,” who “decide that the only correct decision of any issue must be
one which favors the colored point of view.” He urged that Rhodesia not
“get led down the garden path by any of our constitutional cliches —
equal protection of the laws, etc. — which have caused us so much
trouble….” This venerated figure of American liberalism was particularly
disturbed by the Supreme Court’s use of “vague constitutional
provisions” which “hastened racial equality and has invaded the
political field by the one-man-one-vote doctrine,” which made
“Negroes…impatient for still more rapid progress and led to the newly
popular techniques of demonstration and violence” (September 1968). The
“pall of racism…hovering over” African affairs under the Nixon
administration, “and over the most basic public issues foreign and
domestic,” has been discussed by State Department official Roger Morris,
including Nixon’s request to Kissinger to assure that his first
presidential message to Congress on foreign policy have “something in it
for the jigs” (eliciting “the usual respectful ‘Yes’” from this abject
flunkey); Kissinger’s disbelief that the Ibos, “more gifted and
accomplished” than other Nigerians, could also be “more Negroid”; and
Alexander Haig’s “quietly pretend[ing] to beat drums on the table as
African affairs were brought up at NSC staff meetings.
The World Health Organization estimates that 11 million children die
every year in the world of the Cold War victors (“the developing world”)
because of the unwillingness of the rich to help them. The catastrophe
could be brought to a quick end, the WHO study concludes, because the
diseases from which the children suffer and die are easily treated. Four
million die from diarrhea; about two-thirds of them could be saved from
the lethal dehydration it causes by sugar and salt tablets that cost a
few pennies. Three million die each year from infectious diseases that
could be overcome by vaccination, at a cost of about $10 a head.
Reporting in the London Observer on this “virtually unnoticed” study,
Annabel Ferriman quotes WHO director-general Hiroshi Nakajima, who
observes that this “silent genocide” is “a preventable tragedy because
the developed world has the resources and technology to end common
diseases worldwide,” but lacks “the will to help the developing
countries.”
The basic story was summarized succinctly by President Yoweri Museveni
of Uganda, chairman of the Organization of African Unity. Speaking at
the UN conference of the world’s 41 least-developed countries, he called
the 1980s “an unrelenting nightmare” for the poorest countries. There
was a plea to the industrial powers to more than double their aid to a
munificent 2/10 of 1 percent of their GNP, but no agreement was reached,
the New York Times reports “principally because of opposition from the
United States.”
As capitalism and freedom won their Grand Victory, the World Bank
reported that the share of the world’s wealth controlled by poor and
medium-income countries declined from 23 percent to 18 percent (1980 to
1988). The Bank’s 1990 report adds that in 1989, resources transferred
from the “developing countries” to the industrialized world reached a
new record. Debt service payments are estimated to have exceeded new
flows of funds by $42.9 billion, an increase of $5 billion from 1988,
and new funds from the wealthy fell to the lowest level in the decade.
These are some of the joys of capitalism that are somehow missing in the
flood of self-praise and the encomia to the wonders of our system — of
which all of this is a noteworthy component — as we celebrate its
triumph. The media and journals are inundated with laments (with an
admixture of barely concealed glee) over the sad state of the Soviet
Union and its domains, where even a salary of $100 a month enjoyed by
the luckier workers is “scandalously high by the niggardly standards of
Communism.” One will have to search far, however, for a look at the
scene nearer to home, or for derisive commentary on “the niggardly
standards of capitalism” and the suffering endured by the huge mass of
humanity who have been cast aside by the dominant powers, long the
richest and most favored societies of the world, and not without a share
of responsibility for the circumstances of most of the others, all too
easy to ignore.
The missing view also unveils a possible future that may await much of
Eastern Europe, which has endured many horrors, but is still regarded
with envy in large parts of the Third World domains of the West that had
comparable levels of development in the past, and are no less well
endowed with resources and the material conditions for satisfying human
needs. “Why have the leaders, the media, the citizens of the Great
Western Democracies cared long and ardently for the people of Central
Europe, but cared nothing for the people of Central America?” the
experienced correspondent Martha Gellhorn asks: “Most of them are bone
poor, and most of them do not have white skin. Their lives and their
deaths have not touched the conscience of the world. I can testify that
it was far better and safer to be a peasant in communist Poland than it
is to be a peasant in capitalist El Salvador.”
Her question is, unfortunately, all too easy to answer. It has been
demonstrated beyond any lingering doubt that what sears the sensitive
soul is the crimes of the enemy, not our own, for reasons that are all
too obvious and much too uncomfortable to face. The comparison that
Gellhorn draws is scarcely to be found in Western commentary, let alone
the reasons for it.
As in Latin America, some sectors of Eastern European society should
come to share the economic and cultural standards of privileged classes
in the rich industrial world that they see across their borders, much of
the former Communist Party bureaucracy probably among them. Many others
might look to the second Brazil, and its counterparts elsewhere, for a
glimpse of a different future, which may come to pass if matters proceed
on their present course.
April, 1991
In the first two segments of this series, I raised the question that at
once comes to mind amidst the cheers for the glorious victory of the
West in the Cold War: how are the victors faring at the moment of their
triumph? A survey of the domains of the state capitalist industrial
societies provides a stark answer: we find an “unrelenting nightmare,”
in the accurate words of those who have enjoyed the kind tutelage of the
West. The catastrophe of capitalism could not be more vivid and
dramatic.
Notice that the question raised is precisely the right one. One will
learn next to nothing from a comparison of Eastern and Western Europe.
In contrast, it is quite reasonable to compare regions that were more or
less similar in relevant respects 80 years ago, but have since followed
a different course: subjugation to Leninist-Stalinist tyranny and its
aftermath (the USSR and Eastern Europe), or domination by the state
capitalist democracies (the conventional Third World).
Neither of these regions is homogeneous, and their prior histories
differ as well. But to a first approximation, it is reasonable to
describe large parts of both regions, before World War I, as roughly
comparable in social and economic development, and relation to the West.
At the time, Russia was developing, though it was far more backward than
Western Europe and not closing the gap, and by 1914, “becoming a
semi-colonial possession of European capital,” historian Teodor Shanin
observes. Making a similar point, economic historian Alexander
Gerschenkron notes that “in 1913, that is, thirty-five years after
Bulgaria’s liberation, nearly 80 percent of all the plows used in
Bulgarian farming were most primitive wooden implements,” and in the
1930s, “wooden plows were still more numerous than the iron ones.”
Similar observations hold generally, so it appears, though comparative
studies seem to be few.[53]
It is therefore of some interest to ask how Guatemalan peasants or
Brazilian slum dwellers would react, were they to find themselves
suddenly transported to Poland or Bulgaria or the Ukraine. We learn a
good deal about ourselves by pursuing the inquiry, and also by observing
how the obvious questions are stifled and eliminated in the chorus of
self-adulation.
The victims, of course, do not join the chorus, but as always, their
voices remain unheard. Thus, there is much pretense of concern over the
murder of the Jesuit intellectuals in El Salvador, but it does not reach
as far as attending to anything they say on any topic, including this
one, even though — or rather because — one might learn a good deal from
the exercise. On the question at hand, the journal Proceso of the Jesuit
University UCA in San Salvador, where the priests were assassinated, has
this to say:
The so-called Salvadoran ‘democratic process’ could learn a lot from the
capacity for self-criticism that the socialist nations are
demonstrating. If Lech Walesa had been doing his organizing work in El
Salvador, he would have already entered into the ranks of the
disappeared — at the hands of ‘heavily armed men dressed in civilian
clothes’; or have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on his union
headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a politician in our country, he
would have been assassinated like He’ctor Oquel! [the social democratic
leader assassinated in Guatemala, by Salvadoran death squads, according
to the Guatemalan government]. If Andrei Sakharov had worked here in
favor of human rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert Anaya
[one of the many murdered leaders of the independent Salvadoran Human
Rights Commission CDHES]. If Ota-Sik or Vaclav Havel had been carrying
out their intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have woken up one
sinister morning, lying on the patio of a university campus with their
heads destroyed by the bullets of an elite army battalion.[54]
The comparison between the Soviet and U.S. satellites is so dramatic
that it takes real dedication not to perceive it, and outside of Western
intellectual circles, it is a commonplace. A writer in the Mexico’s
leading daily comments on the “striking contrast” between Soviet
behavior toward its satellites and “U.S. policy in the Western
Hemisphere, where intransigence, interventionism and the application of
typical police state instruments have traditionally marked Washington’s
actions”: “In Europe, the USSR and Gorbachev are associated with the
struggle for freedom of travel, political rights, and respect for public
opinion. In the Americas, the U.S. and Bush are associated with
indiscriminate bombings of civilians, the organization, training and
financing of death squads, and programs of mass murder” — not quite the
story in New York and Washington, where the United States is hailed as
an “inspiration for the triumph of democracy in our time” (New
Republic).[55]
A prominent Latin American theologian, Pablo Richard, also fails to see
matters as he is informed he does by the New Republic commissars.
Richard is professor of theology at the National University of Costa
Rica and a leading figure in the formation of the base Christian
communities, a prime target of the U.S.-backed savagery of the
Reagan-Bush years (enthusiastically supported by the New Republic and
others who now bask in their inspiring triumph) because they sought to
organize the poor, threatening to bring democracy and social reform, the
ultimate crime. Richard compares the current situation of the Third
World to that of the early Christians under the Roman Empire, which
Christians saw as “the Beast, a murderous idolatrous Beast,” who could
not be confronted with force, because it is far too powerful and
violent, but must be confronted ethically and spiritually: “This new way
of confronting imperialism in the decade of the ‘90s, which emphasizes
cultural, ethical, spiritual, and theological confrontation, challenges
in a special way the [Christian base communities] and the Church of the
Poor,” Richard writes.[56]
Others use different terms to express similar perceptions. The essential
points, again, are a commonplace outside of disciplined Western circles,
mired in ideological fanaticism and blind to the elementary (but
unacceptable) realities of the world.
The social, economic, and ecological catastrophes resulting from
traditional Western imperialism and its more recent variants go a long
way towards explaining the reluctance of many in the Third World to join
the celebration of victory, and their tendency to regard the victims of
Soviet tyranny with a degree of envy. Furthermore, the state terror
faced on a daily basis by Latin Americans who dare to raise their heads
has been qualitatively different from the repression in Eastern Europe
in the post-Stalin period, terrible as that was in its own ways; and
they do not share our reluctance to see the powerful and systematic
influence of Washington and U.S. corporations in establishing and
maintaining the grim conditions of their lives.
Another comparison that might be addressed is suggested by the huge flow
of capital from the Third World to the United States and the West
generally. Latin America alone transferred some $150 billion to the
industrial West from 1982 to 1987 in addition to $100 billion of capital
flight, a capital transfer amounting to 25 times the total value of the
Alliance for Progress and 15 times the Marshall Plan, according to Latin
Americanist Robert Pastor, director of Latin American and Caribbean
Affairs for the National Security Council under the Carter
administration. The Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland
estimates that between 1978 and 1987, some $170 billion in flight
capital left Latin America, not including money hidden by falsified
trade transactions. The New York Times cites another estimate that
anonymous capital flows, including drug money and flight capital, total
$600 billion to $800 billion. This huge hemorrhage is part of a
complicated system whereby Western banks and Latin American elites
enrich themselves at the expense of the general population of Latin
America, saddled with the “debt crisis” that results from these
manipulations, and taxpayers in the Western countries who are ultimately
called upon to foot part of the bill.[57]
Again, the situation in the Soviet satellites is different. One
commentator on their affairs, Lawrence Weschler, observes that
Poles, like most Eastern Europeans, have long lived under the delusion
that the Soviets were simply bleeding them dry; in fact, the situation
has been considerably more complex than that. (The Soviet dominion was
in fact that unique historical perversity, an empire in which the center
bled itself for the sake of its colonies, or rather, for the sake of
tranquility in those colonies. Muscovites always lived poorer lives than
Varsovians.)
Throughout the region, journalists and others report, shops are better
stocked than in the Soviet Union and material conditions are often
better. It is widely agreed that “Eastern Europe has a higher standard
of living than the USSR,” and that while “Latin-Americans claim mainly
economic exploitation,” “Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe is
principally political and security-oriented” (Jan Triska, summarizing
the conclusions of a Stanford University symposium on the USSR in
Eastern Europe and the U.S. in Latin America).[58] In the decade of the
1970s, according to U.S. government sources, the Soviet Union provided
an $80 billion subsidy to its Eastern European satellites (while their
indebtedness to the West increased from $9.3 billion in 1971 to $68.7
billion in 1979). A study done at the Institute of International Studies
of the University of California (Berkeley) estimated the subsidy at $106
billion from 1974 to 1984. Using different criteria, another academic
study by Paul Marer and Kazimierz Poznanski reaches the estimate of $40
billion for the same period, omitting factors that might add several
billion, they note. When Lithuania was faced with Soviet economic
retaliation after its declaration of independence, the Wall Street
Journal reported that the Soviet subsidy to that country alone might
approach $6 billion annually.[59]
Such comparisons cannot simply be taken at face value; complex issues
arise, and they have never been properly addressed. The only extensive
scholarly study attempting to compare the U.S. impact on Latin America
with that of the USSR on Eastern Europe, to my knowledge, is the
Stanford symposium just cited, but it does not reach very far. Among
many striking gaps, the contributors entirely disregard repression and
state terror in Latin America and the U.S. role in implementing it.
Writing in May 1986, the editor states that “some left-wing forces in
Latin America and all dissidents in Eastern Europe have little hope of
bringing about substantive changes, either peacefully or through
violence.” One contributor even takes seriously (though rejecting) the
absurd statement by Mexican writer (now Nobel Laureate) Octavio Paz in
1985 that it is “monstrous” even to raise the question of comparing U.S.
policies with those of the Soviet Union. Most take it as obvious, hence
needing no real evidence, that U.S. influence has been disinterested and
benign. In fact, this 470 page study contains very little information
altogether.[60]
Many questions would arise if such comparisons were to be undertaken in
a meaningful way. Contrary to standard conventions (generally followed
in the Stanford symposium), it is hardly plausible to regard U.S.
security concerns in Latin America as comparable to those of the Soviet
Union in Eastern Europe, or even to take seriously the conventional
doctrine that security concerns are “probably the greatest factor in
shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America” (Robert Wesson, presenting the
“historical overview and analysis” for the Stanford symposium). In
recent memory, the United States has not been repeatedly invaded and
virtually destroyed by powerful enemies marching through Central
America. In fact, its authentic security concerns are virtually nil, by
international and historical standards. There are what are called
“security concerns,” but as one participant in the symposium finally
concedes, after having taken them quite seriously, “U.S. national
security interests in the Caribbean [as elsewhere in the hemisphere, we
may add] have rested on powerful economic investments” (Jiri Valenta) —
which is to say that they are termed “security interests” only for
purposes of the delusional system. Furthermore, it makes little sense to
attribute to the United States greater tolerance for
“political-ideological deviations” on the grounds that it does not
insist on “the U.S. brand of democracy” and tolerates “authoritarian
dictatorships,” while the USSR insists on Leninist regimes (Valenta).
What the U.S. demands is an economic order geared to its interests; the
political form it takes is largely an irrelevance.[61]
Unless freed from the extreme ideological constraints of conventional
scholarship, comparative study is bound to be largely worthless.
The matter of capital flow is also complex. In the first place, the
regional hegemons are not remotely comparable in wealth and economic
level, and never have been, so that their role in economic transactions
will differ greatly. For another, investment has intricate effects. It
can lead to economic growth, benefit certain sectors of the population
while severely harming others, lay the basis for independent development
or undermine such prospects. The numbers in themselves tell only a small
part of the story, and have to be complemented by the kind of analysis
that has yet to be undertaken in comparing Eastern Europe and Latin
America.
It should be evident without further comment that the standard
comparison of Eastern to Western Europe, or the Soviet Union to the
United States, is virtually meaningless, designed for propaganda, not
enlightenment.
Other subordinate and dependent systems have yet a different character.
Discussing the rapid economic growth of South Korea and Taiwan after the
powerful stimulus given by Vietnam war spending, Bruce Cumings observes
that it resumes a process of development begun under Japanese
colonialism. Unlike the West, he notes, Japan brought industry to the
labor and raw materials rather than vice versa, leading to industrial
development under state-corporate guidance, now renewed. Japan’s
colonial policies were extremely brutal, but they laid a basis for
economic development. Needless to say, these economic successes, like
those of Singapore and Hong Kong, are no tribute either to democracy or
the wonders of the market; rather, to harsh labor conditions, efficient
quasi-fascist political systems, and, much as in Japan, high levels of
protectionism and planning by financial-industrial conglomerates in a
state-coordinated economy.[62]
Comparison of the Pacific colonies of the U.S. and Japan is not common
here, but right-wing Japanese are not reluctant to pursue it. Shintaro
Ishihara, a powerful figure in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party,
which holds a virtual monopoly of political power, observes that the
countries that were once under Japanese administration are “success
stories” from the economic point of view, while the Philippines are an
economic disaster and the “showcase of democracy” is largely empty form.
“Philippine landowners have accumulated incredible power and wealth,
siphoning everything from the ordinary people,” while “tradition is
dismantled” in favor of a shallow and superficial veneer of American
culture, “an atrocity — a barbaric act.”[63]
This spokesman for right-wing nationalism is plainly not a trustworthy
independent source. But there is more than a little truth to what he
says.
Comparison of the Latin American economies with those of East Asia (the
“Newly Industrializing Countries,” NICs) is another topic that has
rarely been undertaken seriously. Editorials, news reporting, and other
commentary commonly allege that the comparison reveals the superiority
of economic liberalism, but without providing the basis for that
conclusion. It is not easy to sustain, if only because of the radical
departures from liberal capitalism in the success stories of Asia. As
Alice Amsden in particular has emphasized, the highly touted economic
successes of East Asia can be traced in no small measure to the fact
that the state is not only powerful enough to discipline labor, as is
the norm, but even to discipline capital, and to compel sharp departures
from market principles for the sake of economic development. More
generally, it is virtually the conventional wisdom (and well supported)
that “late developing countries” typically rely on extensive state
intervention and coordination. In fact, it is hard to find any
exception, late or early. If the U.S. had kept to the principles it now
imposes on the “developing world,” we would probably still be pursuing
our comparative advantage in producing furs, and it is hardly likely
that we would ever have had, say, a steel industry. The same continues
to be true of advanced industrial societies, including the United
States, where the parts of the economy that remain competitive benefit
from huge taxpayer subsidies and a state-guaranteed market (high tech
industry via the Pentagon system being the most striking case). In
Germany, to mention only one feature, the IMF estimates that industrial
incentives are the equivalent of a 30 percent tariff. IMF conditions and
the like are fine for weaker economies that we intend to exploit. The
conditions greatly facilitate the robbery of the poor. Beyond that,
their merits are less than obvious.
The comparison between Latin America and East Asia was addressed at a
conference on global macroeconomics in Helsinki in 1986.[64] Several
contributors observe that the situation is complex, and conclude that
the disparities that developed in the 1980s (though not before) are
attributable to a variety of factors, among them, the harmful effects of
greater openness to international capital markets in large parts of
Latin America (as in the Philippines), which permitted vast capital
flight, but not in the East Asian economies with their more rigid
controls by government and central banks. In South Korea, for example,
export of capital can carry the death penalty. Again, the standard story
seems to be virtually the opposite of the truth.
The complexity of the issues that arise is shown in a revealing study of
Indian development, in comparison to China and others, by Harvard
economist Amartya Sen. He observes that “a comparative study of the
experiences of different countries in the world shows quite clearly that
countries tend to reap as they sow in the field of investment in health
and quality of life.” India followed very different policies from China
in this regard. Beginning at a comparable level in the late 1940s, India
has added about 15 years to added life expectancy, while China added 10
or 15 years beyond that increase, approaching the standards of Europe.
The reasons lie in social policy, primarily, the much greater focus on
improving nutrition and health conditions for the general population in
China, and providing widespread medical coverage. The same was true, Sen
argues, in Sri Lanka and probably Vietnam, and in earlier years in
Europe as well, where, for example, life expectancy rose rapidly in
England and Wales after large-scale public intervention in the
distribution of food and health care and expansion of public employment.
But this is not the whole story. In the late 1950s, life expectancy in
China plunged for several years to far below that of India because of a
huge famine, which took an estimated 30 million lives. Sen attributes
the famine to the nature of the Chinese regime, which did not react for
three years, and may not even have been aware of the scale of the famine
because the totalitarian conditions blocked information flow. Nothing
similar has happened in India with its pluralist democracy.
Nevertheless, Sen calculates, if China’s lower mortality rates prevailed
in India, there would have been close to 4 million fewer deaths a year
in the mid-1980s. “This indicates that every eight years or so more
people in addition die in India — in comparison with Chinese mortality
rates — than the total number that died in the gigantic Chinese famine,”
the worst in the world in this century.
In further confirmation of his thesis, Sen observes that life expectancy
in China has suffered a slow decline since 1979, when the new
market-oriented reforms were undertaken. Another relevant example is the
Indian state of Kerala, long under leftist rule and with “a long history
of extensive public support in education, health care, and food
distribution.” Here, improvement in life expectancy is comparable to
China, though it is one of India’s poorer states.[65]
These are all serious and difficult questions, with far-reaching human
consequences. The development strategies imposed upon the Third World by
Western power, implemented by the international economic institutions or
the states and corporations themselves, have enormous effects on the
lives of the targeted populations. The record shows plainly enough that
the policies that are advocated or enforced by the Western powers, and
the confident rhetoric that accompanies them in official pronouncements
and other commentary, are guided by the self-interest of those who hold
the reins, not by any solid understanding of the economics of
development, or any serious concern for the human impact of these
decisions. Benefits that may accrue to others are largely incidental, as
are the catastrophes that commonly ensue.
As the collapsing Soviet system resumes traditional quasi-colonial
relations with the West, it is coming to be subjected to the same
prescriptions — in part by choice, given the intellectual vacuity that
is one of the consequences of decades of totalitarian rule. But
imposition of Third World norms is bound to meet resistance. One Polish
critic writes that if the popular Chicago School
words become flesh, this government would be the first in the history of
the world to adhere firmly to this doctrine. All developed countries,
including those (such as the Federal Republic of Germany) whose
governments pay obeisance to the liberal doctrine, apply a wide spectrum
of government interventions, such as in resource allocation, in
investments, in developing technology, income distribution, pricing,
export and import.[66]
If resistance follows the path often taken in the Third World, it is
likely to elicit the classic response.
On a visit to Europe a few days before he was assassinated by elite
government forces in San Salvador in November 1989, Father Ignacio
Ellacuria, rector of the University of Central America, addressed the
West on the underlying issues. You “have organized your lives around
inhuman values,” he said. These values
are inhuman because they cannot be universalized. The system rests on a
few using the majority of the resources, while the majority can’t even
cover their basic necessities. It is crucial to define a system of
values and a norm of living that takes into account every human
being.[67]
In our dependencies, such thoughts are subversive and can call forth the
death squads. At home, they are sometimes piously voiced, then relegated
to the ashcan in practice. Perhaps the last words of the murdered
priests deserve a better fate.
[1] Rostow, The Diffusion of Power (Macmillan, 1972). For sources not
cited here, see my Deterring Democracy (Verso, forthcoming), from which
much of this material is excerpted.
[2] Hockstader, WP, June 20, 1990.
[3] Mesoamerica (Costa Rica), July 1990. Detailed updates are circulated
regularly from the Washington office of the Commission, 1359 Monroe St.
NE, Washington DC 20017.
[4] Ronna Montgomery, Mesoamerica, June 1990. On the demolition of the
accords, and the role of Arias and U.S. doves, see my Culture of
Terrorism (South End, 1987), chapter 7; Necessary Illusions (South End,
1989), chapter 4 and Appendix IV, sec. 5; regular articles in Z
magazine, and Deterring Democracy.
[5] Central America Report (CAR), Guatemala, Nov. 10, 1989; July 27;
April 6; March 2, 1990.
[6] AP, Boston Globe, June 4, 1990, a 75-word item, which is more than
elsewhere.
[7] Editorial, Tiempo, July 2, 1990.
[8] Cesar Chelala, “Central America’s Health Plight,” Christian Science
Monitor, March 22; CAR, March 2, 1990.
[9] Latinamerica press (LP) (Peru), Nov. 16, 1989.
[10] Excelsior, Oct. 18, 1989 (Latin America News Update (LANU), Dec.
1989).
[11] For a review, see Joshua Karliner, “Central America’s Other War,”
World Policy Journal, Fall 1989.
[12] Anne Chemin, Le Monde, Sept. 21, 1988; Manchester Guardian Weekly,
Oct. 2. Tiempo, Aug. 10, 17, Sept. 19, 1988. Dr. Morales, Report on
Guatemala, July/August 1989.
[13] Ibid.
[14] La Prensa Dominical, Honduras, July 22, 1990.
[15] CAR, April 28, 1989. For discussion of these matters, see Necessary
Illusions.
[16] CAR, Dec. 1, 1989.
[17] Excelsior, March 24; LP, Feb. 15, 1990.
[18] Karliner, op. cit.; CAR, March 16, 1990. See Douglas R. Shane,
Hoofprints on the Forest: Cattle Ranching and the Destruction of Latin
America’s Tropical Forests (ISHI, 1986); Tom Barry and Deb Preusch, The
Soft War (Grove, 1988); and for background, William H. Durham, Scarcity
and Survival in Central America (Stanford, 1979).
[19] CAR, March 16; Mesoamerica, March 1990.
[20] Elections, CAR, Jan. 26, 1990. LP, Dec. 7; CAR, April 28, July 27;
Excelsior, April 30; COHA Washington Report on the Hemisphere, Sept. 27,
1989. For several examples of repression in the late 1980s of the kind
that aroused great fury when reported in Nicaragua, see Necessary
Illusions, 249, 268; for a much worse case, see Culture of Terrorism,
243.
[21] Mesoamerica, Sept. 1990.
[22] “Costa Rica: Arming the country of peace,” CAR, July 27, 1990.
[23] Ibid. COHA, “News and Analysis,” Aug. 18, 1988; Washington Report
on the Hemisphere, Sept. 27, 1989. Selser, La Jornada (Mexico), Jan. 23,
1990, citing Arias’s NYT Op-Ed on January 9.
[24] Editorial, MH, July 31, 1990.
[25] In the mainstream, that is. See, however, Alexander Cockburn,
Nation, Jan. 29, 1990, and subsequent articles of his.
[26] Rohter, “Panama and U.S. Strive to Settle on Death Toll,” NYT,
April 1, 1990.
[27] Excelsior-AFP, Jan. 27 (LANU), March 1990; Mesoamerica (Costa
Rica), May 1990; CAR, March 2, 1990.
[28] Brecha, CODEHUCA, “Report of Joint CODEHUCA-CONADEHUPA delegation,”
Jan.-Feb. 1990, San Jose.
[29] CODEHUCA, PEACENET, Feb. 5, 1990. Panamanian journalist Jose
Montano, LP (Lima), Jan. 18, 1990.
[30] See Physicians for Human Rights, “‘Operation Just Cause’: The
Medical Cost of Military Action in Panama,” Boston, March 15, 1990;
Americas Watch, Laws of War and the Conduct of the Panama Invasion,
1990.
[31] CAR, Sept. 7, 1990.
[32] CBS TV, 7PM EST, Sept. 30, 1990.
[33] Excelsior (Mexico City), April 14, 1990; Central America NewsPak,
Austin Texas. Pelaez, El Diario-La Prensa, May 7, 1990.
[34] Aviation Week & Space Technology, Jan. 1, 1990.
[35] John Morrocco, ibid.; Hackworth, interview with Bill Baskervill,
AP, Feb. 25, 1990. March 1990 report, see Deterring Democracy chapter 1.
[36] Michael Gordon, NYT, April 11, 1990.
[37] Oppenheimer, MH, June 20, 1990.
[38] CAR, Aug. 17, 1990.
[39] LP, Aug. 30, 1990.
[40] James, “US policy in Panama,” Race & Class, July-September 1990;
State Department letter to Jesse Helms, stating that the Department
“shares your view” on the matter in question, March 26, 1987, cited by
James.
[41] CAR, Aug. 31; Excelsior. Sept. 2, 1990.
[42] Wysham, Labor Action, April-May 1990; James, op. cit. On these and
other matters discussed here, see also Martha Gellhorn, “The Invasion of
Panama,” Granta, Spring 1990.
[43] Constable, BG, July 11, 1990.
[44] CSM, April 9, 1990.
[45] Excelsior, Feb. 28, 1990; LANU.
[46] Felicitas Pliego, Excelsior, April 29, 1990.
[47] Commission of Inquiry release, Feb. 17; COHA News and Analysis, May
1, 1990.
[48] Bernal, “Panama’s fight for free expression,” Chicago Tribune, May
29, 1990.
[49] Excelsior, Aug. 24; CAR, Sept. 7, 1990. See my articles in Z
magazine, November 1989, March 1990.
[50] CAR, April 6; Andres Oppenheimer, MH, Jan. 19, 1990.
[51] CAR, Aug. 30, 1990, citing a recent poll published in La Prensa.
[52] Massing, NYRB, May 17, 1990.
[53] Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’ (Yale, 1985), vol. 1,
186f., quoting D. Mirsky, Russia, A Social History (London 1952), 269;
Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Harvard,
1962), 216.
[54] Quoted by Jon Reed, Guardian (New York), May 23, 1990.
[55] John Saxe-Fernandez, Excelsior, Nov. 21, 1989, in Latin America
News Update, Jan. 1990; TNR, March 19, 1990.
[56] Pasos, publication of the Ecumenical Department of Investigation in
San Jose, Costa Rica; LADOC (Peru), Nov./Dec. 1990.
[57] Pastor, Foreign Policy, Winter 1988–9; Jeff Gerth, NYT, Feb. 12,
1990.
[58] Weschler, “Poland,” Dissent, Spring 1990; Triska, “introduction,”
in Triska, ed., Dominant Powers and Subordinate States (Duke, 1986).
[59] Raymond Garthoff, Deetente and Confrontation, 499; M. Marrese and
J. Vanous, Soviet Subsidization of Trade with Eastern Europe
(California, 1983); Marer and Poznanski, “Costs of Domination, Benefits
of Subordination,” in Triska, op. cit.; Peter Gumbel, “Gorbachev Threat
Would Cut Both Ways,” WSJ, April 17, 1990.
[60] Triska, op. cit., 11; Paz cited by Jeffrey Hughes, 29.
[61] Wesson, Valenta, in Triska, op. cit., 63, 282.
[62] On these matters, see particularly Alice Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant
(Oxford, 1989), and for an overview, Amsden, “East Asia’s Challenge — to
Standard Economics,” American Prospect, Summer 1990. For some recent
reflections on Taiwan and Japan, Carl Goldstein, Bob Johnstone, Far
Eastern Economic Review, May 3, May 31, 1990. Cumings, “The origins and
development of the Northeast Asian political economy,” International
Organization 38.1, Winter 1984.
[63] Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No
(Konbusha, Tokyo), translation distributed privately, taken from
Congressional Record, Nov. 14, 1989, E3783-98.
[64] Tariq Banuri, ed., No Panacea: the Limits of Economic
Liberalization (Oxford, forthcoming).
[65] Sen, “Indian Development: Lessons and Non-Lessons,” Daedalus, Vol.
118 of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1989. For further details on the Kerala exception, see Richard W. Franke
and Barbara H. Chasin, Kerala: Radical Reform As Development in an
Indian State (Institute for Food & Development Policy, Food First
Development Report No. 6, October 1989).
[66] Mieczyslaw Mieszczanowski, Polityka, Dec. 16, 1989, cited by
Abraham Brumberg, Foreign Affairs, “America and the World,” 1989–90.
[67] Envio (Managua), May 1990.