Guatemala 1954
‘I want all of you to be damn good and sure you succeed,’ President Eisenhower told a meeting in the White House, three days before the overthrow of the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, in June 1954. Arbenz, a moderate reformer, had angered the United Fruit Company by promulgating agrarian reform. The company, Guatemala’s largest landowner, had a tight web of personal connections with the Eisenhower administration. In August 1953, Eisenhower personally authorised the CIA to remove the Guatemalan president. The CIA recruited and armed hundreds of Guatemalan exiles and foreign mercenaries, then transported them to the Guatemalan border, where they launched an ‘invasion’ in June 1954. CIA planes bombed Guatemala City and strategic sites, while the agency’s radio station broadcast misinformation. This unsettled the population and wore down the resolve of Guatemala’s military leaders, who, after nine days, persuaded Arbenz to resign.

Genocide in Guatemala
General Ríos Montt, who came to power in a coup in 1982, led a scorched-earth policy, burning hundreds of Mayan villages, atrocities which a UN commission defined as ‘acts of genocide’. US president Ronald Reagan declared that Montt had got a ‘bum rap on human rights’, and sent his regime economic aid and military helicopters. To circumvent a congressional ban on military aid (introduced by Reagan’s predecessor Jimmy Carter), Reagan also persuaded Israel to send military assistance. The CIA continued operating in Guatemala throughout this period and CIA assets were responsible, according to an US intelligence oversight report, for ‘assassinations, extrajudicial execution, torture and kidnapping’. Reagan finally persuaded Congress to restore military aid in 1985, even though repression remained severe. The toll of death and suffering of the 34-year civil war (1962–96) makes sombre reading: 200,000 people, mainly indigenous Mayans, were killed, and one million people were forced to flee their homes.
Illustration: Edd Baldry
The Contra war in Nicaragua, 1979–1990
President Reagan unleashed unbridled aggression against a tiny country with a population of just three million. The aim? To overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government, which had led a popular revolution against a dictator in 1979. US ‘low intensity warfare’, which involved the arming of thousands of ‘Contras’ (counter-revolutionaries), left 30,864 people dead and 20,064 wounded. The Contras targeted peasant collectives, schools and health clinics, to spread terror, disrupt the economy and undermine Sandinista social programmes. The International Court of Justice estimated the cost of the war and US embargo at £11 billion. It ruled that the US had broken international law and violated Nicaragua’s sovereignty. The court ordered the US to stop ‘arming and training’ Contra rebels, a judgement the Reagan administration ignored. The Sandinistas introduced democracy to Nicaragua. They won elections in 1984, but after ten years of US‑backed war lost office in 1990. They were re-elected in 2007 (see pages 31–33).

Death squad terror in 1980s El Salvador
After the triumph of the Sandinistas, the Reagan administration was determined to stop another guerrilla-led revolution in Central America. It poured military aid, training and intelligence assistance into El Salvador, one of the most repressive states in the world, whose ‘murders, disappearances and violations of human rights’ were condemned by the UN general assembly. The murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero in 1980 brought worldwide condemnation but the death squads’ leader Roberto D’Aubuisson was entertained in Washington by Reagan administration officials. By 1983, 11,000 people had been killed or ‘disappeared’ by the security forces and their allies. In total 75,000 were killed in the civil war (1980–1992) and one million fled their homes. A UN truth commission found that state forces and right-wing death squads were responsible for 85 per cent of the killings.

Turning against Noriega, 1989
Manuel Antonio Noriega, the military ruler of Panama from 1983 to 1989, had been a useful anti-communist ally to the US. Having trained at the School of the Americas, he was the CIA’s highest-ranking paid informant and, despite being heavily involved in drugs trafficking, was also an informant of the US Drugs Enforcement Agency. George Bush senior had lunched with him and Noriega had even visited the home of CIA director William Casey. But by the mid‑1980s, media exposés of his gun‑running and money laundering became an embarrassment. The US also wanted to ensure that the Panama canal remained in pro-US hands and no longer needed his help in the Contra war in Nicaragua. Bush ordered 26,000 troops to attack in December 1989. Noriega was arrested and taken to the US where he was tried and jailed for drugs trafficking. Having served a seven-year sentence, he is now awaiting trial in Panama.

Grace Livingstone’s book, America’s Backyard: the United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror is available at a 20 per cent discount to Red Pepper readers. Phone Zed Books on 020 7837 4014 quoting this offer

It stated that the Palanquero airbase in Colombia ‘provides an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America’ and listed ‘anti-US governments’ among the threats faced by US forces. ‘Full spectrum operations’ is a Pentagon term for dominating the battle space on land, sea, air and space, and can include nuclear weapons.

Although the text of the document has now been changed, it caused a sensation in Latin America because it seems to confirm fears that the Colombian bases deal is about cementing US military dominance in the region and maintaining its ability to interfere in any country it chooses.

Loosening the alliance

Latin American governments are right to be concerned, but the deal with Colombia is, paradoxically, a sign of US weakness in the region. Left-wing governments have swept to power across the Americas in the past decade and to varying degrees have rejected the crude free-market economics espoused by US dominated institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. These progressive governments are also loosening the historically tight alliance with the US military.

Latin American elites once gave US Green Berets free rein in their mountains and rainforests and schooled their own officers in US academies, where they learnt the latest counter-insurgency and torture techniques to be used against ‘subversives’. But today the ‘pink tide’ governments are pulling their officers out of US training schools. Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Uruguay have now withdrawn from the School of Americas, the notorious institution that boasts 11 Latin American dictators among its graduates. Ecuador and Nicaragua are likely to withdraw their soldiers and Costa Rica, which has no army, has pulled out its police cadets. The School of Americas used to be based in the Panama Canal Zone, but has now moved to Fort Benning, Georgia and has a new anodyne name: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co operation.

The US does not own any military bases in Latin America. Since US Southern Command left its headquarters in the Panama Canal Zone in 1999, it has had to rely on friendly governments to lend or lease it military bases in the region. After leaving Panama, it signed four 10-year leases on air-bases in Ecuador, El Salvador, Aruba and Curacao. The left wing president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, recently refused to extend the lease and US forces have left the Manta airbase. It has now been written into the constitution that US forces cannot be stationed on Ecuadorian territory.

The lease on the airbase in El Salvador was extended for five years, just before another left-winger, President Mauricio Funes, was inaugurated in January. So he was not given a chance to expel US troops, but the US will be concerned that its Salvadoran base does not have a long-term future.

In Paraguay, the Pentagon spent millions of dollars building a base with a state-of-the-art radar system, which opened in 2006. But to the consternation of US military planners, a progressive priest, Fernando Lugo, has won the presidency, so it looks as if the construction was a wasted investment.

Apart from the large numbers of US troops sited in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the most important US base in the region is in Honduras, where 500 troops of Joint Task Force Bravo are stationed. One reason why Pentagon hardliners have been sympathetic to the recent coup in Honduras is because the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, planned to start commercial flights from the base, compromising the security and secrecy of US operations on that vital installation.

Clawing back military hegemony

As it casts its eye around the region, the Pentagon has been finding it harder and harder to find military allies and has been forced to fall back on Colombia, the country with the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. As it tries to claw back its once unassailable military hegemony, the US has re-activated the Fourth Fleet of the Southern Command Navy, which patrols the waters all round Latin America. The Pentagon is now planning to pay for the construction of new naval bases in Panama, where US military training may take place, according to the Center for International Policy.

Since the launch of Plan Colombia in 2001, nominally a counter-drugs strategy but with an obvious counter-insurgency element, US forces have gradually been sucked into the war against Colombia’s left-wing guerrillas and are already present on many of Colombia’s military bases. Declassified documents show that the US now spends almost half its military aid budget in Colombia on private military contractors, which obscures the true extent of the US presence there; ITT, for example, operates Colombia’s ground-based military radars.

This latest agreement allows US troops to use seven named bases. Of these, Palanquero airbase is the most important. The US will spend more than US$40 million on improving the runway so it will have the capacity for large transport aircraft such as C-17s, which have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and can carry tanks, helicopters and large numbers of troops. Also noteworthy are the two naval bases, Cartagena and Malaga, not only convenient ports for the newly-activated Fourth Fleet, but vital gateways to both the Atlantic and Pacific, crucial to the US military’s global strategy, as well as operations in the Americas.

Coalitions of the unwilling

The militarisation of Latin America has provoked a swell of protest. Almost all the governments of South America have spoken out against the Colombian bases deal. In Colombia, a wide coalition of grass-roots movements, including the country’s largest trade union federations, is braving paramilitary repression to speak out against the bases – which, they say, not only violate the country’s sovereignty but will exacerbate the country’s human rights crisis.

In Ecuador a similar coalition successfully pressured the government to evict US forces from the Manta base. Both the Colombian and Ecuadorian movements are part of the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases (or No Bases Network) that grew out of the social forum in India in 2004 and was formally established in Quito in 2007. The network, which now has hundreds of campaigners in all continents, aims to close the estimated 1,000 US and 200 European bases worldwide.

Latin America’s new anti-base movement has an inspiring example in Puerto Rico. There tens of thousands of people protested and took part in civil disobedience campaigns against the US Navy, which for decades carried out bombing exercises on the small island of Vieques. The test bombs contained depleted uranium and carcinogenic chemicals such as triocyl phosphate. In 2003, the US Navy finally left Vieques and the Pentagon closed all but one of its military bases in Puerto Rico. n

Grace Livingstone is the author of America’s Backyard: the United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror (Zed, 2009)
No Bases Network: www.no-bases.org

I was born on a reservation. My family is from the Tierra Adentro reservation in Cauca, southern Colombia. I have been involved in community organising for 15 years. I became an activist because I was born indigenous; my parents were community leaders, so I suppose it’s in my genes. For me, the most important thing is to work with the community – work together, walk together – and this has led me to defend our indigenous territories.

Can you describe the resguardos?

The reservations are an indigenous territory and hold a collective land title. They have their own election authorities, run their own schools, have their own teachers, health workers, a whole system run by the community. Each family lives on their own plot of land, where they have their little house; they cultivate maize, onions and yucca and other food crops. These are mainly subsistence crops and very little is sold. It’s an autonomy we depend on. We fear that as soon as the multinationals arrive on our territory that will be the end of our collective system.

Why do the multinationals pose a risk?

Many indigenous lands are at risk from multinationals. For example, Anglo Gold Ashanti has made numerous applications for mining concessions. The multinationals want minerals, gold and precious stones, so the risk is that when they start mining they will destroy nature and our sacred sites.

There are also multinationals that want to explore for oil. There are those involved in privatising water, not just in Colombia but across the world. And there are companies that want to patent our ancestral knowledge of plants, seeds or even our own genes.

What is the Minga?

The Minga was formed to mobilise civil protest and demand respect against the multinational invasion. It has five demands:

1) Respect for human rights. The Colombian government’s policy of ‘democratic security’ is not a strategy for combating terrorism and drugs-trafficking but to militarise the country and give free passage to the multinationals.

2) We want the government to adopt the UN declaration of indigenous peoples’ rights.

3) We oppose changing our laws to favour multinationals, such as through free trade treaties. The free trade agreement [with the US, which the US congress has so far refused to sign, citing human rights concerns] will allow companies to exploit the biodiversity that exists in Colombia, most of which is in indigenous territories.

4) We want the government to honour the accords on education, health and other public policies signed with indigenous peoples and other social movements 20 years ago.

5) We call on all the different groups in Colombia to unite to defend our rights.

The government has said that the Minga is run by the FARC [left-wing guerrillas], but we have shown that we are not terrorists. We are indigenous peoples engaged in civil resistance and we are demanding respect. The indigenous community has suffered attacks from both FARC guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries.

Can you tell me about your husband, Edwin, who was murdered last year?

They killed him because they wanted to attack the leaders of the Minga – not just me, all the leaders. An order was given to a squadron of 37 soldiers operating in Cauca. They knew that I travelled in a red van, but that day, 16 December 2008, my husband was in the van alone; he was on his way to pick me up. The Colombian army fired 106 bullets at the van.

Despite being injured, my husband managed to drive eight kilometres, which saved him from becoming a ‘false positive’ – which is when the army dress their victims in guerrilla uniforms or leave weapons and say the person they have assassinated was a terrorist. When the soldiers were detained, they were found to have three additional guns, uniforms and all the things they use for ‘false positives’.

Your 12-year-old daughter was also attacked, wasn’t she?

After the murder of Edwin, an intense campaign of persecution against me began. My daughter was attacked in our own house on 11 May 2009. A car with four armed men drove by. One of the men shot at her. Luckily she was not hit.

How can you live with this level of danger?

The Colombian government offered me protection but I didn’t accept it because I suspect that the security service and police bodyguards appointed would be the same people responsible for the assassination of my husband. The indigenous authorities give me protection and I carry out a type of self-protection. The active support of the indigenous communities makes it possible for us leaders to remain in the region.

Obama has set a new tone in the relationship between the US and Latin America, a relationship that not only reached a historic low under George Bush, but that for two centuries has been marred by repeated US military intervention, support for dictators (of the unelected, military variety), death-squads and CIA destabilisation campaigns – which may sound like the fodder of conspiracy-obsessed bloggers, but is in fact verified by declassified US documents and congressional reports.

Change: from rhetoric to reality

Latin American governments have cautiously welcomed Obama’s election, hoping it will mark the end of the constant US interference in their nations’ affairs and an end to the blanket imposition of the free market dogma that has failed so dramatically in the region. Obama won applause from Latin American leaders at the recent summit when he pledged to seek ‘an equal partnership’, adding that ‘there is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations’.

A new tone was also evident in his approach to Mexico, which is wracked by drugs-related violence. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have acknowledged that demand for drugs in the west is fuelling the trade, a point frequently made by Latin Americans who dislike the US’s high-handed and frequently militarised approach to the ‘drugs war’. Obama has also tentatively welcomed Cuba’s offer of talks and has removed curbs on Cuban-Americans’ travel and remittances to the island. This move actually has very little political cost for Obama because the restrictions, which were introduced by Bush, were unpopular even with right-wing Cuban Americans. Their removal does not change the substance of the trade embargo, which is still in place 49 years after it was imposed by the Eisenhower government. Nevertheless, Obama’s actions have symbolic importance and may lead to a fuller rapprochement with Cuban president Raúl Castro, who is clearly making overtures towards the White House.

This more nuanced approach is in marked contrast to the Bush years, when relations with Latin America reached a nadir. Latin America pulsed with revolt against free market economics, and governments widely considered left-wing were elected across the region – in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the White House was governed by hard-line right-wing ideologues who not only continued to promote the neoliberal economics that had so clearly failed in Latin America, but after 9/11 also began to paint the region as a haven for terrorists, drugs gangs and criminals.

The Bush administration revived memories of the cold war when it supported a short-lived coup against President Chávez in 2002 and meddled in the elections of Nicaragua and Bolivia, trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent left-wing presidents taking power. Bush’s neocons also worked with allies of the old military regime in Haiti to oust an elected president and quietly, while all eyes were on the Middle East, stepped up involvement in the counter-insurgency war in Colombia.

It comes as no surprise then, that Latin Americans have welcomed the election of Obama. But how far do Obama’s policies so far and his rhetoric for the region point to a real change in US/Latin America relations? And even if Obama personally wanted such a change, does he really have the power to deliver?

US foreign policy: who’s the boss?

Since 1823, when US president James Monroe warned European powers to keep out of the hemisphere, the US has regarded Latin America as its ‘sphere of influence’ and a source of commodities, markets and cheap labour. Historically there has been remarkable continuity in US policy towards the region regardless of whether there have been Democrats or Republicans in the White House. All US administrations have favoured stable, pro-capitalist regimes – democracies if possible, dictatorships if necessary.

The US also wants the use of military bases, airstrips, ports and radar systems throughout the hemisphere, so that it can maintain its status as a global superpower and hegemony over its own ‘backyard’. This is particularly important today when the US no longer has the Panama Canal Zone (it left in 1999) and has to lease military bases from friendly governments. The left-wing president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, for example, plans to expel the US from the base in Manta, northern Ecuador, when the lease expires this year. If Obama wants to change some of the US’s most damaging policies in Latin America he will come up against entrenched corporate interests, a powerful state machinery and centuries of cultural assumptions.

Take the case of Colombia. 70 per cent of all US military aid in Latin America is devoted to Colombia, which is home to a still-significant left-wing guerrilla force, the FARC. US forces are heavily involved in the counter-insurgency war, providing air cover and supply lines, as well as radar, satellite and other intelligence assistance. The United States also continues to fund and promote the aerial spraying of herbicides on farms growing coca, which is the basis of cocaine after chemical processing. These herbicides kill food crops as well as coca; they have killed animals, caused human illnesses and may be doing long term damage to the Colombian environment.

Obama’s Colombia policy may change in minor ways. Some congressional Democrats have raised concerns about herbicide use and Obama himself signed letters condemning human rights abuses when he was a senator. Conditions may be imposed on military aid. But the basic war thrust of the policy is unlikely to change because it is being driven by the Pentagon. The commander of the US southern command, General Charles E Wilhelm, identified Colombia as the most ‘threatened nation’ in the region in 2000, because of the strength of the FARC guerrillas. The US poured billions into Plan Colombia, nominally a counter-drugs programme, but one with a clear counter-insurgency aim. Now that the FARC has been weakened, driven out of the cities and pushed back into isolated rural backwaters, the Pentagon wants to go on to ‘finish the job’. The US military establishment is pushing the Colombian elite to hold out for total victory, regardless of how elusive that may be and how much bloodshed it causes.

All US presidents have traditionally deferred to the military on issues of national security – and under George Bush the Pentagon became even more influential, usurping the role of the State Department in shaping foreign policy. So far, Obama has said he will continue the war against the FARC, but if he wanted to pursue a different course in Colombia, and use the guerrillas’ weakness as an opportunity to press for peace, he could feel the weight of the US military and intelligence establishment bear down on him.

Similarly, the Pentagon and intelligence community are pushing for a hawkish policy towards Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Not only do they regard oil as an issue of national security (Venezuela is the US’s fourth largest oil supplier), they are alarmed by Chávez’s ‘destabilising’ influence both in the Americas and the wider third world – in particular, his relationship with Iran and China. A pamphlet published by the US Army War College, entitled Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivarian Socialism and Asymmetric Warfare, warns that ‘Chávez and Venezuela are developing the conceptual and physical capability to challenge the status quo in Latin America and to generate a “Super Insurgency” intended to bring about fundamental political and economic change in the region’. It goes on to caution that ‘inaction [against Chávez] could destroy the democracy, free market economies, and prosperity that has been achieved’. Obama may have shaken Chávez’s hand at the recent summit, but in the short time he has been in office he has also described him as a ‘demagogue’ and accused him of ‘impeding progress in the region’ and ‘exporting terrorist activities’. The policy of trying to isolate Venezuela within the region and divide Chávez from the more moderate left-wing administrations (Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina) is likely to continue.

Free trade and the future

A key question is whether the US will continue to promote free trade. US corporations were behind the aggressive push for free trade in the Americas over the past decade because they needed to compete with cheap Chinese imports. Free trade allowed them to produce cheap goods in Mexican and central American maquiladoras (assembly plants), which they could then send back to the US duty free, allowing them to compete with Asian imports in the US domestic market. A related aggressive corporate search for new markets in services – banking, telecoms, water, electricity – was behind the wave of privatisations and deregulation in Latin America in the 1990s.

The right of corporations to influence policy is accepted unquestioningly by all US administrations. Business representatives shape policy both as paid lobbyists and, more effectively, as specialist advisers. Corporations have played a direct role in designing the framework and rules for free trade in the past two decades. Much of the bargaining for World Trade Organisation (WTO) treaties, for example, takes place in closed, private meetings, which are by invitation only. Business groups are invited to informal talks and take part as technical advisers. After the WTO meeting in Seattle, the African delegation and a group of Latin American and Caribbean countries issued a statement complaining of ‘being marginalised and generally excluded on issues of vital importance for our peoples and their future’.

The largest free trade area in the Americas is covered by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which comprises the US, Mexico and Canada. Introduced in 1994, NAFTA has benefited large corporations and landowners in the US and Mexico at the expense of smallholders, small businesses and workers. Manufacturing wages have fallen on both sides of the border and thousands have lost jobs and land. During his election campaign, Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA, but this would bring him into conflict with some of the largest corporations in the US, as well as the pro-business conservative Mexican government, so it remains to be seen whether he will keep his promise.

NAFTA illustrates that the economic models pursued by the US affect all other areas of policy, including migration, security and even drugs. NAFTA allows for free movement of goods and capital, but it does not permit the free movement of people. So when Mexican unemployed migrants cross the border into the US, they are deported back, leaving some to feel they have little choice but to take the dollars of the drugs gangs. Although Obama’s more conciliatory tone in the drugs debate is welcome, his administration will have to face the complex reality that, in Mexico and Colombia, drugs violence is rooted in socio-economic inequalities, and economic policies that increase landlessness and unemployment simply provide more manpower for the armed groups.

Whatever Obama’s real intentions for Latin America, he will be forced to confront the fact that the so-called ‘pink tide’ of governments across the region are bullishly espousing their independence and most economies have diversified so that they are less dependent on the US. Most of the region’s countries have rejected neoliberal dogma and are trying alternative models. Although they will be severely tested by the current economic crisis, the new wave of progressive governments is demanding respect from whoever is in the White House.

n Grace Livingstone is the author of America’s Backyard: the United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror (Zed Books, 2009). Debate this article at http://forums.redpepper.org.uk