As soon as Chavez dared to think his countrymen should get a fair slice of the oil and other pies, he was a marked man.
The NY Times rag chose to use the word conspiracy', which they know has negative connotations regarding the claimant.
There was, and is still, a plan to make sure that no other Latin American country ever dares to suggest that it should govern itself for the benefit of its own citizens first. It doesn't sit well with the unfettered capitalist club.
Read: Inevitable Revolutions, shitheads convincing/coercing states to move to one-crop dependency so they could manipulate them.
https://books.google.com.kh/books/about ... edir_esc=y
A review:
James Carter
Post-1945 U.S.
Dr. Buzzanco
Spring 1999
Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Pp. 368 + notes, biblio, & index.
The role of the Central American nations today remains at best obscure. The handful of countries stretching from Colombia on one side to Mexico on the other are often maligned as the "banana republics," a reference to their only contribution to the U.S. economy. It is striking then that the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations referred to these countries in 1981 as "the most important place in the world for the United States." (5) The reason for this is explained by Walter LaFeber in Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. The United States implemented in the region a "system," part economic, part political, part military, that sought absolute control over the economies of the "banana republics."
In this book, LaFeber strikes again. In his earlier books, such as America, Russia, and the Cold War (now in its eighth edition), and the American Age, the author wrote of the crucial connection between U.S. foreign policy and economic security. In this study of Central America, he again clearly establishes the crucial link between U.S. foreign policy and the quest for perpetual capitalist growth and secure markets around the world. The book under review here really is a survey text. The author examines the history of relations between the United States and Central America starting from the nineteenth century and concluding in the 1980s.
To begin, LaFeber outlines his approach to the problem by carefully placing the Central American states in the context of a world "system." The theory used here is one of "neodependency." The author defines neodependency as "a way of looking at Latin American development, not in isolation, but as part of an international system in which the leading powers, have used their economic strength to make Latin American development dependent on–and subordinate to–the interests of those leading powers." The results are obvious: these countries rely almost exclusively on one or two exports, coffee and/or bananas, and their internal growth is therefore stunted because they are at the mercy of fluctuating world prices for their only exports. This larger market is, to as large an extent as possible, controlled by the so-called great powers.
The Latin's position is indeed a precarious one at best. The great irony is that many Americans believe, because that is what we have been told, that intense private investment promises to lift these poor people out of their wretched conditions and promote peace, harmony, stability, and, above all, free trade. The reality, of course, is that "such investment and trade has been pivotal is misshaping those nations' history until revolution appears to be the only instrument that can break the hammerlock held by the local oligarchy and foreign capitalists." (17)
As early as the second decade of the twentieth century, the United States had established the kind of relationship it had long desired with Central America. The export numbers speak for themselves: Costa Rica's exports for 1929 totaled $18 million, $12 million from coffee and $5 million from bananas; El Salvador's exports totaled $18 million, $17 million from coffee and $1 million from sugar; Guatemala's exports totaled $25 million, $19 million from coffee and $3 million from bananas; Honduras exported $25 million worth, $21 million for bananas; Nicaragua's exports totaled $11 million, $6 million from coffee and $2 million from bananas. As if it needed pointing out, LaFeber writes, "clearly if the prices of coffee and bananas suddenly dropped on international markets, all Central America would plunge into disaster." (63)
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the United States dusted off the Monroe Doctrine to justify this level of involvement and control in the hemisphere. President Roosevelt later added his own Corollary to the doctrine to officially oust the Europeans and get the United States, via United Fruit, into the region. The so-called Progressives of the teens and twenties also sought out Latin America to stabilize and make efficient, two of their buzz words, the home economy that was under threat from not only "radical" labor movements, but also from the "robber barons" who threatened with their unlimited greed. The involvement was certainly beneficial to private interests like United Fruit. But as LaFeber points out, "in nearly every instance, the interests of the State Department and North American business coincided. When they did not, the business interest usually gave way, as indeed it had to do if a system was to be maintained." (82)
Following FDR's Good Neighbor policy during the New Deal, the United States had solidified its hold over Central America. These states received much of their food supply from the Good Neighbor to the north, as well as markets for their goods, and "nearly all their foreign loans and military supplies."(85) The problems for the United States came in the years following World War II. The "maintenance" of the system now included certain elements that had not been important prior to 1945, namely, the perceived threat of communism around the world.
In Guatemala, for example, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected in 1950, winning better than 65 percent of the vote in what many considered a "remarkably open and free election." (116) Initially, Arbenz posed no threat. In fact, the United States was not all together upset to see him replace his predecessor, Arevalo. The latter had permitted communist input, labor strikes, social security resulting in an 80 percent wage increase in 6 years, and a rapidly growing middle class. This move to liberalize Guatemala by Arevalo characterized much of Latin America, according to Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough in their essay, "The Impact of the Cold War on Latin America." With a few important exceptions in Central America, Latin American countries accepted at least the rhetoric of democracy and liberalism and had chosen "the side of Freedom." It is worth pointing out, however, that this argument can easily be overstated. For example, the authors posit that Latin American elites accepted that democracy meant a "positive redistribution of wealth" and "wider participation." Their position, however, is later qualified into irrelevance. "The commitment of Latin American elites to formal, liberal democracy...by no means implied an acceptance of wide-ranging social reform and the recognition of organized labor as a major political actor."
Nevertheless, the period immediately following WWII did witness some general movement to the left in places like Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, and Guatemala. Of course, in the case of Guatemala (as well as Peru and Venezuela), the reformist Arbenz government never really had a chance, according to LaFeber. He legalized the Communist Party (Guatemalan Labor Party), and moved to end the vestiges of feudalism (large landholders, etc.). He proposed to break up the large landholdings and give the campesinos about 42 acres. "By 1954, about 100,000 had received land as well as bank credit and technical aid for sowing and marketing."(118) The result was that by 1954, the nation enjoyed a favorable balance of payments.
The United States promptly began to impose economic sanctions to influence Arbenz. The State Department did not move fast enough for The Wrigley Gum Company which decided not purchase its chicle from Guatemala. Arbenz then had to provide massive aid to Guatemalan chicle growers. The president continued to carry out his programs, taking 234,000 acres of land from United Fruit Co., who owned some 3 million (only 3 % percent of which was planted, the remainder being held to ward off potential competition). The powerful forces at work here are worth pointing out. United Fruit immediately began lobbying its cause to important friends in the United States. First, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his former law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had long represented the company. His brother Allen, head of the CIA, formerly served on the company's board of trustees. Ed Whitman, UFCO's top PR man, was married to Ann Whitman, the personal secretary to Eisenhower. Needless to say, Arbenz passed the "duck test" as a communist, and U.S. intervention followed.
The threat in Guatemala became communism. As LaFeber points, however, this justification of the U.S. counterrevolution "overlooks the previous seven years of growing confrontation that had centered on issues of private property and personnel for Guatemalan agencies that exercised power over property." (121) Overlooking a vast amount of detail, Arbenz was forced to resign in 1954 and was followed by Castillo Armas, who was gunned down in 1957. His successor, Ydigoras Fuentes came to power and quickly turned distinctly to the right. Guatemala and the "system" had been saved.
By the time John F. Kennedy became president in 1960, the system needed updating to reflect a different set of circumstances in the region. Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress under the guise of aid to lift the Latin American people out of poverty. The Alliance ended up being a huge military expenditure, vastly more than Eisenhower had spent. It now quickly involved the training of Latin officers, private investments for private U.S. and dictator gains, and a growing disparity "between the very rich and the very poor," according to Senator Albert Gore. (157) Following Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson "downgraded the Alliance in one dramatic step." He put Thomas Mann in charge of it. Mann had oppose Kennedy's version of it all along.
As Vietnam grew under Johnson, Alliance funds shrunk, except military funds. Now, "statism" replaced a reliance on private investment to develop Latin American countries. This had been the great fear of the U.S. In violation of the O.A.S. non-intervention clause, to which the U.S. was a signatory, LBJ sent 22,000 troops into the Dominican Republic. The Alliance was dead. The focus now was on protection of U.S. investment and anti-communism. Snubbing the O.A.S., LBJ said the organization "couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel." (160)
By the late sixties and into the seventies, the remnants of the Alliance became "familism" under the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, a right-wing dictatorship in Guatemala that even the C.I.A. called the "most extreme and unyielding in the hemisphere," 300,000 Salvadorans were forced to flee their country and go to neighboring Honduras seeking food and shelter, and the latter country's unemployment rate had shot up 25 percent in six years, prompting the wealthy to force the Salvadorans to return, culminating in the "soccer war" in mid-1969. (170-185)
By the decade of the seventies, "the landless rural labor force in some areas was more than 1,000 percent larger than during the fifties." (226) As Nicaragua exploded, the Carter administration fumbled around for a response that would be consistent with past U.S. policy, anything to avoid supporting the Sandinista government. Carter tried to link them with Castro and communism, to no avail. In a now familiar story, the C.I.A. under Carter began to retrain the Somoza forces for an overthrow of the Sandinista government. Reagan merely continued and even increased this effort while recommending that the Latins "make use of the magic of the marketplace." (285)
Under the Economic Support Fund (ESF), the Reagan administration doubled U.S. spending to nearly $2 billion on Central American militaries. Military expenditures accounted for half of El Salvador's budget, and 25 percent of both the Guatemalan and Honduras budgets. "By 1985, the average U.S. cat ate more beef than the average person in Central America." (289) The pattern in Central America was by now a familiar one. Despite U.S. claims of liberalism, its foreign policy consistently demonstrates otherwise. U.S. aid to Central America had always been to protect American investments and/or to ensure security in the hemisphere.
LaFeber's book is an exhaustive and exhausting one. I would recommend it as an important introduction to the problems of Central America (and to all of Latin America), as it was for me. And though it can be a bit overwhelming, it is nevertheless a valuable reference tool.
ירי ילדים והפצצת אזרחים דורש אומץ, כמו גם הטרדה מינית של עובדי ההוראה.